Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, 2nd Tuesday School Board Meeting, Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Date: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 6h 13m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/1029250118?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 2026-10-18. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[00:03:28] Good afternoon. I call to order this November 12, 2024, Loudoun County School Board member. At this time, we will start with disclosures, and I will start. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosures to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:03:58] Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may also be affected, of which I am included.

[00:04:16] I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Ms. Chandler. Thank you, Madam Chair. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:04:45] Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interest may also be affected, of which I am included.

[00:05:01] I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Thank you. Thank you. We normally go to Ms. Donoghue, but I'm going to let her get together for a second.

[00:05:18] We'll move on to Ms. Griffiths, and then we'll come back to Ms. Donoghue for disclosures. Ms. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding the budget and our health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:05:41] Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees while in the access of the statutory three employees whose interests may also be affected, of which I am included.

[00:05:58] I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Griffiths. Ms. Donahue? Thank you, Madam Chair. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding employee salaries, the budget, and or health insurance, and any other discussion that may include or affect salary and benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:06:29] Specifically, my spouse, my minor children, and I are enrolled in LCPS health insurance that may be affected by any potential changes to employee salaries, the budget, and or health insurance. Additionally, my sister-in-law is an LCPS employee who does not reside with me and is not dependent on me.

[00:06:45] These subjects include thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may be affected, of which my spouse, my children, my sister-in-law, and I am included. I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the Clerk of the School Board for five years.

[00:07:05] Thank you, Ms. Donahue. Vice Chair Struffy? Thank you madam chair as a member of the Loudoun County school board I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda Regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees Specifically as a school board member. I'm eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee These benefits however affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may also be affected of which I am included. I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the

[00:07:44] clerk of the school board for five years. Thank You Vice Chair Strachey. Ms. LaBelle. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding the budget and/or health insurance and related benefits in any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees specifically as a school board member I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee these benefits however affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees

[00:08:22] whose interests may also be affected of which I am included I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public interest this disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the court clerk of the school board for five years. Thank you, Ms. LaBelle. Ms. Chernoff? Thank you, Chair Mansfield. As a member of the Loudoun County School Board, I make the following disclosure to the school board and to the general public in connection with the item on tonight's agenda regarding the budget and or health insurance and related benefits and any other discussion that may include or affect benefits for LCPS employees.

[00:08:50] Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in excess of statutory three employees whose interest may also be affected of which I am included. I can and will participate fairly objectively and in the public interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Thank you Ms. Chernoff. We will now move on to agenda item 3 approval of the consent agenda. Board members are there

[00:09:29] any changes to be made to the consent agenda? Seeing none so before we vote on the consent agenda we have three proclamations to read. The first proclamation, recognizing November 2024 as National Homeless Month Awareness Month, Homeless Youth Awareness Month, will be read by Mrs. Chernoff.

[00:09:51] Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair. In June, I was invited to attend Loudoun Interfaith Homeless Summit, where many of the stats that I will share in this proclamation were also shared. So I'm very glad that we are bringing awareness to this, and I hope that one day we don't have to do that.

[00:10:07] So on that note, National Youth Homeless Awareness Month. Whereas November was first declared as National Homeless Youth Awareness Month in 2007, and every year, hundreds of thousands of American families become homeless, including more than 1.3 million children, 700,000 of which are unaccompanied minors, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

[00:10:30] And whereas there were about 1.2 million students in the public school in Virginia during the 2023-2024 school year, according to the Virginia Department of Education, with about 10,200 of those students identified as experiencing homelessness. Whereas the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act provides educational rights and services to children and youth experiencing homelessness in grades pre-K through 12, including those 21 years and younger who were found eligible for services under IDEA special education.

[00:11:01] Whereas as defined by the McKinney-Vento Homelessness Assistance Act, Youth and children experiencing homelessness are individuals who lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence, including those sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason, are living in motels, hotels, trailer parks, or camping grounds due to a lack of alternative adequate accommodations, are living in emergency or transitional shelters, or are abandoned in hospitals.

[00:11:32] Whereas the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act further defines youth and children experiencing homelessness as those who have a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not designated for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings, including those who are living in cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings.

[00:11:59] And whereas the population of youth experiencing homelessness also includes migratory youth as well as unaccompanied youth who have left home for one or more nights without permission, youth who have been kicked out of their homes or abandoned, deserted, or prevented from returning home. Whereas Loudoun County Public Schools continues to support students experiencing homelessness and identified approximately 1,550 students experiencing homelessness in the 23-24 school year, allowing them to receive a stable education despite the uncertainty of their living situation.

[00:12:32] Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Loudoun County Public School Board proclaims November as National Homeless Youth Awareness Month in Loudoun County Public Schools. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Chernoff. The second proclamation, recognizing November 2024 as National Adoption Month, will be read by Dr. Rasheed.

[00:12:49] Thank you, Chair. National Adoption Month, November 2024, whereas over 100,000 children in our nation's foster care system are waiting to be adopted, longing for the love, connection, and stability that only a permanent family can offer, whereas still young people will age out of foster care without being adopted, it is crucial that we collaborate with others to support these youth in staying in school, gaining job skills, managing their finances, and starting successful adult lives.

[00:13:17] For the 2023-24 school year, LCPS served 1,802 non-disabled students in foster care placements and 1,683 students with disabilities in foster care. Whereas during National Adoption Month, we honor the love and connection shared by adoptive families across the country, we celebrate the millions of adoptive and kinship families who have opened their hearts to provide safe, nurturing homes.

[00:13:42] We also express our gratitude to foster families and the dedicated professionals who play a vital role in this journey. To foster youth and adoptees of all ages, we stand with you, reminding you that you are never alone. Most importantly, we encourage those considering adoption to take that courageous and loving step, enriching their families and bringing deeper meaning to their lives.

[00:14:04] Now, therefore, be it resolved that we hereby declare November 2024 as National Adoption Month, We encourage all Americans to observe this month by supporting children and youth in their communities and finding permanent homes where they can experience the love and connection they need to flourish.

[00:14:21] Thank you, Dr. Rasheed. The final proclamation of the season evening recognizes November as Native American Heritage Month, which will also be read by Dr. Rasheed. Thank you, Chair. Native American Heritage Month 2024. Whereas Native American Heritage Month is celebrated in November to honor the culture, traditions, and achievements of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and affiliated island communities.

[00:14:46] It's also a time to recognize Native American veterans who have served to defend the United States. And whereas the first federal recognition of Native American Heritage Month was in 1990, but its roots trace back to the early 1900s when Seneca archaeologist Dr. Arthur C. Parker fought for a federal recognition day.

[00:15:06] And whereas in 1976, the United States Congress passed a resolution authorizing President Gerald Ford to proclaim a week in October as Native American Awareness Week. On October 8, 1976, he issued his presidential proclamation doing so.

[00:15:24] Decades following, Congress and the president have set aside time to honor Native American and Alaska Native people. While there is no national theme for the observance, each federal department and agency may develop ways of celebrating and honoring the nation's Native American heritage.

[00:15:41] And whereas this month highlights the remarkable diversity of Native American and Alaska Native cultures, language, traditions, spiritual beliefs, stemming from their very geographic origins, historical adaptations to different environments and distinct tribal affiliations.

[00:15:56] Such diversity makes them a highly heterogeneous population across the United States, even within a single tribe. Significant cultural variations can exist depending on regional differences and individual practices. And whereas Native American and Alaska Native communities today face significant challenges, including high poverty rates, inadequate access to health care, limited educational opportunities, housing disparities, high rates of substance abuse and mental health issues, systemic discrimination, and historical trauma stemming from colonization, all contributing to significant health

[00:16:35] and socioeconomic inequalities compared to the general population. And whereas Loudoun County Public Schools is committed to sharing the rich histories and contributions of Native Americans and Alaska Natives and their resiliency to thrive with each passing generation, this November and every month, we celebrate the culture and heritage of these remarkable Americans who deeply enrich the quality and character of our nation.

[00:17:01] And whereas as a community that values diversity, equity, inclusion, and history, Loudoun County Public Schools will continue to acknowledge and celebrate Native American Heritage Month and recognize the original inhabitants of the Americas for their rich traditions, inventions, governments, agriculture, astrology, sports, and medicine.

[00:17:22] And be it further resolved that all Loudoun County Public Schools will actively engage in the collective responsibility to teach and affirm Native American and Alaska Native heritage, culture, history, and community. And now, therefore, we, the Loudoun County School Board, do hereby proclaim November as Native American Heritage Month for Loudoun County Public Schools.

[00:17:44] Thank you, Dr. Rashid. I'll now entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda. Yes, Ms. Donahue. Thank you Madam Chair. I move that the Loudoun County School Board approve tonight's consent agenda.

[00:17:58] Thank you, Ms. Donahue. Do I have a second? Second. I have a second by Dr. Rashid. It's been properly moved and seconded to approve the consent agenda. At this time we'll take a vote to approve the consent agenda with our fancy new clickers. At this time, let's see, clerk please open the vote. Board members please record your vote.

[00:18:26] Clerk please close and display the vote. And that motion passes eight with Mrs. Griffiths absent for the vote. We will now move on to item four, our special education advisory committee, SEAC, quarterly update presented by Ms. Elizabeth Crotty, SEAC chair.

[00:18:52] Good evening, Dr. Spence, chair Mansfield. I'm so used to calling you by your first name. I'm sorry, Vice Chair Streffy, and all of the rest of you wonderful members of the school board.

[00:19:08] I am here to present SEAC's quarterly report to you. As I'm sure you are all aware, we are governed by the regs of Virginia. Tonight, I am here to address item number three, which is submitting periodic reports and recommendations regarding the education of students with disabilities to the division superintendent for transmission to the local school board.

[00:19:32] slide please my name is Liz Crotty as you said I am joined here tonight by our SEAC vice chair of planning Catherine Moran these are our wonderful SEAC officers who work very hard and we also have some SEAC liaisons who I will thank on our in a future slide next slide please so we have 21 voting members which is a full roster for us we're very excited we also now have as as of today, 82 schools with PTA/PTO representatives.

[00:20:10] We're still trying to get a full roster, but I'm hopeful that we'll get there this year. We have five active subcommittees that meet monthly, two of which additionally have quarterly work sessions. And I just want to highlight this because our SEAC members work very hard.

[00:20:28] They do not just come to our monthly meetings. They are showing up to the subcommittees all the time as a staff. So it really is-- it's a lot of hours put into SEAC. We take a lot of care developing these recommendations, doing the work, researching, and finding out information so that we can give you the best possible information that we can.

[00:20:52] We provided feedback on nine policies so far this year. And then last June, we had our SEAC awards, where we honored 118 awardees. It's quite an effort, but there were a number of you there that evening.

[00:21:08] We are so appreciative. Our awardees are so appreciative. I run into them in the community sometime, and that event means a lot to them, and it's our favorite time to really celebrate all the great work that is being done here in LCPS.

[00:21:24] Next slide. So we have a lot of commendations. We have so many things to celebrate. We have a fantastic director of special education, Dr. Paige Carter, who is our liaison to you all, and she, um, or to our school, to our SEAC, and she is fantastic at getting us the support we need, making sure we have staff available.

[00:21:49] Um, the entire office of special education, there are so many people, too numerous to name the supervisors, the specialists, but I just want to highlight, um, Ms. Nakia Purnell, Dr. Kim Jones and Ms. Kristen Lovell really do an amazing job making us look as professional as we possibly can, like we have it together.

[00:22:12] So we're very appreciative of all of their hard work. And then Ms. Tedra Richardson, our Assistant Superintendent of Student Services, is just a treasure. She is so helpful to us in so many ways, and we just appreciate the collaboration that we have with them.

[00:22:32] truly something special and I know that each of our SEAC members truly appreciates it and then I also just wanted to throw in LCPS staff in general because normally we've always been very limited to just the Office of Special Education and really just the Office of Special Education but I feel like that's really changed in the last year and we are getting so much support from so many different departments within LCPS and I feel like that's really enhanced the work we've done in our knowledge base and understanding as well and it's really empowered our members to you know learn more grow more and then take that out into the community so I just want to really

[00:23:12] express my appreciation to all of the LCPS staff that has interacted with us this year and then miss Carrie LaBelle who is our SEAC liaison to the school board it's fantastic we are very thankful for her representing us and bringing information to us she's she I mean she's so knowledgeable right so she's teaching us a lot as well we are very thankful for that and all of you as well I mean truly I we have also enjoyed getting to know you getting to talk to you getting to collaborate and share ideas it's it's really

[00:23:48] been a remarkable experience so thank you all so much next slide please so as you'll see in board docs we just got the analysis of our CX survey for the 23-24 school year and so I wanted to share some of the items that we had high overall satisfaction with in general special education services was really quite high with an average of 78% different items ranged from 69 to 86% but overall still quite high academic

[00:24:21] instruction there was a range from 81 to 90 percent and really it covered most of the areas the only two items that fell a little bit out of that overall high satisfaction were writing and foreign languages so that's those are known areas of struggle so you know those are things that will probably be focusing on most related services which for those who don't know what related services are that's like your adapted PE, your OT, your PT, those kinds of things, music therapy, speech

[00:24:56] therapy, auditory therapies, assistive technology, all ranged between 80 and 95 percent satisfaction, so that's also really quite high. And then the last item was really quite miraculous, and I don't think it's happened before, but I don't know if this is due to the redistricting or due to the change in leadership, or, you know, there could be so many factors, but the data did not vary considerably based from district to district so overall that seems to suggest some consistency which is really quite remarkable and something that should be celebrated because that's always been a frustration for a lot of

[00:25:34] parents of students with disabilities next slide so for our areas of need increased meaningful inclusion in the classroom in school events transition out of high school remains a big concern as we've all talked about quite a bit before, more consistency and collaboration among teachers, more knowledgeable teachers, TAs, and support personnel. Parents want to be part of the collaboration, have more communication, and need access to internal and external

[00:26:10] resources. Multiple emotional and intellectual disabilities were three disability categories that often came out lower in terms of their satisfaction, And so those are areas that we should really pay a bit more attention to and kind of see what sorts of things we can do to help with that.

[00:26:32] And now I'll move into our SEAC recommendations, which are kind of driven in part by the results of the survey, but also the work of our subcommittees, the public comments that we got that you'll see are part of our annual report here too.

[00:26:48] And I also, just a note on the CX survey, I would recommend, you know, the numbers are great, but I always find really helpful to go through and read the comments that the parents left. We get a lot of really kind of high-quality feedback, and it sort of gives you a flavor of sometimes unfiltered thoughts and opinions that, you know, they might not be willing to share otherwise, but in this format, they are.

[00:27:14] So I think that aspect is definitely worth paying attention to if you have the time to go through. Next slide, please. And next slide, please. Thank you. So for equity, we support staffing special education from identified student and teacher needs versus just from ratios.

[00:27:37] but we would like to provide a plus one to each elementary school to give some flexibility to our elementary schools so that they can provide programs that actually do cater to those students who have differing needs and that don't fit that ratio right like that you know the one to ten might not be enough you know because their needs are more intense but they're also not quite in a program where they're the 1 to 8 or the 1 to 6.

[00:28:09] We want to improve secondary instruction for students with disabilities by focusing on effective co-teaching models and how to incorporate Tier 1 supports. So at the secondary level, generally we have a lot of co-teaching that is going on for our special education gen ed classrooms, but oftentimes, and you know, this could be due to a lot of new staff. The actual co-teaching models that you traditionally read about are not what's actually happening, and so increased attention to that would be really beneficial for increasing our inclusion. We would like

[00:28:49] to fund the continuum of special education with options such as virtual schooling, K to 12, and also a separate day program for our students who need a a higher level of behavioral support in an alternative setting. Next slide, please.

[00:29:08] We would like to prioritize in-person special education training for our paraprofessionals. Our paraprofessionals are so important in a special education setting. They really are often the ones who are implementing our meaningful inclusion and carrying out some of our goal work and things like that, and we need them to be very, very knowledgeable And SEAC was very excited to hear that we were going to start having some specific special education training for these paraprofessionals.

[00:29:42] And it is really important that it occurs in person so that they're really getting that hands-on experience. That's so much more valuable than just, I think we all know, sitting in front of a computer and watching something. Also this is a repeat of a recommendation we've had.

[00:29:57] Create a peer group credit-bearing elective across all secondary schools so that our students with disabilities have a peer to partner with and enable them to participate in more of these general education environments and after-school activities without overtaxing staff who is tired at the end of the day.

[00:30:17] Next slide, please. So there's our transition center, which I know you guys are all very -- have you heard of it? Anyway, so we think that will be very helpful.

[00:30:32] Those vocational evaluators who are going to come in and really assess what our students with disabilities need, what they're good at, what businesses have jobs that will fit what they're interested in, we think that is absolutely critical that we focus on getting those in place so that our students can get some better evaluation going.

[00:30:54] We want to create pathways for students with disabilities in all CTE offerings, and I'm I'm very excited with the conversations that I've been hearing. It sounds like we might be moving towards that direction, which is wonderful. So thank you all for what you guys have done, and thank you to Dr. Grubbs as well.

[00:31:14] Community-based instruction framework with funding to elementary and middle schools. So it's currently, or it had been called CII, and now we're switching it back to the CBI. And that's basically where our students are getting some of that work experience and time outside in the community.

[00:31:35] So for that to happen, it's probably going to require some funding, you know, transportation, you know, different places that they can go. But it's really important because transition, it doesn't start in high school. It starts in elementary school.

[00:31:50] We need this to really, to have this overall vision and start from an early age so that by the time our kids get to high school they're already ready to go out in the community they're all ready to you know step into those workplaces and do great work you know we've already done the basic skills and then we need additional transition teachers to increase interaction and support particularly what we hear is at the middle school level there's not a lot happening right and some of those early high school grades as well because they're busy already they have other things that they're working on in high school so if

[00:32:26] there are ways to add some additional transition teachers we think that would be very beneficial next slide please inclusive playgrounds at elementary schools for grade school and preschool age students this one I know we've we've spoken about quite a bit but we really think it's important like these kids we We need to make sure everyone is getting access to a playground, everyone is getting time to work on their, you know, get their energy out, work on their social skills and their

[00:33:03] gross motor skills so that they can be successful in the classroom. I am very hopeful that as we get more of our students out and about and running and playing that we'll see a decrease in behaviors as well for some of our more challenging behavioral students and preschool our preschoolers they truly they really need this kind of equipment I have personal experience and I know what it what happens during recess with these kids when they don't have actual playground equipment and we

[00:33:38] see the effects hit our kids for longer because they aren't working on those gross motor skills they aren't getting the kinds of you know cognitively stimulating environments that they really need in terms to like increase their growth so I really I know it's I know it's a hard one but we've got to figure out some sort of a solution because we've got a lot of preschoolers in our step programs and our special ed preschoolers preschools who who really need this as a priority and then ensure that all students have access to school

[00:34:14] grounds for both recess and physical education most a lot of our students with disabilities who are in program classes currently have recess in the courtyards, and they do their adapted PE in cafeterias or classrooms.

[00:34:33] They're not getting that runaround time that they need, and I would ask all principals who might be listening out there to please, please, please figure out how to get all of your students outside on the fields, on the playgrounds, running.

[00:34:51] SEAC really does not want to hear any more about students who are spending their recess time in courtyards without proper play equipment, you know, in very echoey, loud spaces. It's just not appropriate for our students, so thank you.

[00:35:11] Utilize the instructional framework to provide training to all general education teachers on how to design lessons and learning in ways that harness the unique strengths and needs of all students. So that's language that's taken from our instructional framework.

[00:35:26] And it's very much in alignment with SEAC's aims and what we hope for for our students in the classroom. It's to really build off of their strengths, but also addressing their needs. And we want more of that to happen in the general education setting.

[00:35:42] And so we think the instructional framework is a perfect tool to help us kind of guide and prioritize that need. So we look forward to hearing more about that. Inform teachers of existing accessible instructional materials and encourage usage.

[00:36:03] So I know LCPS has spent a lot of time and money developing these, or purchasing, procuring all of these accessible materials that our teachers do have access for. And I also know that a lot of our teachers go on to Teachers Pay Teachers, and they download these very, very cutesy little worksheets and packets and things like that, and they are so cute, they are so fun, and they are very not accessible.

[00:36:36] And then our special educators have to try to figure out how to make them accessible or how to create something completely different, which when we have already purchased materials that could be used, that are accessible, that have been screened for that accessibility.

[00:36:52] We need to help our teachers know, maybe they're overwhelmed with the amount of material, but let's help them figure out how to get what they need in a way that our students are going to be able to access and that isn't going to require additional work for our teachers, our special educators.

[00:37:09] We also advocate for regular training and coaching to teachers, teacher assistants, parents and students on tier one accessibility tools and AAC devices. Oftentimes, you know, parents and students and teachers and TAs don't actually know what these wonderful accessibility tools that we have are.

[00:37:32] They don't know how to use them. So even though we have them, we need to make sure everyone's actually getting trained on them and that all the students have access to them. And there's not, like, some sort of gatekeeper that's keeping them from being able to get to them. And also our AAC devices.

[00:37:48] We have so many students using AAC devices now, which is incredibly exciting, but you can't just give people AAC devices and expect them to work. Like, we really need to do some intentional teaching and coaching with these TAs who are constantly with them, with the parents so they can reinforce at home, and the teachers, the gen ed teachers, so everyone feels comfortable and is able to do them to the, you know, most fidelity that they can.

[00:38:17] Next slide, please. For literacy and math instruction, we would like to clearly define the implementation of policy 5350, parent notification and assessment, and define and communicate to parents remediation framework for students not meeting benchmarks.

[00:38:36] And this is an important one. hear from parents all the time who do not understand the reports that they are able to find and then other ones that they don't even know about and they're being told about in a meeting and they're like what are you what is this and I don't know how to compare this to anything what does this even mean so I think that we can do a lot better with the testing that we do to make sure the parents understand it and so that and then they know how the school is addressing any issues that are identified. We would like to improve access to literacy services at high school for our students who do

[00:39:14] not meet the literacy screening expectations. I know there's been a big focus on elementary and middle but we got high schoolers who also need those literacy services and we need to make sure our high school teachers are able to do those interventions as needed. We would like to follow evidence-based literacy practices in all of our program classes we want to make sure that all the materials that are going in front of these students also align with our science of reading and that these students are getting the proper instruction there then for preschool we would like there to be developed a

[00:39:52] comprehensive developmental monitoring tool that includes pre-academic standards and report progress to parents at least three times a year and I believe that this is in progress but it is something that's really important for our parents to understand where their kid is on their development it's something that I think a lot of non special ed parents kind of take for granted when they put their kid in the daycare program or a preschool program they're going to get these really long checklists to tell them exactly where their child is in terms of their development and we traditionally have not gotten that in special education you just get information about the goals

[00:40:31] your child is doing. So we're glad to hear that something's in development and we look forward to learning more about it. Next slide. And that is the end of my presentation. Do you have any questions? Thank you, Ms. Crotty. Board members, do you have any? Yes, Ms. Sherna. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you so much, Ms. Crotty, for this. I was going to call you Liz too. So for this presentation, I thank you for your passion. I thank you for your care. I know we've said that to you before. I really appreciate the report and the comments. Seeing the public comments from the parents especially

[00:41:09] was really helpful just to see the participation in your meetings and how that's grown over the years. I think speaks not only to your leadership but just the needs that are there and the growing needs but also that there is a place to express that voice in a safe space and I thank you for bringing that to us. I wanted to pull out two things that I found particularly relevant from the report. The first one was I found the parent survey data to be really interesting and I'm really glad that you said that transition is not just high school to career because for me when I think about the push for transition I think about our little guys in our ECSE programs and I've had the chance to go out and see those programs in action and speak to the educator so I'm really

[00:41:49] grateful for the push of the I don't want to call it a screener but something that's tracking their progress I think that that's really going to help with that transition to elementary school so that teachers have that information too not just families I think families definitely need it And I know Ms. Richardson and I have had conversations at length, too, about what that transition looks like for them from preschool to kindergarten and really tapping into what our kindergarten teachers are experiencing in terms of that adjustment where we are sometimes seeing behaviors and the hours not perfectly aligning and just them taking on those responsibilities.

[00:42:22] so I will definitely be looking to talk more about that with you as things progress and then I just wanted to address policy 5350 being the chair of curriculum and instruction I wanted you to know and see act to know that that is on our list of things to address and actually and I hope I'm not jumping the gun I'm sure dr. Spence will definitely mention this but the student success talks that are launching this Thursday night starting at Lunsford middle were born exactly out of this conversation about how do we do better in getting the right information to parents about the assessments about the data that's in

[00:43:00] parent view about the supports that are in place and so I am very grateful to Dr. Spence for engaging that conversation that was born out of sort of the loose language in the policy if you will and we will be looking at the feedback from those sessions and hopefully with you all in the future in NCI to continue to tighten that up and make sure that it is effective for parents.

[00:43:25] I just want you to know that. Thank you so much. Yes, Ms. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. Ms. Crotty, the transition center, I'd like to hear more about it. I know we'd have to probably acquire land or have a building, and there are empty buildings throughout Loudoun County, and I was curious to know if we can utilize something like that, but also get more details about the Transition Center.

[00:43:55] What kind of programs we would have in there. And I don't know if you have something ready to go. And I might have missed it, and I'm sorry if I did. But if you do, I'd like to see that for the Transition Center. I do have an interest in learning about that.

[00:44:12] Thank you. We've certainly started to have a lot of conversations in SEAC about what we as parents would like to see in the Transition Center. but my understanding is once staff gets the directive to go ahead on it, then we will probably form some sort of group, working group, that will really nail out the details.

[00:44:33] But ultimately, what SEAC hopes it will accomplish is that it will be a place that is there to provide the proper assessment and vocational work to work with our businesses, to provide that specialized instruction for our students so that they have all the different career paths that they're interested in.

[00:44:53] So that is our hope and dream, and we're really excited to get to work and sort out all the details. Thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Grievous. Any other questions? Yes, Ms. Donahue. - Thank you, Madam Chair. No questions.

[00:45:08] I just wanted to thank Ms. Crotty and SEAC for the presentation that you put together for tonight and for all the work that you do for our community. - Thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Crotty. You know, you almost have always had my support, so.

[00:45:23] - We appreciate it. - And I'm looking forward to the parent engagement, the 5350, because that was a law that I helped bring about many, three or four years ago, because I felt like parents need to have more engagement and more understanding of their children's assessments, and they needed to be working a team collaboratively. So thank you for all your hard work and your advocacy. Thank you so much. Board members, we're going to move on.

[00:45:55] We have about, I guess, what, 40 minutes, 45 minutes for our work session. School board FY2026, FY2031 capital budgets work session presented by Mr. Kevin Lewis, our chief operations officer, and others as I see them moving in.

[00:46:42] Thank you, Chair Mansfield, Vice Chair Streffi, members of the board, Dr. Spence. We are very pleased to be here tonight to present to you a work session on the CIP that we presented the main program on October 22nd. As you can see, I have quite a few friends here with me tonight.

[00:47:01] It takes quite an entourage to put a program together this large, and so I have all the folks here to help me answer your questions and provide all the information we possibly can so you can make the best decisions moving forward. I will say that there's a couple of things I wanted to do as far as housekeeping tonight.

[00:47:20] We are going to be specifically talking about a capital budget update that we got from the board, county staff. We've been talking through our preliminary discussions about how that funding may pan out. Of course, that's something that the Board of Supervisors has to vote on moving forward, but we have some guesses for you.

[00:47:36] We will be talking about student enrollment. There have been some questions about that. The main focus of tonight's section is on new capacities. We'll be talking about those types of projects, which includes the school replacement and renovation program, and then we also have a reminder of school board priorities.

[00:47:55] I do want to take a minute to talk about what's in the board item. There's quite a few documents there, and so probably the most important one is the yellow sheet that was put on your table up there, which contains the update to the financial part of the capital budget.

[00:48:13] But we also have a number of things there. We have, I think, Mr. Chernoff, you had asked for all the facility condition assessment numbers, so those are all there. Chair Mansfield, you had asked for enrollment and capacity numbers to be added to that chart, which we have done, and we'll talk a little bit more about that as we move forward.

[00:48:31] We also have some questions and answers that we've received from the community, but also from board members. Mr. Estreffi, I wanted to call your attention to, I think it's question number four, about sustainment projects, and thank you for asking that question. We're going to talk in more in depth about that on, this is the 12th, on November 19th.

[00:48:50] But, so, we do have that information there for you, and we'll be digging a lot deeper into those projects as we get on the week of the work session on the 19th. So, we shall dig in to this document here, the yellow one you have there.

[00:49:09] You'll see there that this slide is similar to the one that was presented on October 22nd. And the chart or the table at the top of the page shows you what we provided to you on October 22nd, where we had, you see the second column from the left, we have FY26 recommended or needs base.

[00:49:27] And that was the total that you see that also is at the bottom of this page, the yellow sheet that said that we had last year's funding for the CIP from the Board of Supervisors was 89.3, and the needs assessment that we did for projects that are in the queue that are necessary to maintain and expand our system was 176, which left us about 86 million short.

[00:49:52] Good news is we are nowhere near that, and what appears from our preliminary conversations with county staff is that we're looking more towards $129.8, $130 million, which is a much better situation than being that much short.

[00:50:08] But what I do want to call your attention to is on this yellow sheet, we have a number of things that are highlighted in that column that's labeled as the November 12th update, and you'll see some numbers that are in highlighted columns.

[00:50:24] Starting with line number three, we have the critical system renewals, and those are very obviously critical systems that we do, projects that we do. One of the systems that's in there is we have a complete HVAC retrofit along with a solar panel installation.

[00:50:41] So what we've done is opt to move the solar panel installation for that project to the right one year to FY27, freeing up some money there. We also look, if you see on line 23, where we have property acquisition and land acquisition due diligence.

[00:50:57] there was previously a 40 million dollar placeholder there and Ms. Crotty just mentioned the transition center that's one of the projects that that was earmarked for we've moved that out of the CIP intentionally in conversations with it with the county folks that will be addressing those projects in a different way I will also say that that earmarked a number for not only the transition center but also the recovery school as well and so that is where you'll find where we're planning for those facilities as we know they need to come on.

[00:51:28] It's a priority for the board. It's a priority for staff. And so we're going to address that outside of this CIP process. The next change you'll see is in line 40, the press boxes for high school baseball and softball fields. Those are the last two press boxes for boys' baseball and girls' softball at Loudoun County and Briarwoods High School.

[00:51:50] If you'll recall, the school board asked for those dollars in the end-of-year funding from the Board of Supervisors. So we are taking a leap of faith that that money will come for those projects through that process, and so we've moved them out of this. And then lastly, we've pushed $3.4 million online, 51, for the walking tracks at the elementary schools out one year to make room for the funding levels that we have.

[00:52:14] So at this point, we have been able to reconcile this with the numbers, the preliminary numbers we've gotten from the county. know and so the board will have the opportunity to talk and make recommendations for revisions as time goes on as you want but that's the summary and the update so we're in a much better position than we were on the 22nd still with as you probably know lots and lots of work to do yet to get to the end final final plan so we're going to switch a little bit and keep mind of the time we're going to switch a little bit to school enrollment so we

[00:52:52] did want to talk about that as you know things have been changing over our the last few years with enrollment and this slide is just a summary you know we began growing from K all the way through 12 between 1984 and 2019 but in particular k5 started to decline in the 2010s and so we saw that part of that is a declining birth rates although the Long Island County continues to gain population school systems not growing like we were we once were we also haven't fully recovered from the pandemic i think from the the rates so i mean we're still we still have

[00:53:29] some you know growth from time to time but it's not like it was prior to the covid pandemic so what we are doing in this cip is we're projecting a flat enrollment for the next few years and i wanted to take a minute to share this graph that would help you illustrate that so the orange line at the top well it illustrates the county population growth from 2000 to 2024 and you can see that's a fairly steep growth rate and we've put a couple numbers in there you see 169 million

[00:54:02] 312 and 420 those are reflective of the 10-year census years so you see those numbers from those 10-year increments we've also done the same numbers or the same years for this the student enrollment for LCPS. And you see that went from 31.8 to 81.5. What's interesting is, even though the graph of the county population looks much steeper, the student population, we actually have a bigger share of the population now than we did back in 2000. So it's just some information to try

[00:54:37] to put some context to our enrollment over the years. And then you'll see on the right-hand side of that graph where we're projecting for the next six years to be fairly flat from and not growing a great deal in enrollment. I will say that as many of you know that doesn't mean we're not growing in some areas of the county and putting pressure on our schools and we still are building schools and so those are things that we will be talking about as we move forward over time. So tonight's topic is new capacity. How do we continue to add new capacity to our school system and make sure

[00:55:16] that we accommodate everyone in our school system everybody has a seat you've seen this chart a number of times before it just talks about we have these three major categories sustainment new capacity improvements we'll be talking about sustainment on the 19th but tonight we're focusing on new capacity which you can see there are new schools land additions to schools lease spaces and all the above mrs. Griffith you asked earlier about rent or to lease space and when those are things that we're looking at as well. So we have folks in our planning department that are

[00:55:52] constantly looking at what might be available out there for a different way to deliver space for things that we need. So these charts are interesting. These are what we're going to call heat maps, and they are indicating where our enrollment is and where our pressures are.

[00:56:13] If you see anything in yellow, that is an area where our schools are actually under capacity. So we have space in some of those rooms. If you look, there's quite a bit of yellow on the maps. The white are schools that are at capacity, somewhere between 99% and 100%.

[00:56:28] Anything in the pink or light red or whatever you want to call that color is from 101% to 105% of capacity. So they're up to 5% over capacity for their particular school. And then anything that's red is over capacity, and that is in excess of 5% over what the school was designed to hold.

[00:56:51] That becomes challenging, and over the last few years we've changed the way we count capacity because things have changed over time. And so what you see on the left-hand side of the page is year one, which is 25-26. So that is our school enrollment projections that we're seeing for the fall of 2025.

[00:57:09] What's on the right is year six of the CIP, or what we expect to have happen by the fall of 2030 in the 2030-31 school year. You can see some of those. I'll call your attention right in the middle of the page where you see cool spring, and that's CSP is red now but white later and we haven't done anything is because we are projecting that enrollment to go down so there are some flexibilities not everything stays the same as families grow and develop and their children you know move on from elementary to middle school and you know a new family maybe necessarily moves in so we want to focus on the things that are in red

[00:57:48] and I'll also remind you if you look at the far left page it's really important to recognize that these numbers all reflect the schools without modular classrooms. We're trying to figure out what our real capacity is at our schools because modular classrooms are a temporary solution. See, these do not reflect those additional capacity numbers that we would get by adding a modular.

[00:58:11] You'll see Waterford goes from pink to red, which means it's getting worse, but we also have a project planned. It's not funded yet. It'll be funded after this CIP to do an addition to that school, which would then solve this problem. So at this time next year when we provide this presentation, that will probably be shown either yellow or white as we fix that enrollment issue there.

[00:58:37] So you see the blue boxes are how we are planning to address where we have the issues of the red or pink. Down at the bottom of the page, you see that attendance zones for or adding ES36 are a couple of ways we could fix the issues you see there at Hovatter and Madison's Trust.

[00:58:56] Both of those are red. Madison Strasse is a little redder than the Hovater. But as we know, the Dulles South area continues to grow. And so, you know, we'll be asking the board for guidance on, you know, how is it best to solve this issue?

[00:59:11] Do we go ahead and build Elementary School 36, which is planned for the same campus as Watson Mountain and HS14? Or would the board like to consider doing some attendance changes and use those funds for something else? At the bottom of the page, you also see we have another box there that would suggest that there's another way to do that by doing additions to particular schools as we go.

[00:59:34] I'm going to apologize because I'm going to lose my voice. I'm going to try to get, I do not have a teacher's voice, and this happens to me. But I will go on and say that the next page is a similar situation for the middle schools.

[00:59:51] You can see the issues are centered in the Dulles South area, where Willard Middle School and Mercer Middle School are both struggling. They're both overcrowded, and we have the ability to work on those.

[01:00:10] And one of the things are, you know, we will have, those schools will likely get relief when we open HS14. We expect there will be some northern movement of capacity there, although we do have a concern. Staff and Mr. Tate and I have been having conversations about our concern whether or not Willard will make it to 2028 when the high school 14 opens.

[01:00:36] So we continue to work on that, but just to illustrate, that is where our current issue is in the south area. Same thing with the high schools. You'll see that, you know, Light Ridge, Champ, sorry, Barwoods and Independence are all struggling there.

[01:00:59] They're overcrowded, and they will get relief when we open up HS-14 as well. So moving on to new capacity, the other things that are included in that are Eastern Loudon Transportation Center support space and property acquisition.

[01:01:18] This is where the land for the transition center comes in. Sorry about that. So now we want to talk about the school renovation plan, just a snapshot of how many schools we've added over the years.

[01:01:43] Take a look at those, our 10-year increments, and there's quite a few schools there. In fact, the ones that are grayed out at the bottom from 1991, 71 schools open in that period of time and allowed to get to 100 where we are now.

[01:02:05] The facility condition assessment process starts with looking at any school that's 75 years old or older for consideration to be replaced according to policy. And this year we did a facility condition assessment for any school that are over 35 years old.

[01:02:30] I may have to ask for reinforcements soon. so you've seen this slide before the box on the left are the schools that we plan to do with the assessment and this is where that chart comes in that you have in there but we'll go over that here in a minute a little more detail so the schools on the left are the ones we plan to do in the six-year window of the CIP and the schools on the right are the ones that are in the future fiscal years but we wanted to give that order so folks can plan and know where their school sits with that this is just a quick reminder that school renovation

[01:03:08] replacement program was the third priority that you provided us. So we know that that's important to you and we're working very hard to develop a plan, excuse me, to address those needs. So this is an abridged version of what you have in the board docs. And we just wanted to share that the first four schools, well, let me talk about the chart. You have the name of those schools that scored the lowest. So the lower the score of the school, the more it needs to be renovated or

[01:03:45] replaced in this process. So we have the year the school was built, the base capacity and current enrollment. That's Ms. Chair Mansfield, you'd ask for that information. And then we have three columns, school site, building exterior, and MEP. MEP stands for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing.

[01:04:09] So we hired a consulting firm to come in, go through our buildings with architects and engineers, and score the facility as it sits and how the building functions. Then the next column is the plan and program adequacy, where our staff did, took our educational specifications.

[01:04:27] The document that tells us how many rooms we have to have for this subject, how many offices we need for staff, special ed, all those types of things, and they gave that a score, and then we combined it all for the total score you see there with a total of 400 points.

[01:04:47] So that is essentially how we ordered the projects and put them in the number according to how they scored. We'll call your attention to the fact that Lincoln, Hillsborough, Aldi, and Middleburg should be grayed out on yours. It's not gray on this slide, but it's grayed out on the document.

[01:05:06] So Hillsborough and Middleburg are charter schools, and the board will wait for the board to give us guidance on whether or not we do capital projects there. So at this point, we have not included them in the superintendent's recommended CIP. Lincoln and Aldi are also site-challenged.

[01:05:26] We can't really add on to those buildings for a myriad of reasons, so we've not added those in there. So you'll see on the ranking highest need at number one in the next to last column is where we're saying we would start these projects with Hamilton, Meadowland, and Sully, and those would be the first ones programmed after, and I failed to mention earlier in the earlier slide about we're going to continue to move forward with recommending to do parking resolutions at Sterling Middle School and Loudoun County High School.

[01:05:57] So that is a briefer-than-planned overview, and I appreciate your patience with my voice. And I'll just share that today we're on November 12th.

[01:06:14] On November 19th, we'll be talking about sustainment projects and playgrounds. I know everybody's really interested in having the playground conversation. We'll be coming with a summary of that program. And then on December 2nd, we'll talk about improvement projects. So at this point, I'm happy to take some questions, and I'll ask for my team to help me with answering those.

[01:06:36] Thank you so much, Mr. Lewis. Hope you get your voice back soon. Board members, do you have any questions? Yes, Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. I'm really concerned about slide 17. I don't know if you've seen or I received letters from Guilford Elementary where they're basically asking to have their school renovated.

[01:07:00] I've received letters from kids, students there that are begging to have their school renovated. So they are far down on the list. Have any renovations been done? That's question one. So we have done a number of projects at Guilford over time.

[01:07:23] I also received those letters, so I'm very familiar with that. But we will get you a summary of things that have been done at that school over the years. Also, I see that Mercer Middle is over capacity.

[01:07:39] You're looking at changing the boundaries for this school. Might not make it to 2028. Did you say that as well? Our biggest concern right now is Willard. And so we think Mercer has a better chance of making it to 2028 than we will at Willard.

[01:07:56] But we are, I just highlight that because that's one of the areas that was read and we need to have a solution for that. And so as a part of the CIP, we're not prepared to do that, but we will come back with staff to address those overcrowding in that short term.

[01:08:12] I guess my question about Mercer is, you know, it's looking at the name changing of the school. How does that assist in capacity of the school? I'm just curious. I'm sorry, can you clarify? How did the name change?

[01:08:28] Well, we're thinking of changing the name of the school. Does that have anything to do with the fact that you're changing boundaries for the school and it's overcapacity? No, ma'am, and we haven't proposed to change boundaries for Mercer at this point. For tonight's exercise, we just pointed out that it is overcrowded.

[01:08:45] It's something we're going to address. It may be very well that it will last until 2028 when HS14 opens up and we change boundaries for the whole area. And one more question. This is not really in reference to the schools, but the CIP program. We have construction going on on the second floor here in admin.

[01:09:03] You and I spoke about this. Please explain where the cost of $500,000 came from to pay for those renovations. I'm just curious about that because, as you know, a lot of schools need renovations. And I'm not quite sure that we needed renovations on the second floor of this building.

[01:09:22] So can you give me some details and tell me what's going on on the second floor here? Yes, ma'am. So if you look on the other sheet, on line 24, you'll see a project titled Support Space.

[01:09:41] And that's where projects are done that not only address this building, but also address the other ancillary facilities that we have, the bus garage, the Round Hill Center, the Western Service Center, the Valley Service Center, all those things, projects that we do for space alterations.

[01:10:02] One of the projects we're doing out of that in the coming year is to revamp some of the SOC or the Security Operations Center. The work that's being done on the second floor here is part of an ongoing project that has been done for the second floor. This building is 20 years old, and so it's part of the refresh where we're going through the entire school system and changing all the lights from our fluorescent, less efficient lights to the LED lights to save energy.

[01:10:29] And so that's a program we've been doing for a number of years and systematically through all of our buildings to do that. So that's part of what that project is on the second floor. Is it possible in the future to get a breakdown for any work done here in the admin building in the future? I have to apologize. I was clearing my throat. Say that again. I'm sorry.

[01:10:48] Is it possible to get a breakdown of any work that's being done here in the future? Because we also did 16,000 work to a school board suite that I wasn't aware of. So is it possible you can inform us how much these projects cost? Sure.

[01:11:05] Any other questions? Yes, Dr. Rashid. Thank you, Chair. And thank you, Mr. Lewis, for this awesome presentation. I know you're not finished yet, and I know that I really like the maps, especially you call them heat maps, I think. But one of the ones, and I think I asked you this before, I think it's the one for the elementary schools.

[01:11:27] And that, I don't know what slide that is, but it goes from 25, 26 to 2030 and 31. And if you could just clarify, you said that in 2025, the map shows that Madison's Trust is, for example, on the colored pink.

[01:11:46] So it's overcapacity by like 101 or 105%. But then what I didn't understand is that by 2030 or 2031, with the attendance zone changes, especially considering elementary school 36, that doesn't offset the Madison's Trust overage or capacity overage?

[01:12:07] So I apologize if that was not clear. What we're showing in the blue boxes are potential ways to address that issue. And because we haven't decided to do one or the other, then we haven't solved that. So if we were to do an attendance zone change and pulled students away from Madison's Trust, then that would change the color of that.

[01:12:25] If we went on and built Elementary School 36 and did boundaries, then that would also, we believe, pull some students that way. Okay. And then does that also apply to the next, I think it's like the third slide from here about the high schools, where, for example, we have some of them that are white, and then all of a sudden they turn pink.

[01:12:45] So then there are overcapacities at the same point, how to address that by opening HS-14? Absolutely. That's our plan. And HS-14 is very much needed. And so all those schools will get relief from that, we believe. And of course, that'll be a board decision on how the boundaries actually play out.

[01:13:01] But we anticipate that all those, there'll be a northern shift of students to try to help address that issue. Now, is it safe to say that we can assume that instead of pink, if they were to open HS-14, would that color change to yellow then? Our hope is that it would change from either to either white or yellow.

[01:13:21] But that also, again, depends on how many students the board decides to move. And so those are always difficult conversations for the community, and it's a difficult decision for the board. But we believe there's enough capacity there to get those to white or yellow. But we'll have to wait and see how the numbers pan out.

[01:13:38] And also, if, let's say, we were, hypothetically speaking, not opening HS14 or, in the previous slide, the other anticipated schools, would these I guess you could say is there other developments housing developments that would affect these these capacities for example in the slide in 2526 so are there housing housing projections or their new communities being built that would make this worse if you didn't have HS 14 so if we didn't have HS 14 we would have a perpetual problem I will say that we do track

[01:14:16] future developments in the back of every section of your CIP there is a residential plan development page so there's one on page 123 for the Eastern Loudoun development area and it shows you all of the subdivisions that we're tracking that we know that application been approved but they haven't been built yet there's even a section area that tells you how much how far they are complete so some subdivisions are on their way and that those are ways that miss tate and her team are tracking those students to try to help us figure out who's coming and when

[01:14:50] they're going to get here okay thank you mr lewis thank you mr lewis um so as far as mercer's concern this is like the what this it it opened and it was over enrolled and then i know that we also did um because it was the only middle school in that area for a long period of time before we got Lunsford and so the other thing is that I know we added to it as well later is there any thought to continue to add to it as well to help off to help offset Willard as well as maybe takes kids

[01:15:28] you know to Lunsford as well so it's always a consideration and that was one of the the blue boxes on one of the slides where it says we could do additions or we can do you know boundary changes or new schools I was part of the addition to that that that the chassis of that building we need to consider to make sure that we're not overloading the cafeteria and the gyms and all those things if we continue to add student counts there can the rest can the core of the building manage all that so those are things we can certainly look at we're happy to do that with the board as

[01:16:03] as we get closer to making recommendations but it is it is something we can consider absolutely Thank you. Mrs. Griffiths, you had another question? Thank you, Madam Chair. You said $87 million shortfall, correct?

[01:16:19] But you're hoping other money will come in and you won't have any issues? Can you clarify? Yes. So what we've handed out tonight is the update. Essentially, it provides a reconciled or balanced project list with what we believe is possible that we would get from the Board of Supervisors.

[01:16:40] So right now, if the board adopted exactly what we have presented without any changes to it, we believe there's a good chance that the supervisors would fund it as it is. If the board wants to make changes to it, then we need to adjust that as we go. I did want to mention, as far as initiatives that I saw in some of the paperwork, climate initiatives and gender-neutral bathrooms and that sort of thing, I feel like we're getting away from our schools you know we're the priorities of our schools the renovations the maintenance I visited with Selden's a couple weeks ago and

[01:17:17] they just got their chillers and their boilers so I don't I they waited I guess a while for those so that's where I don't want to get away from items for the schools I really feel like they should have their renovations and their maintenance on a regular basis and nothing should be pushed back So I just wanted to make that known, thank you.

[01:17:43] - Yes, Vice Chair Strafi. - Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Lewis and the entire team for this presentation. Let me know if I'm getting too much into the sustainment side, but I'm just looking at the facility condition assessment. And I have, I'm generally a little bit more curious into the detail, specifically around when we select, you know, specific schools.

[01:18:09] One is, is this a renovation, or is this an expansion? Are we actually increasing the-- potentially allowing more students to attend that school? What is involved? And then looking at some of the scoring on the different categories, I'm just curious as to some more context around the schools that may be prioritized, the schools that are at the top of the list, specifically the four that were proposed, but also a few others, and just to really be able to see

[01:18:46] what is it in that facility condition assessment, and specifically the impact to the school community if we move forward with the renovation or an expansion. You don't have to answer that part here, but I'm just generally a little bit more curious as to the details as we look into, as we get to the other work sessions.

[01:19:10] - Thank you for that question, Mr. Ostreffi. I'll just share a little bit of what you can find in the CIP at this point. And on your yellow page, if you go to line 44, you'll see there that as you go across the page, you'll see $11 million in FY29, 44.

[01:19:40] And so what that is doing is I'm trying to get to that myself. We will start the design process. And so, as I mentioned earlier, that Loudoun County High School, the parking issues and the athletic programs, as well as the design money for the three projects, which started with Hamilton, Meadowland, and what was the other one?

[01:20:08] The three on the top, sorry. Sully, thank you, yes. So, that $11 million would start on the work on the county process and the county project, but also the design money for those. At that point is when we'll answer the questions about what we're going to do.

[01:20:26] As I'll give you an example, when we did the facility condition assessment for Parkview, we decided that building needed to be replaced. We did the same thing for Loudoun County High School and got a different answer because the building is different.

[01:20:43] It has some historical significance. And so we decided that we would continue to work on that building in small increments rather than do a replacement project. So every one of these projects on the list, we would do that same exercise. We're going to look at it. We're going to look and see how the systems are, what the building itself is, what the site is, what constraints there are, and make a decision and recommendation to the board as whether or not we add on or renovate or replace.

[01:21:09] And so that information won't come until a few years from now when we get into that detailed section. Thank you very much. Yes, Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you guys so much for your presentation, and thank you for meeting us with us ahead a time to go over the maps and kind of have this discussion mine's more my questions I think are going to be more directed towards my colleagues actually in terms of just their philosophy and they don't have to share it on the spot but I'm curious about how we're going to be as a board moving forward with some of these discussions especially in terms of enrollment so I'm really grateful for the map and that you brought up enrollment and it has been something that

[01:21:49] personally I've been hearing a lot about from constituents and there is a struggle I think for our taxpayers when they see enrollment flatlining or decreasing and not recovering necessarily from the COVID numbers and also seeing our budgets increase year after year after year I think that that can sometimes be hard to reconcile for me personally but also for the public in terms of being fiscally responsible so I see some options in this area to be able to kind of have those discussions and think about meeting the needs of our students and making sure that we are using the budget to our full advantage and finding

[01:22:25] efficiencies but also making sure that we can do new things but doing the new things and meeting the needs does also not negate our responsibility to do our due diligence and continue to reflect on how our current funds are being used so in my opinion this is a key area especially as we look at the heat maps and I know this may be an unpopular opinion with the public and even maybe be with my colleagues and Leesburg's certainly not on the list right now in terms of desperately needing a rezone but I do wonder if we have buildings that are under capacity and we have the ability to rezone and move people around

[01:23:05] fiscally that could be more responsible in my opinion although more difficult and definitely a hard discussion when we look at that to meet the needs of enrollment before we sign off on what I think you said for the new elementary school would be a 70 million dollar project projected and in this economy we have seen that things are costing more than we even project them at. So I think we have an opportunity here to show some fiscal responsibility while simultaneously reinforcing that all our schools are wonderful and to really think about our communities that way and just be smart about where we can put our kids

[01:23:43] and that benefits our students too. It benefits class size, it benefits our teachers in terms of being able to make sure that kids have what they need so that's kind of where my thinking is on this so i appreciate you bringing those numbers and i am grappling with those philosophical budget questions um and i just wanted to ask a clarifying question to that end when would that 70 million dollars come into play if you could just clarify that for me for the elementary school so back to

[01:24:19] our yellow sheet on line 16, you'll see ES36 co-located with Watson Mountain. If you go across the page there, you'll see that right now we're currently planning for $6.1 million in FY28 for design and approvals, and then $73 million for the construction phase in 2029. Thank you. Appreciate that. I do think that, I think Fairfax looks at boundaries like every five years or something. Is

[01:24:52] that correct and I don't think we have that in policy I think we just kind of do it when it happens and so I'm wondering if that would be something that we could look at in policy that said though we're just always looking with an eye towards the future every five years is that something that we could put in a committee or put in policy of some sort certainly we can bring the policy through the process and and look at that I have not read the Fairfax County new policy but I do believe that's what they've done as a system-wide look every five years.

[01:25:28] We had not done that in the past here because we were growing so fast, we just couldn't keep up. But as we level out, maybe this is the time to look at that. So we can certainly take a look at the policy and recommend some language for that. Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Okay, yes. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[01:25:47] I'm just curious to know, as far as prioritizing the schools and everything, Lincoln Elementary and Aldi Elementary School, they're not prioritized. Can you explain that as to why? I understand they might not be able to do expansion, but if you could just discuss that.

[01:26:04] Thank you. Sure. So those buildings are both constrained significantly on their site. They are older buildings, and so that adds some other challenges to what we can do to them. Aldi in particular is located, actually a corner of the building is actually in what's now the floodplain, and so we would not be allowed to add on to that building.

[01:26:24] You know, from a structural standpoint, you know, it's the design of those two buildings that make it difficult to add on something that would make sense and then have, you know, the core capacity of the buildings would have to be expanded as well.

[01:26:40] And so it just, from our perspective, we will continue to treat those buildings just like any other buildings, and we will keep them updated in the CAP and in the work order system, and they will be managed and run and cleaned just like any other buildings. but we just don't think it's worth to invest in that chassis to add on to them, which is why we haven't prioritized them in this report.

[01:27:01] Thank you, Mr. Lewis. Ms. Chandler. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Mr. Lewis, and to everyone on your team for this very insightful presentation. I want to say, as someone who's been engaging in lots of different ways with the school board for many years, I am happy to see an awareness change in philosophy in terms of how we have reacted to the situations that we have been dealt with in the past and are now starting to see some different changes in data and really thoughtfulness in looking at how we can make sure

[01:27:40] that all of our schools are efficiently used. I know earlier this year when I came on as a board member and went on all the school visits, I was surprised at the difference in capacity in my own community. And I think, you know, having a regular policy and really looking at it would give us the opportunity to make sure that we're not overtaxing one area and underutilizing another area.

[01:28:02] I really am drawn to that efficiency. That said, I also want to acknowledge, like in the past, there are many factors that are contributing to this issue here in Loudoun County now, and they could change at any time. And one of them is the fact that the interest rate is relatively high.

[01:28:20] So it's not a great time for people who have already raised their children in Loudoun County Public Schools to move. That could change. I don't know at any point what's coming down the pipe. But I am very grateful for your team's willingness to really look at the data in real time and be thoughtful and assess it.

[01:28:37] So thank you. Thank you, Ms. Chandler. I think that's all the questions. Thank you, Mr. Lewis and team. We appreciate all your hard work and your thoughtfulness. Okay, so board members, we're going to have to move 5.02 to the information item.

[01:29:02] So, Ms. Byrne, would you mind moving item 5.02 to the beginning of the information item? And I guess we would start that with, what is it, 13.01? Thank you.

[01:29:18] All right. I don't think four minutes is going to cover some of that. - All right, so we will go ahead and break for dinner.

[01:29:42] Yes, the school board will now recess for dinner

[01:29:44] and we'll reconvene at 6:30 p. m. , thanks.

[02:03:12] Good evening, the board is coming out of recess at this time and we will continue with the Pledge of Allegiance and National Anthem.

[02:03:30] The Seneca Ridge Middle School Select Chorus is a newly formed group of seventh and eighth grade students to perform frequently in our community. These singers rehearse after school each week and enjoy additional performance opportunities outside their concert schedule.

[02:03:45] They are under the direction of Liz Shoemaker, the Seneca Ridge Chorus Director.

[02:03:51] Everybody would rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.

[02:05:53] Now continue with student staff recognitions item 9.01, the One LCPS Spotlight Transition Program at Light Ridge High School, Presented by Talia Dennis, Transitions Teacher at Light Ridge High School.

[02:06:10] Jenna Arndt, Special Education Supervisor for Transition. Dr. Ryan Hitchman, Principal at Light Ridge High School. Welcome. Thank you.

[02:06:30] Presentation here. Good evening and thank you for providing us with the opportunity to share information regarding the transition program here at Light Ridge High School.

[02:06:51] My name is Dr. Ryan Hitchman. I am proud to serve as the Principal at Light Ridge. Tonight, I am joined by our fabulous transition teacher, Ms. Talaya Dennis, and by our special education supervisor for transition, Ms. Jenna Arndt. So, what is transition?

[02:07:11] We'd like to share tonight what transition is, who participates in transition, what it looks like at Lightridge High School, and what it looks like within our community. Transition is the process students and their families use to plan for life after high school.

[02:07:29] Aligned with the LCPS strategic plan, we try to provide our students with multiple accessible pathways to develop college and career readiness skills through specialized educational opportunities. While all students with an IEP participate in transition, at Light Ridge, we blend our regular education students with our students with an IEP to create a more welcoming, inclusive community through our Education for Employment courses.

[02:08:03] I would now like to turn it over to Talaya Dennis to share what transition looks like at Light Ridge. At Light Ridge, we are an inclusive school that provides opportunities for all students. We provide events that are designed to unlock opportunities for our families to access support and services.

[02:08:25] We have the Lightning Lounge and our 3D printing school business. Our students are mastering workplace readiness skills that will serve them throughout their careers. They are also building confidence and independence, learning how to work together with peers and engage with the broader community.

[02:08:41] At Light Ridge, we believe that all students have the ability to succeed and acquire real-world experiences. And now, here are our faces and voices of Lightridge.

[02:08:55] I was given the opportunity to prepare for life after Lightridge.

[02:09:44] And some of those things I've been doing were, I did 3D printing, I also made some shirts, worked at the Lounge, I'm also going to Bridgewater after I graduate, and I'm also getting a job.

[02:10:02] I'm here at Lightridge because it helps me really think about what I'm doing, more like just thinking in my dreams. think it helps me put things down on paper and put things into reality and not just think of them as like this is what i want to do but this is what you need to do to get there i think that's very helpful for me lots of activities and clubs i'm in fccla lightning lounge the unified gourmet foods and the dance team and there's tons of opportunities to get involved and be with everybody in the school. I like basketball and unified sports. I like

[02:10:39] garlic food, chocolate, chicken, cherry. To work hard and a good greeter and a good attitude and that's it. Thank you so very much for the opportunity to present about our transition program. Do you have any questions? Thank you so much. I'm really looking forward to expanding the transition programs and transition center and everything else i think it's just very needed here in our county um board members do you

[02:11:19] have any questions no thank you again for coming in and presenting all right we're moving on to item 10 student school board representative comment with uh manette core she's a senior at lightridge high school and is very excited to be the senior president and the lightridge school board representative. Manat co-founded Girls in STEM, where high school students go to local

[02:11:57] elementary schools and do a STEM-related activities with fourth and fifth grade girls. Manat was acutely aware of the outer representation of women in these fields. To make girls more comfortable with STEM from an early age, the club decided to target events to a younger population.

[02:12:15] The club has reached over 300 students and won the top 10 award at the Step Up Loudoun Youth Competition in 2023. Additionally, Minot has been a part of the Student Council Association since seventh grade.

[02:12:31] She is the Light Ridge Ambassador for Friends of the Gumspring Library, the Secretary of the Spanish Honor Society, a student leader for the LCPS student advisory planning team, a member of the Light Ridge Accreditation Team, and the Student Principal Advisory Committee.

[02:12:50] Manant would like to attend a four-year university and major in computer science or engineering, and would potentially like to work specifically in the fields of AI, prompt engineering, or similar fields. Welcome, Ms. Kaur, and the floor is yours.

[02:13:05] Thank you, Madam Chair, and good evening, everyone. My name is Manant Kaur and I'm the Student Council President and School Board Representative from Light Ridge High School. As I near the conclusion of my sixth year in Student Council and my last year at Light Ridge, I would like to begin by thanking my SCA sponsors, Ms. Barbara, Ms. Schrader, Ms. LaRouge and Ms. Boss, my principal, Dr. Hitchman, our faculty, and of course my family for supporting me throughout my high school journey.

[02:13:29] I'm honored to be here tonight to speak about how Light Ridge has grown since its opening, just four years ago. With over 2,000 students, Light Ridge is now the second largest school in the county. This growth and the need to give students the balance of both structure and freedom throughout the school day has led to the creation of our new bell schedule, which better accommodates students' busy lives and ensures that we have time during the school day to meet with our advisory teachers, attend club meetings, and get academic support from our teachers.

[02:13:55] I'm also proud to share some of the outstanding athletic achievements of our students this fall. Shout out to our girls' field hockey team who made it to regionals, Gavin Hufat who made it to States for Golf, our boys' cross-country team who won districts and second place in regionals, and our varsity football team who just qualified for state playoffs.

[02:14:12] Besides athletics, our Girls in STEM chapter recently placed in the top 10 in the Step Up Loud and Youth competition, we have been a Blue Ribbon School of Music for three consecutive years, and our academic team has held the state championship title for two years. As someone who's in several clubs, one of my favorite things about Light Ridge is that we have over 100 clubs and organizations, allowing students to engage with peers and adults that share similar passions as them, whether that's Trader Joe's Club or Lettuce Club, or Model UN, and so many others, there's something for everyone. In addition to these activities, we have worked diligently to build a strong student council that helps keep our growing community engaged and connected. Our events, like the annual Battle of Braddock,

[02:14:52] Homecoming, Prom, and countless class fundraisers show how dedicated each SCA member is to planning events that our students and staff will enjoy. We strive to make Light Ridge a place where students and staff want to be, not just a place where they feel they have to be. While there is much to celebrate, the ongoing challenge of the timing of our day and how it impacts instructional time is prominent. Being in the southern part of the county, our athletes and other students involved in after-school activities often have to leave early for events. Many students also need to work in order to support their families, and starting work at 5 p.m. just isn't feasible. As a result, these students lose crucial instructional time, which can make it difficult for them to stay on

[02:15:30] top of their academic work. I think it would be beneficial to start high school earlier so that students have more time in the afternoons for after-school activities and studying in general. Additionally, the growth of the Dulles South area, as mentioned earlier, has made the traffic condition worse. There is just one road, Braddock Road, that leads to Lightridge, Hovater, Henrietta Lacks, Willard, John Champ, Pinebrook, just to name a few, which can make it difficult to reach school on time and can even cause car accidents like on the roundabout that leads to Lightridge, Henrietta Lacks, Hovater, and Willard. We would appreciate the school board's support in these areas so that students can maximize their instructional time and engage in their school activities safely. I truly cannot believe how quickly my time at

[02:16:08] Lightridge has gone by, and I've enjoyed every minute of it. Being a student at Lightridge has allowed me to hone my leadership, communication, and public speaking skills, and I know that I wouldn't be the person I am today if it weren't for the amazing opportunities and staff members that have guided me and pushed me to reach my full potential. As I prepare to go to college next year, I feel confident that the experiences I've gained at Lightridge will continue to shape me as I pursue new challenges and opportunities. I'm grateful for the foundation Light Ridge has given me, one that I will carry with me into the next chapter of my life. Thank you for this opportunity to share the amazing things happening at Light Ridge and I can't

[02:16:42] wait to see what the future holds for Light Ridge and Loudoun County. Thank you. Thank you Ms. Corr for being here and for your comments. And we will now move on to item 11, the superintendent's report presented by Dr. Aaron Spence, our superintendent. Thank you Madam Chair and members of the board.

[02:17:05] It's my pleasure as always to share some good news from around our school division. I'd like to begin by asking Jennifer Haggerty to please just stand up. Ms. Haggerty has been named the next principal of Cedar Lane Elementary School. Ms. Haggerty has been the assistant principal at Evergreen Mill Elementary.

[02:17:29] Previously, she was the dean of Eagle Ridge Middle School. Ms. Haggerty joined LCPS in 2006 as a fourth-grade teacher and began her career in education in Fairfax County in 1994 as a special education teacher. Ms. Haggerty has a bachelor's degree in Spanish from the University of Virginia, a master's degree in special education also from the University of Virginia, and an educational leadership certificate from George Mason University, and we welcome Ms. Haggerty to her new role. Congratulations again. Next, I'm excited to announce, as you heard earlier, starting this month and continuing through May, members of my

[02:18:08] team and I are hosting student success talks in each of Loudoun County's eight election districts. These events will be a unique opportunity for families, staff, and community members to engage in what we believe will be meaningful conversations about supporting student success. Each session will cover important topics, including, as you heard earlier, parent view and other digital tools, how we communicate around assessments and testing, college and career readiness, and mental health and well-being. These sessions will offer guidance on family involvement, advocacy, and navigating our school system. The dates and locations are listed on this slide, so please see the website

[02:18:43] on the slide for more details. Next, to celebrate Veterans Day, I had the great pleasure of attending and visiting Moorfield Station Elementary and Loudoun County High School. At Moorfield Station, students dressed in red, white, and blue and sang patriotic songs and thanked their family members who were serving or who had served in the Arms Forces for their service.

[02:19:04] At Loudoun County High School, the Navy Junior Reserve Officers Training Corps, or NJROTC, shared drills to showcase some of their training while they celebrated veterans in the audience and the school's choir sang the anthems of all military branches. Other schools around the division also hosted events to celebrate and thank those who served, and I'd like to also offer my thanks to all of our service members and to our schools for honoring them.

[02:19:28] Speaking of our efforts to recognize and support our military community, I'm proud to announce that seven LCPS schools were named 2024 Purple Star Schools. This award is presented to schools that demonstrate military-friendly practices and a commitment to military-connected students and their families.

[02:19:45] The schools receiving the Purple Star Award this year are Brambleton Middle School, Broadbrun High School, Independence High School, John Tolbert Elementary School, Little River Elementary School, Riverbend Middle School, and Stonebridge High School. Purple Star schools retain their designation for three years before reapplying.

[02:20:05] This is the second time Brambleton and Riverbend Middle Schools have been recognized, and in addition to these schools, 10 additional LCPS schools received the Purple Star designation in previous years. We want to thank all of these schools for their commitment to our military-connected families. Next, a big thank you to our schools, our staff, students, and our community for a very successful first-ever One LCPS Celebration Day.

[02:20:29] As you heard last time we met, we created this day to honor our entire school community for all they do to make LCPS such a wonderful place to live, work, and go to school. Members of the LCPS leadership team had the privilege of visiting nearly 70 schools, and as a part of Celebration Day, schools were asked to share photos as a part of a division-wide photo contest.

[02:20:49] On this slide are just a few of the schools which received the following awards. Aldi Elementary for the best use of musical instruments, Parkview High School for the best mascot photo, and J.L. Simpson Middle School for the superintendent's 1LCPS Spirit Award. All of the schools that submitted photos for the photo contest were also recognized with a certificate.

[02:21:11] Next, at the recent legislative breakfast, I joined with Loudoun County School Board members as we presented the 2025 legislative program to Loudoun's General Assembly delegation. The event gave us the opportunity to address some of the issues happening in our community and highlight how our elected officials can support our students and their families.

[02:21:31] I look forward to continued engagement and support from Loudoun County's representatives as we head into the short session in January. Next, six of our students and two teachers from Briar Woods High School and the Academies of Loudoun attended the second annual Quad Cyber Challenge at the White House on October the 10th.

[02:21:48] This event brought together cybersecurity experts, policymakers, and students from across the nation to discuss the future of cybersecurity education and workforce development. Our students not only gained valuable insight from national leaders, but also contributed to key conversations helping to shape this field.

[02:22:05] I'm proud of their participation and their representation of LCPS at such a prestigious event. Nearly 100 LCPS middle school students from Willard, Lunsford, and Mercer Middle Schools participated in Pathways to Engineering Careers, which was hosted by Microsoft and supported by the Loudon Education Foundation on Wednesday, October the 23rd.

[02:22:25] This event provided an overview of career options for girls who are interested in engineering. The students had the opportunity to virtually explore a data center, disassemble and reassemble CAT5 cables and hear from a panel of computer and technology engineers about their pathways to these careers. Riverbend Middle School sixth grade students participated in an immersive hands-on mobile STEM lab experience. This was hosted by Learning Undefeated, which is an experiential learning non-profit, which was also made possible through the Loudon Education Foundation, as well as the Equinix Foundation. The goal of the program is to teach students about STEM opportunities in

[02:23:03] the region and to promote equity in the field. Students explored topics such as artificial intelligence, Ohm's law of electricity, and the mystery of the crooked cell, which was a look at the science behind diseases. Last February, students at Farmwell Middle School had a first-hand lesson in the political process as they testified to the House of Delegates subcommittee on K-12 education advocating to change the code of Virginia and allow middle and high school students to have careers in technical education clubs at their schools. The students learned they could not have a chapter of the Health Occupation Students of America Club at their school as it did not offer

[02:23:40] a corresponding CTE course, but in October, Senator Suha Subramayam presented the students with a copy of the Senate bill permitting students across Virginia to establish a CTE student club regardless of whether the school offers a course in that field, which was a direct result of these students' advocacy and work with Senator Subramayam. Next, Dr. Brian Pecoraro, an eighth-grade counselor at Harmony Middle School was honored by the Virginia School Counselors Association with the 2024 Student Scholarship Award for his exceptional support in helping a student who

[02:24:14] is now attending college. Dr. Paccararo is known for fostering meaningful connections with Harmony students and his commitment to understanding each student's unique concerns has made him a trusted advocate and mentor and he and his student were recognized at the VSCA conference in early October. Congratulations to him on this recognition. Arturo Soto Diaz, a sixth grade student at Harper Middle School, has been selected to perform in Ford's Theater's 2024 production of A Christmas Carol. He's one of only 14 children chosen from hundreds of young professionals around

[02:24:51] the region to be a part of this production. Arturo's journey to this opportunity began with an open audition in August at Ford's Theater, and his talent earned him a callback and ultimately a role, and of course rehearsals have been in full swing, and he's dedicating long hours to work aside professional actors in preparation for the show's run, and we congratulate him on this accomplishment.

[02:25:12] I'm also pleased to note that the Virginia Board of Education has recognized seven LCPS schools for their high achievement as a part of its exemplar school recognition program. These schools were among 92 schools recognized across the Commonwealth that received this recognition, and the LCPS schools that received the highest achievement award are Aldi Elementary School, Hamilton Elementary School, Hillsborough Charter Academy, Lincoln Elementary School, Loudoun Valley High School, Waterford Elementary School, and Woodgrove High School. So congratulations

[02:25:46] to those schools. English learner families, we are inviting you to attend Empowered, a resource and learning conference that will take place this Saturday, November the 16th, right here in the LCPS Administration Building. Families who attend will learn how to support student learning at home, and community organizations will be joining us to share information about resources available to support your students and your family. We do hope that you will join us. And then finally, the Loudoun County Chamber is hosting a first-of-its-kind civic competition in Loudoun

[02:26:20] County that encourages students to develop their interest in American democracy, engage constructively in their communities, and build trust with their fellow citizens. LCPS middle school students are encouraged to apply to compete in the civics b along with the chamber the national civics b in loudon is being held with the support of the morven park center for civic impact and the loudon school business partnership council executive council you can look on the loudon chamber foundation website and look in our newsletters for more information about how to participate and madam chair that

[02:26:55] concludes my report thank you dr spence um that brings us to item 12 public comment thank you for engaging with the school board through the public comment process. The school board welcomes comments from Loudoun County residents and believes that strong community engagement and outreach are important components of a successful school system. Speakers must limit comments to the time allotted. Based on the number of speakers and the agenda this evening, all speakers have

[02:27:29] been allotted one minute each for public comment. Please be advised that speakers who miss their time slot will not be called at a later time. All audience members shall maintain civility decorum and respect for the functioning and dignity of the school board at all times.

[02:27:46] Please remain seated unless arriving, departing, speaking at the podium, or during a break. Violations of civility, decorum, and respect include shouting, heckling, jeering, applause, or other noise which disrupts or delays the meeting, obstructing speakers from being able to see the school board, and vice versa, interrupting speakers, attempting to speak when not called to do so by the chair and approaching a speaker or otherwise attempting to intimidate disparage or distract a speaker staff member or other meeting attendees speakers

[02:28:23] should refrain from vulgarity obscenities defamation profanity or other like breaches of respect nor may speakers target criticize or attack individual students and or individual division employees during public comment. As a reminder, school board policy 2520 states speakers may not target, criticize, or attack individual students during public comment. Speakers should communicate those concerns to their school principal or an appropriate school official.

[02:28:58] The school board requests the comments on an individual student or employee related matter not be shared at public meetings where the disclosure can violate applicable confidentiality requirements. Speakers should face the dais and direct their comments to the school board.

[02:29:16] Per LCPS policy 2520, members of the school board will not answer questions or respond directly to the public during public comment period. Violations of decorum or civility by any meeting attendee may result in the chair directing staff to remove the attendee from the remainder of the meeting. Repeated or persistent violations of decorum or civility by the audience may result in, on the decision of the chair, public comment being tabled until a later point in the meeting's agenda, limiting the number of attendees in the meeting room during public

[02:29:51] comment for safety reasons, or the public comment period ending for the evening. Copies of materials for board members should be given to the public information officer in the media box at the back of the boardroom before the start of the meeting. Please provide 12 copies of the materials. Under no circumstances may a speaker approach the dais. The public is reminded that access to school board meetings is available through LCPS-TV on Comcast Channel 18 and Verizon Fios Channel 43. The live

[02:30:24] stream of the meeting may be viewed on the website. We look forward to hearing your comments. Before we start with public comment, I do want to take a moment to clarify a few things. As is shared during the opening remarks prior to public comment, speakers may not target, criticize, or attack individual students during public comment. Again, that prohibition is from school board policy 2520, participation by the public. The policy prohibits such conduct because it causes unnecessary delay

[02:30:58] or disruption to a meeting. Additionally, as is shared during the opening remarks prior to public comment the school board requests that comments on an individual student or employee related matter not be shared at public meetings where disclosure could violate applicable confidentiality requirements as i explained at our last meeting speakers can personally identify a student without stating a student's name that is personally identifiable information is any information that a reasonable person can link together to pinpoint an individual student and where that individual

[02:31:35] student is known to others in their school and surrounding community based on the context that is shared. The school board welcomes you to share your concerns, but asks that to the extent you have prepared remarks that target, criticize, or attack any individual students, you generalize such remarks to ensure compliance with board policy. For example, comments that target, criticize or attack a student or a student from a specific named school or a student with any

[02:32:13] characteristics where the information would personally identify that student to others in the school or broader LCPS community would violate school policy. However, comments that discuss general concerns with students or at schools and do not target, criticize, or attack an individual identifiable student are permissible. While the media and law enforcement are able to share information that relates to personally identifiable student at their discretion, based on relevant

[02:32:51] student privacy laws and relevant school board policy, targeting, criticizing, or attacking individual students is prohibited in this forum. Under school board policy, I, as the school board chair, am charged with the responsibility to maintain order during the school board meetings.

[02:33:10] Accordingly, when reasonable, I will warn of breaches of decorum, civility, and respect prior to discontinuing individual speaking privileges or taking other actions to preserve the civility, decorum, and orderly conduct of the meeting. Such action includes calling a recess in order to maintain or restore order to the extent necessary i will warn of breaches of decorum civility and respect from attendees prior to taking other actions to preserve the orderly conduct of the meeting if speakers fail to comply with board policy regarding public participation you will

[02:33:50] receive a warning and request to redirect or generalize your comments should you fail to redirect or generalize your comments after that warning you may be asked to yield the microphone at which time you should take your seat, and then I will call the next speaker.

[02:34:09] We will now start with our virtual public comment. We'll start with Michael Flanagan, continued with Brenda Bankson. Aaron School Board members, good evening. My name is Michael Casey Flanagan.

[02:34:26] I serve as the Director of Sports Cardiology for the NOVA Health System, and in that role, serve as a consultant to Loudoun County Public Schools providing training, education, and athlete screening. I'm joining tonight's meeting to highlight the importance that athletic trainers play in the health and safety of student athletes.

[02:34:42] In addition to managing orthopedic injuries during practice and competition, athletic trainers serve as first responders to medical emergencies on the court, in the field, or in the stands. One such emergency is sudden cardiac arrest, and while relatively rare, it can be devastating. Fortunately, the case of Buffalo Bills player DeMar Hamlin's sudden cardiac arrest on Monday Night Football demonstrated the outstanding outcomes possible with recognition and early therapy.

[02:35:06] 2020 studies show that high school athletes survive at twice the rate when they arrest during school performances than outside, highlighting the need for expertise that athletic trainers provide during sporting events. Thank you very much.

[02:35:24] Thank you, Brenda Bankston, and then we'll continue with our in-person Jennifer Schrader. Object 2025 is destructive, not instructive. Vile racist texts were sent post-election to named middle, high, and college students across the nation about picking cotton on a plantation.

[02:35:52] Mothers called it slave trade level racism, asking why there's so much hate. Anyone who thinks for a living knows we see who spread this spate of hate in 25 states. Audra McDonald sings Outrage in Children Will Listen and Carefully Taught.

[02:36:16] What do you leave your child when you're dead? Only whatever you've put in its head. You've got to be taught before it's too late to hate all the people your relatives hate. Annoy angry agitators. Don't let them bully you.

[02:36:32] Protect students. Thank you. We'll continue with in-person, starting with Jennifer Schrader, followed by Jackie Socha. Good evening. My name is Jen Schrader. I'm the parent of two LCPS students, and I've been a school counselor for LCPS for the past 13 years.

[02:36:56] I've been at Light Ridge since we opened in 2020. Tonight, you'll hear from a number of our players, coaches, and program sponsors in an effort to bring girls' flag football to Loudoun County as a sanctioned sport. This year, we started our first-ever high school program under the activities umbrella with 150 players representing 14 LCPS high schools participating in our eight-week program.

[02:37:15] We have partnered with the DC Divas who are here tonight and the Washington Commanders. You will hear about the development of the sport as the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. and in a county that prides itself on innovation, we would love to see this program adopted by athletics. Girls Fag is now a D1 collegiate sport and will be an Olympic sport in 2028.

[02:37:32] We ask for your support as we bring new and innovative opportunities to our students. Thank you very much. Thank you. no applause i'm sorry um jackie sosha followed by david keller i'm jackie sosha i'm a senior at lightridge and i'm here to talk about girls flags so flag right now is the fastest growing sport in the u.s for boys and girls sports we there are areas surrounding us such as prince william virginia beach richmond that have some program going but not as far as us we over the eight

[02:38:08] weeks we've had 17 or seven schools have full teams of like a roster of girls and then many other girls represented on our mixed team flag football is a much more equitable sport and we have funding from commanders and many sponsorships um our goal is to bring it as a varsity sport level um 14 states already have as a varsity sport so my question is what's stopping us from having a varsity sport thank you thank you and we'll go david keller followed by avery earl

[02:38:45] Good evening, board. I am the proud coach of Independence Flag Football. It's a very big privilege of mine this year. It's been an amazing opportunity, but more so for our student athletes that are especially females. Since 2020, flag football is the fastest growing sport in the United States. 2.4 million youth athletes play flag football. Of that, 1.6 are female athletes, making up 66% of the entire sport for the U.S.

[02:39:21] Right now, 12, actually, sorry, 14 D2 schools have adopted the program for 2025, 2026 school year, and our first D1 school in Mount St. Mary starts this year. So it's growing, going to be in the Olympics in 2028.

[02:39:38] We are actually pioneering the program for the state of Virginia, which will hopefully be the 14th state to adopt this program at the high school 11, providing our girls the opportunity to play in college and adapt or earn scholarships and potentially go further. So thank you very much. Thank you. Avery Earle, followed by Michael Kotelnicki. Michael Kotelnicki, followed by Catherine Contreras.

[02:40:13] Good evening. Here once again, Dr. Michael Kotelnicki talking about having a second athletic trainer at each high school in our Loudoun County Public Schools. We often talk about the benefit it has on the student-athlete.

[02:40:34] Let me give you a brief instance since I've had the privilege of being hired by Loudoun County. Is that when I came here, I was relayed a story at a high school where an athletic trainer was covering a girls' soccer game. We cover sports by the incident of traumatic injury. What's the highest incident in that evening was girls' soccer.

[02:40:50] Baseball had an incident with the parent. The parent had a heart attack. That athletic trainer was called from soccer, went down to the baseball game, providing the AED. If a shock is required, we're in a bad place, people. And so a shock was required. This person lived. At that same time, he was getting a phone call from a young lady who had a knee injury.

[02:41:09] Now, if it was the other way around, I wonder what would have happened if the knee injury happened first and the parent was down with a heart attack. This Thanksgiving might look a little different this year. So thank you for your time. Thank you. Catherine Contreras, followed by Myron Curtis.

[02:41:32] Thank you to the school board for being here and for all your work that benefits the students or children. My eldest is going to be a rising kindergartner for the 26th, 27th school year, and I would like to respectfully petition for an expansion of the dual language immersion program to two more elementary schools.

[02:41:49] Dual language immersion is important to my family and others like mine as it normalizes two languages importance as well as promoting an understanding of other cultures. It will also enhance my children's sense of personal identity. My husband speaks to our children primarily in Spanish and I primarily speak in English.

[02:42:05] Apart from my husband's family, most outside influences English. We live in Leesburg, not currently a host school for DLI. In the pilot year, only one student was chosen, as was the case with several other county schools. Most elementary schools had five or fewer in the pilot year. There is certainly a demand enough for this program to expand to two or more schools for the 26-27 school year.

[02:42:26] 427 students applied for 100 spots in just the second year of the program. Interests and demand among the community support the expansion to two additional elementary schools. Please consider expanding the program for the 26-27 school year as well. Thank you. Myron Curtis, followed by Tara Forrester.

[02:42:51] Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I'm here to advocate for the inclusion of girls' flag football as a sanctioned sport in our schools. I just wanted a chance to speak for myself and for my daughters. My name is Myron Curtis. I currently teach at Light Ridge High School. Prior to coming to Light Ridge, I taught and coached varsity football at Broad Run for 12 years.

[02:43:07] So football has been a large part of both my daughters' lives. Although they never asked for it, they've always seemed to embrace it. I've since stepped down, giving more time to my girls. However, my youngest daughter's love for the sport never left. She constantly reminds me of how much fun she had coming to practice. And even now, getting her to go to a Light Ridge football game on Friday nights has been a very useful behavior incentive.

[02:43:26] I grew up with football until recently. It's always been a part of my life, whether it's Little League, college, or whatever. But I've always had access to it. Football's always been there for me. But now as an adult, it saddens me to think that my daughter, who might have a bigger love for the game than I have, would have less opportunities to participate.

[02:43:43] When Ms. Schrader took over the initiative of getting this program rolling, I, like many girl dads, realized that there was hope for our daughters, that opportunities are being created right now. Thank you. Tara Forrester, followed by Alana Espirito.

[02:44:02] I'm a nurse practitioner in ICU, a coach, and a parent of a student athlete. Trainers' roles are ever-expanding and all-consuming, covering hundreds of athletes to one trainer at any given moment. When there is an injury, many times immediate care is required and unfortunately unavailable or delayed.

[02:44:21] Our children deserve an extremely high standard of care. And of note, Fairfax County is going to a dual trainer model. I would think Loudoun County would want to be a leader and not a follower in this regard. I personally have seen an incident where a discus was released early during warm-ups at a regional meet and caused a severe head trauma.

[02:44:40] No trainer was immediately available due to the regions I mentioned earlier. My athletes know I'm an ICU nurse practitioner and called me to manage the situation until a trainer could arrive. It was immediately apparent that there was a significant head trauma and I requested an ambulance.

[02:44:55] The trainer did arrive and assisted me in stabilizing the patient in preparation for transfer to the ER and a CT scan. We need no delays in these emergency situations. Response time and access to trainers is of most importance. Let's improve the safety and welfare. Thank you. Thank you. Alana Espiritu followed by Victoria Spiotto.

[02:45:17] Hi, my name is Alana Espiritu and I am a senior at Independence High School and I'll be talking about flag football. I've been playing flag football since I was eight years old, and I strongly encourage the board to support making girls flag football a high school sport in Loudoun County. Flag football is one of the fastest growing sports and was recently added to the 2028 Olympics.

[02:45:36] Growing up, I had always played football with boys, and it was not until my freshman year that I had the opportunity to play on a girls team. Being able to be a part of this community of female athletes and helping to grow the sport in Loudoun County has been an amazing opportunity. The NFL is a big supporter of females in flag, and thanks to this valuable partnership, the commanders have been helping the grow the sport in Northern Virginia.

[02:45:53] Last spring, they held a free training camp at Lightridge where the commanders provided shirts, flags, and footballs to all the players. Looking ahead, the commanders plan to host similar clinics this spring to help prepare the girls, coaches, and officials for our next fall season. Flag football is an affordable sport, and the commanders have agreed to provide uniforms, footballs, and flags to participating schools, which limits the school's expenses to start the program.

[02:46:12] Flag football has been more than just a sport for me. I have made lifelong friends, and now I am part of an amazing community. I ask you to support this growing sport and officially bring girls flag football to Loudoun County High Schools. Thank you. Thank you. Victoria Spiato, followed by Jennifer DiDonato.

[02:46:30] Hi, good evening. My name is Victoria Spiato. I am a K-12 LCPS alumna, and I teach at Mercer. I've been teaching there for four years at Mercer Middle School. And I'm here coming out of my comfort zone to implore you to consider that we do not want our name changed at our school.

[02:46:50] It is too expensive. It is unfounded. It is unnecessary, and there has been no feedback solicited from the community. You are talking about in following your own policies. You have not followed policy 6510, which states that you need to initiate a community-wide survey.

[02:47:06] You have completely ignored that when Mercer was founded, it was against LCPS policy to name it after an individual. There is no reason that 20 years later, you would like to propose to spend over $100,000 on changing our school's name just to virtue signal. There are no students that will benefit from this name change, and I am also upset that a school board member came to our school to tell us that we have trauma induced by our name.

[02:47:27] There is no licensed behavior psychologist on this board that has a place to be telling us that as a member of that community, we do not need this name change. Thank you. Jennifer DiDonato, followed by Doris Serrano.

[02:47:43] And I have to, before, I'm sorry, Jennifer, before our next person, I need to make sure that people know that at 2520, our policy 2520, I will be allowing two minutes for our next speaker because she's going to be using a translator.

[02:48:00] So I just wanted to let people know. I was like, me? No, not you. Not you. Go ahead. I'm a parent, PTO at a Hillside Elementary and SEAC member. I wanted to thank you. Last year, we outlined the importance of inclusive playgrounds, and you listened.

[02:48:16] We now have a plan for inclusive playgrounds at all of our elementary schools. Unfortunately, though, the plan is woefully underfunded. Currently, LCPS only has funding to build three inclusive playgrounds per year. At this rate, it will take 20 years to implement inclusive playgrounds across the county.

[02:48:36] 20 years! We can do better. In talking with LCPS, if they get the funding, they can manage building 12 inclusive playgrounds per year. This would mean we would have inclusive playgrounds at all elementary schools in five years.

[02:48:52] If you fund an additional $3.2 million per year for the next five years, we can give all elementary students the opportunity to learn, to build friendships, to develop a strong sense of community. Please fully fund inclusive playgrounds for all elementary schools.

[02:49:08] Thank you. Thank you. Our next person, as I said before, will be allowing for two minutes because there will be a translator. Doris Serrano. Good evening, my name is Doris Serrano, I live in Lisbon, I am a volunteer volunteer in Virginia,

[02:49:44] mother of a daughter of 3rd grade school Evergreen. As parents, we believe that education is key for the well-being of our children, and it is our responsibility. And now we are here because we are looking for opportunities for development.

[02:50:04] Queremos que la próxima propuesta escolar incluya programas extracurriculares, pilotos, programas que puedan implementar en las escuelas extracurriculares, gratis o accesibles para los estudiantes, independientemente de la raza, género o origen, especialmente para aquellos con dificultades económicas.

[02:50:30] Muchos niños tienen talento en deporte, arte y creemos que las oportunidades pueden desarrollarlos. Creemos que estos programas contribuirán a la mejora del rendimiento escolar y el apoyo económico y social, a mantener a los estudiantes enfocados, alejarlos de los riesgos asociados con la tecnología y otros peligros alrededor de las escuelas.

[02:50:57] Debemos empujar a los pequeños a crecer con habilidades para poder destacar a sus capacidades de inteligencia y brindarles un camino fácil hacia una, a su formación. Gracias. Good evening. My name is Marisa Alvarez.

[02:51:15] Can you hold on one second? Well, there was some changing there. Could we take it to 30 seconds? Is that possible? Can I speak?

[02:51:36] Yeah, one minute, one second. Okay. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, I'm so sorry. Yeah, my name is Doris Serrano. I live in Lisbon. I am a member of New Virginia Majorities and mother of the third grade daughters in every middle elementary.

[02:51:55] As parents, we believe the education and the case will be our children and our responsibility to seek opportunity to develop. We want to next school vice today include resort for free access to school education and extracurricular program accessible to all students, regardless of race, gender, or background, and especially those with economically difficult.

[02:52:21] Many children, they have talents and support in the art, but a lot of opportunity to develop them. We believe that this program will contribute to the improved academy, performance, emotional, and social support. that we all help key students focus it and they stay away from the risk associated with the technology and the other the journey around the school. Thank you. I'm sorry I'm gonna have to stop you I'm sorry thank you very much. Next person is Anna DiDonato followed by Jefferson

[02:52:58] Rivas. You want to bring the microphone down? My name is Anna and I'm in second grade at Hillside Elementary. I love to play with my friends at school but at recess it's really hard.

[02:53:24] Our current playground is super old. It's always too small and it doesn't have anything for all my friends to play. It's not fair that some kids can't use the playground and have fun. Have to sit and watch while everyone else can play.

[02:53:48] Our playground should be a fun place for all my friends to play, not just some of us. Please help all kids play on the playground. Support Hillside Elementary and all schools in Loudoun County by giving us inclusive playgrounds so all students can play together.

[02:54:10] Thank you. Thank you. Please, I know, it's really hard. It's a child. I get it. I'm sorry. um okay so jefferson rivas followed by lee skinner hello good afternoon school board my name is jefferson allemand i'm a student at sterling middle school and part of new virginia

[02:54:43] majority as a student i have the goal of achieving a professional future and following my dreams i am passionate about soccer and other sports that help me stay emotionally stable however at my school i suffer from bullying which affects my emotional well-being. It is urgent to take action to stop this situation that affects many students. I believe that free after-school programs can

[02:55:19] provide support to students, keep our minds busy, and reduce the negative impact of technology. These programs also would help improve discipline, academic performance, and emotional stability.

[02:55:37] Thank you. Lee Skinner, followed by Desiree Herrera. I'm a parent and certified athletic trainer in LCPS since 2003.

[02:55:56] Over the past 21 years in LCPS, I have witnessed an increase in the number of sports and athletes, and most importantly, I have witnessed a betterment in standard of care of LCPS athletes. The betterment and standard of care has also increased the responsibilities of certified athletic trainers.

[02:56:12] These responsibilities include beneficial healthcare platforms, however, with more athletes and more platforms, is the need for more manpower. Additional sports create more game nights. Game time requires that athletic trainers be present, therefore curtailing therapeutic care in the training room.

[02:56:27] An athlete's quick access to rehabilitation impacts our athletic program's safety and competitiveness. ATC's are qualified in a large scope of care, however, with one ATC the care becomes a triage. ATC's can do their job at a higher proficiency with increased manpower.

[02:56:43] I recommend two full-time certified athletic trainers at each school with equal roles for continuity, quality, and depth of patient care. Thank you. Thank you. Desiree Herrera followed by Joey DiDonato.

[02:57:05] My English is not very good, but I try. Hello, good afternoon school. My name is Desiree Herrera. I live in Sterling, I am voluntary leader for the New Virginia Majority and the mother with the sixth grade student in Seneca Elementary School.

[02:57:26] As part, we are deeply concerned about the education in our children, especially in London County. We all know there are several challenges. As part, we are always concerned about the education in our children. We know there is a lot to work in the London County School.

[02:57:42] I am concerned about the challenges we are ongoing throughout the pandemic. our children are being bullied on the bus and at school by other children who don't have a habit stable behavior and are not focused on adult education the situation is affect their concentration on the student on their student as those not have a clear solution it's urgent to support a student so that they can focus on the education and develop the skill we need to talk a program and the free and low-cost extracurricular activities that help you improve.

[02:58:17] Thank you. Thank you so much. Joey DiDonato followed by Laura Colossi. My name is Joey DiDonato.

[02:58:35] Inclusive playgrounds are really important to me and my friends. Every kid should be able to have fun on the playground at recess. It's too late for me and my friends, but you can help future students.

[02:58:52] Please support us kids by giving inclusive playgrounds to Hillside Elementary and all elementary schools. Thank you. Thank you. Laura Colossi, followed by Suzanne Satterfield. Good evening.

[02:59:16] I'm Laura Colossi, and I'm the mother of a kindergartner with autism. I want to urge you all to continue focusing on making our playgrounds more inclusive. My son is currently in a K-2 autism class, and his class is currently forced to play in an indoor courtyard instead of having access to a playground. This indoor courtyard does not have any commercial-grade play equipment.

[02:59:35] Instead, the students are playing on consumer-grade plastic play structures that are meant for toddlers. I understand that the county is working on replacing playgrounds, but at a rate of three per year, it is simply not enough. At the end of the day, I just want my son and other kids with disabilities to be able to play on the playground like everybody else instead of being contained in a place that looks like an indoor prison yard.

[02:59:57] Please fund more inclusive playgrounds. Thank you so much. Thank you. Suzanne Satterfield, followed by Jessica Smith.

[03:00:13] Jessica Smith, followed by Ann Miller. Ann Miller, followed by Carrie Adams. Carrie Adams, followed by Chris Countryman.

[03:00:43] Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the school board. Again, I'm Carrie Adams. I'm here on behalf of my first grade son, who's a full-time wheelchair user, to discuss our difficulties and accessibility of his elementary playground.

[03:00:59] As I've stated before, my son's playground is 100% inaccessible for him, causing him to be left behind from his classmates during recess. This exclusion will have lifelong effects on him. I'm here to stress the importance that my son, along with every child in LCPS, deserves to have a playground that is accessible to them.

[03:01:16] I'm urging the school board to accelerate the current plan to replace three playgrounds a year, which will take the absolutely unacceptable timeline of 20 years, as we've heard before tonight, to meet the expedited schedule the facilities team is capable of replacing with 12 a year. This would cut it down to five years.

[03:01:32] Additionally, the replacement plan needs to prioritize the schools with a known need in population versus the current plan to just replace by age. In a time where the futures of the disabled population are so uncertain, I'm urging LCPS to show that they prioritize their disabled student population to the same degree they do for their able-bodied classmates.

[03:01:50] Leaving students without an accessible playground for 20 years is unacceptable. Chris Countryman, followed by Abby Platt. Good evening. I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your continued dedication to our students and staff and rising above the criticisms of voluntary ignorance that you have had to deal with. Thank you for all you're doing. I really do love that I get to come here and share updates on collective bargaining with you. I am very happy to share that today the LRN officially certified

[03:02:29] that we have met the thresholds to proceed to collective bargaining to be the exclusive agent for both the certified and classified bargaining units. I am still hopeful, though, that those of you that have not met with me to respectfully share perspectives and challenge misinformation on collective bargaining will choose to do so.

[03:02:49] Collective bargaining will bring strength to the Loudoun County School Division. And with my remaining time, I would like to personally share support for the flag football folks here, as well as an improved playground for Anna and her friends. Thank you.

[03:03:04] Thank you. Ms. Abby Platt, followed by Victoria Hanande. Victoria Hanande, followed by Madison Schuyler. Good evening. Slanderous, hateful article was recently published in a high school

[03:03:38] by a student. This article has hateful opinion towards Christians and those who voted for President Trump. Everyone has the right to their opinion, and I'm not here to debate that. I'm here because this hateful, slanderous article should have never been allowed to published and approved by school officials in the name of free speech. I'm requesting an examination how this article does or does not violate LCPS policy 8030 and 8360 in regards to hate speech and publications allowed by our schools. This article should bring us great grief because it promotes divisions in our school based on differing beliefs. God is love. Thank you.

[03:04:25] Madison, is it Sclair? I'm sorry if I mess up your name. Could you tell me how to say it? Hi, my name is Madison Schlier and I'm a junior at Briarwoods High School. To tell you a little bit about my flag football experience, this is my 10th theory in the sport and earlier this year I was ranked inside the top 50 in the whole entire country.

[03:04:48] I have played with and against some of the best flag football players in the whole entire world and I don't know a single one of them that does not play for their own high school. Before this movement started in Loudoun County, I even considered moving states just for the sport. Flag football is said to be one of the fastest growing sports in America. 13 states already have it as a sanctioned varsity sport.

[03:05:06] Even a county in Maryland has partnered with Baltimore Ravens to bring flag into all of their schools. Playing a sport inside of your high school is the easiest way to get recruited by a college, and flag football can be played collegiately now, too. If you had told me five years ago that I would be standing here today, I wouldn't have believed you.

[03:05:22] But we have to take this amazing opportunity to create something huge for Loudoun County, and we need to take it. Thank you so much. Thank you. And with that, we end our public comment. Thank you all for coming out today and providing your public comment.

[03:05:41] Board members, at this time, we will take a short recess, and we will reconvene around 7.40, I think. Thanks.

[03:17:11] And we will continue with item 13, and our information item starting with 13. 01.

[03:17:30] And I'll remind everyone that we moved the Performance Monitoring Committee to our information items so everything has been re-numbered. All right. So Performance Monitoring Committee 2023-2024 Student Achievement Data presented by Dr. Ashley Ellis and Dr. Ryan Tyler.

[03:17:50] Thank you, Madam Chair. Good evening, members of the board. This evening, Dr. Tyler and I have our annual Student Achievement Data presentation for you. This year, because of the formation of the Performance Monitoring Committee, this presentation is a little later than it typically is, the PMC met last month to review the data in the presentation and provide feedback on the presentation.

[03:18:12] The general feedback from the committee was that the information was important to share publicly, that showing data for reporting groups is helpful for addressing gaps, and that the visual representations were also useful. There are many slides in this presentation, as you can see in BoardDocs, and the information has been publicly available on the VDOE website and on our LCPS website for quite some time.

[03:18:37] So given that, I'd like to give you a high-level overview of what you'll find in these 50 slides and then turn it back over to you to ask questions or provide comments. Given the length of the agenda, Dr. Tyler and I are also happy to follow up at another time or with written responses. So we'll take your lead on that.

[03:18:54] So first, in the presentation, I think it's important to remember the alignment to the strategic plan when we talk about student achievement, so there are slides that mention the connection to the plan, specifically Goal 1, as well as Dr. Spence's post-entry plan. We then provide links to the public dashboards and the VDOE school quality profiles that provides all of this data for all of the schools in Virginia.

[03:19:18] Throughout the presentation, we celebrate being a high-performing school division with above-average achievement overall and pass rates higher than the average across the state. We also saw an increase in achievement in almost every subject area and reporting group, And there are also areas of improvement, particularly for English learners and students with disabilities, that we continue to focus on this year through our continuous school improvement process.

[03:19:41] We then have many slides illustrating the 23-24 school year student achievement data. This includes SOL achievement, measures of academic progress or MAP growth in reading and math, graduation rates, SAT scores, chronic absenteeism, and finally the overall state accreditation.

[03:20:01] I will note that the state school performance and support framework released by VDOE this fall will replace the current accountability system in the coming school year, so this presentation will likely change next year. So with that, I will turn it back over to you, Ms. Chair Mansfield, and Dr. Tyler and I are happy to display any particular slides or answer questions you might have.

[03:20:26] Thank you, Dr. Ellis. Board members, do you have any questions? Yes. Ms. Donohue. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Dr. Ellis and Dr. Tyler, for compiling this information and being available to answer our questions. I had a couple of questions about the SOL pass rates, the sheet that you posted for us.

[03:20:50] So when I was looking through here, two questions. My first question is I don't understand the carrot in some of the results. I saw there's a legend at the bottom of the sheet that says it's related to lack of results because of personal identifying information.

[03:21:09] I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about why that's the case. So could you repeat your question when you were looking at notes on a particular slide? So I'm looking at the document that is SOL pass rates for 23-24.

[03:21:29] Okay. Dr. Tyler, this is the personally identifiable redaction. right as so in the current system any group fewer than 30 students is not reported on and groups fewer that I guess than 10 are actually suppressed that's changing in the new system to from 30 to 15 so if their cases where we had small cell sizes that there would not they would not be reported on for accountability purposes okay thank you very much for that explanation and then

[03:22:02] And I was also curious, as I was reading through these SOL test score results, most of them, I've never been an education professional, so I don't know if these are good, but they look good. A lot of them look very good to me as a parent, but I did notice there were several schools that had really high or fairly high consistent results in maybe three areas, and then much lower results in the fourth area, and that tended to be in history or science, where

[03:22:39] there was a lower fourth area, at least from my review. and I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that if you view that as a trend or and this can also be something I can follow up with you on later but that was one one question I had and another question I had was for schools that may have comparatively lower rates across the board than some of the other

[03:23:11] schools is that a concern and what will the follow-up be if it is a concern thank you for those questions so I'll start and I'll ask dr. Tyler to jump in so related to your first question perhaps we could talk offline and maybe look at a couple of particular schools I think it would be probably school specific for me to be able to answer that question oftentimes it depends on the number of of students who took the assessments, and depending on, particularly at the high school level, what SOL students take in middle school impacts what SOLs they're required to take

[03:23:51] in high school, and could potentially impact the results overall for that particular high school. So happy to do a deeper dive with you on school by school. Related to your second question, I really appreciate that question, and that is really one of the drivers of the continuous school improvement process, so the school leadership team and the office of school improvement in Dr. Tyler's office look very carefully at the data. Schools look at it student by student, and those lower rates are addressed

[03:24:28] through setting goals in the school improvement process with the ultimate goal of every student achieving. - And I would add with the ongoing support from Dr. Spence, there are a number of schools that we've identified and partnered with the Yale office, special education office, and we're providing enhanced supports to them throughout the year.

[03:24:47] It could be anything from help with, or assistance with doing learning walks, implementing certain evidence-based strategies to close achievement and outcome gaps. So there's ongoing support for schools that actually predates the new system that's coming, that we will continue to support schools in the current system and in the new system.

[03:25:07] Thank you very much. Dr. Rasheed. Thank you, Chair. I had a question about one of the slides which pertain to SOL summary. I think it's the pass rates for economically disadvantaged students. I was wondering if next year's data, would it include students that are in special programs like HamSci and IB?

[03:25:29] I don't know which slide number it was. Thank you, Dr. Rasheed. We can absolutely disaggregate that data and show pass rates by enrollment in special programs. Dr. Tyler and I spoke briefly about what that could look like earlier today.

[03:25:47] And in terms of reporting out school-level data in the new system, we would caution against showing data as, for example, HAMSCI as a school because it is a special program. But that being said, we can certainly indicate pass rates for students in special programs, if that would be helpful.

[03:26:08] Thank you. And also, you know, I noticed that the overall science scores are just predominantly the lowest in all the slides that were presented when it came to, I guess, the tabulated information and the SOL pass rates for 23 and 24.

[03:26:25] I also wanted to make sure that the RIT, does that stand for RASH unit score? I just wanted to confirm that. Yes, I believe you might have seen that. with the MAP data, so that's the Roush Instructional Unit, so that's a statistical metric used by the publisher of that assessment.

[03:26:42] And maybe I'm not reading it. Oh, sorry. Hey, please. I was going to answer your question about science. So the science, obviously it's pretty apparent looking at the data across the board that science is an area that we need to focus on.

[03:26:59] The Department of Teaching and Learning has been working hard with schools to identify strategies to support students in their science learning. We also are working with a group of schools, school leaders from across the state.

[03:27:17] We're a part of a consortium that is developing performance assessments in science to support this work. So I will add that science is an area of growth across the state, not just in LCPS. So we are working on building out multiple choice items, technology enhanced items.

[03:27:35] Those don't currently exist as sample items, unlike other test areas where we do have a ton of sample items that teachers can use with their students. So we're taking that upon ourselves to build those out. The science office is building out common assessments as well to support teachers in measuring students' growth in science over the course of the year.

[03:27:59] I am happy to report that they are fully built out for grades three through five. So we have student growth assessments. We have quarterly and unit assessments that are available for schools. And then the team is building out those assessments for K through two right now. They're still in development.

[03:28:16] So that is definitely an area that we have identified for growth. We have also been able to utilize flexible staffing to think creatively about science support in schools. So that's an area that we continue to work on. I appreciate you asking.

[03:28:31] Great, thanks. And also with the SOL pass rates, I noticed, especially on a particular slide, that I noticed that a lot of them were 70 or above, but there was some that was like a single digit of two, and then there was like some that were like as low as 39. Is that a really true score of their SOLs?

[03:28:50] I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't, maybe it was just like something else that was written down. So the data has been looked at by the research office multiple times. It's been validated. There are a couple of outliers. That often depends on the sample size, so how many students took the assessment.

[03:29:10] For example, a school like Roby has very low enrollment, so that could impact the pass rate as well. And again, going back to Ms. Donoghue's question, it depends on the students who are taking the assessment. And so I'm happy to talk more offline about particular data points if you want.

[03:29:29] Okay, thank you so much. Sure. Any other questions? Yes, Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Chair Mansfield. It's not questions so much, but just to highlight a few of the things. And for those people that don't necessarily tune in to PMC, my concerns are always, you know, love to celebrate the good data and like to hear that, you know, overall it looks pretty good to me.

[03:29:54] I think that that is important. And obviously, when you look at these visuals, we are doing better than the state. But I've said it before. I'm going to keep saying it. I think that that should not be the goal. I think we need to look at every single learner and look at the different reporting groups and really think about what we're doing. And I'm grateful that flexible staffing is going to be a response to some of these numbers because I think it will help.

[03:30:15] But I think it is an all-hands-on-deck approach, especially in terms of looking at our English language learners. when you look at them being around a third in almost every category of pass rate. I just have a hard time putting my head on my pillow at night and feeling good about that.

[03:30:33] I really think that we need to, we've got to, it's just got to be all hands on deck. And I think the attention from the state is going to be really important. I think we need to look at it in terms of, you know, equity lens too. Like what are we doing for the different schools that have these different needs and these different students?

[03:30:49] I am encouraged to see increase scores for students with disabilities but again 50% is that really the bar like we have to continue to work at making sure that every student is achieving to their full potential and when we're looking at across on slide 9 you can see the SOL summary of the historical achievement and we are not back to pre pandemic numbers although we are climbing closer but I I was really digging into the extra attachment on the map growth and really looking at our schools

[03:31:23] and you know when you look at the growth you want to see higher than 50 percent. We used to have a goal here I think of 60 percent where we needed to close gaps because that would mean you've made more than one year's worth of growth and we know that kids had gaps post-COVID and so when I look at those percentages and I look at the elementary schools, I see one that is at 60% or higher, one. And then we have 32 out of 61 elementary schools that showed below 50% growth, which means they are not even making a year's worth growth on average, let alone closing gaps. So that's

[03:32:02] alarming to me when that's 52% of our schools. And then for middle school, I wish the news was better, but for middle school, 17 out of 18 schools are below 50% average growth. So that's 94%, and that's in reading. 15 out of 17 in math, and that's 88% of our schools. So again, I have some questions that I think we need to dig deeper into in our PMC committee and really get into the weeds here of exactly how we're going to target these things, because to me, we should be

[03:32:37] seeing gaps closing and from this map data there's some definite concerns on my end so I'm going to keep putting that plug again I never want to shy away from the overall things that are going well but I really want to I don't want the trends to continue where we're not closing gaps. Thank you Ms. Chernoff. Board members any other questions? Yes Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you Madam Chair. My concerns were with Sterling Middle and Sully as Title I schools. I understand that when you do when kids take the SOLs, it's not a requirement. I happen to know that my daughter missed an English

[03:33:17] SOL and she didn't make it up. Should there be a requirement for SOLs for better numbers to get a better idea? Because I feel like these numbers are skewed a little bit. Also, don't the Title I schools get extra money? So I'm kind of perplexed as to why they're so low they get additional money for title one schools so can you explain that to me how they can be so low so the title one school thank you for that question the title one schools do receive

[03:33:56] title one funds they are required to complete a title one plan each year that contains measurable goals and objectives related to student achievement. They look very closely at their student achievement data and make goals based on student need. In terms of SOL participation, we can get that number for you. Our participation rate is usually pretty high. You are correct. Parents

[03:34:30] are allowed to opt out of participation and if a student misses an SOL we encourage them to attend on a makeup day but we cannot require the parent to have their student assessed so we can get you that percentage what would you add and absolutely accurate and what adds to that is that we tend to have higher participation rates elementary and middle but once students satisfy their graduation requirements is where we see more challenges typically at the high school level but we can confirm the exact rates.

[03:35:01] Dr. Deans. In the list where it talks about accredited, there are a couple that are accredited with conditions. Can you share what the conditions, or is that too identifiable?

[03:35:22] So accredited with conditions means that they have specific areas that have been identified through the federal process that need additional work. And so those schools that are accredited with conditions work very closely with Dr. Tyler and Mr. Meisensal and the School Improvement Office to develop plans to close those gaps that have been identified.

[03:35:49] We are required to submit those plans to the VDOE and get approval of those plans, and they are closely monitored by the Office of School Improvement. Dr. Tyler, what would you add? Yes, and to add to that, on slide 43, you actually see the detail for Parkview.

[03:36:06] The particular issues were science, chronic absenteeism, and dropout rate. And for Robey, it was chronic absenteeism. And that is on slide 43. Do we have, what about the students at, help me, the Star School, the North Star?

[03:36:27] Are they a, they are not a standalone? Their scores are counted back at their homeschool's share. That is correct. North Star is a program similar to the academies.

[03:36:45] So Robey is an alternative pathway school and has a status for that reason. But the other schools where students are concurrently enrolled do not have a particular school code in the accountability system and are not treated as schools in that system.

[03:37:04] Would it ever be possible for Robey with its low numbers to be rolled into another school versus being a standalone school? Would the state even allow that to make a change at this point? That's an interesting question, Dr. Deans.

[03:37:22] I think that that would require both board action and state approval because the board took action to actually create an alternative school. It has a separate school code. We have to submit annually a separate accreditation plan for Robey High School.

[03:37:44] And so that's why it's very different from a program like North Star and the academies where those students are technically assigned to their home high school. That being said, when schools look at data, North Star has access to all of their students' data.

[03:38:03] They look at it student by student and provide supports as needed. So with the alternative program located there, would those students take SOLs? They may take SOLs, yes, and those scores would technically be attached to the student's home school.

[03:38:27] So the board could take action to make Robey a part of the alternative school program versus a separate high school. Is that what you said? No, sorry. When the board created Robey High School, we submitted an application to the state for it to be an alternative school.

[03:38:48] So it has its own school number and code in the state list of schools. The alternative program and the North Star program are just that. They're programs. We have not applied to make them separate schools.

[03:39:06] Okay. I'd like to have some conversation along those lines in the future privately. Any other questions? Yes. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I wanted to ask, in terms of measuring students' achievement or growth, Do you also look at things like CPAs?

[03:39:28] Because I know in, like, world language classes, we take CPAs quarterly. So is that also included in that growth measurement, or is that, like, released somewhere else? I really appreciate that question. So that information is not included in the state or federal accountability system.

[03:39:46] It is essentially what we shared this evening is included in those two systems. That being said, those assessments are extremely important for teachers to make instructional decisions. So they look at that data constantly and make instructional decisions based off of that.

[03:40:03] Ms. Cora, I wanted to let you know. So there's a new accountability measures, and they do include things like AP, and they do include those things. And I think it might be a really interesting advocacy for someone to do to advocate that perhaps something like that assessment would be appropriate to add to that measure.

[03:40:29] Yeah, absolutely. Any other questions? Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for your presentation. And we will move on to 13.02, Human Resources and Talent Development School Calendar Options.

[03:40:55] 2026-27 school year presented by Ms. Lisa Boland, our Chief Human Resource Officer. Ms. Boland. Okay, good evening. As you know, one of HRTD's goals is to provide our staff and families with multi-year school calendars to support long-term planning. This practice began with presentation

[03:41:29] and approval of the 24, 25, and 25, 26 school calendars by the previous school board on May 9, 2023. Tonight, we are continuing this approach by presenting draft calendar options for the 26, 27 school year. LCPS is committed to supporting every student in pursuing and reaching their full potential and empowering them to make meaningful contributions to the world. Establishing a thoughtfully crafted school calendar is a foundational step toward fulfilling this mission.

[03:42:10] Tonight, we are presenting four calendar options for the 26-27 school year for the board's consideration. In our commitment to centering our work around students, we also recognize the essential role teachers play in helping students achieve their educational goals.

[03:42:30] To support them, it's critical that we provide educators with adequate time to prepare for a successful school year. The student school calendar serves as the foundation upon which we build an effective teacher work calendar.

[03:42:46] Together, these two calendars establish the standard that guides the development of all other staff calendars. In our commitment to centering our work around students, we also recognize, oh, sorry, as you can imagine, creating a school calendar that meets the needs of more than 80,000 students and their families is a challenging and complex task.

[03:43:16] This calendar must comply with LCPS policy and the Virginia Code and set the foundation for over 30 staff calendars impacting more than 13,000 employees and remain aligned with our core values and goals of the 2027 Strategic Plan for Excellence. Before sharing our recommended school calendar options for the 26-27 school year, I'd like to provide a brief overview of the guiding principles reflected in our current calendars. These principles were shaped by feedback from

[03:43:55] stakeholders during our last presentation to the school board and are evident in our approved calendars through the 25-26 school year. The development of school calendars follow LCPS policy and Regulation 7040 along with Virginia Code and other relevant laws. Policy 7040 provides guidelines for student and teacher calendar development, holidays, staff development days, and inclement

[03:44:28] weather procedures, and more. Virginia Code requires all school divisions to offer 180 instructional days or 990 instructional hours each calendar year. LCPS students receive 6 hours and 15 minutes of instructional time daily, exceeding the state requirement by 45 minutes per day. Additionally, another consideration as of late is the House Bill 1148, which moved the

[03:45:02] Virginia June primary election from the second to the third Tuesday in June, which may impact the last day of school and other student-related events. In addition to the laws and policies that guide school calendar development, we've developed a set of guiding principles based on extensive stakeholder feedback. This feedback was gathered through surveys, discussion with advisory committees, input from school board members, and public comment. It has been instrumental in shaping

[03:45:37] these guiding principles which inform the calendar drafts through the 25-26 school year. The guiding principles include starting two weeks before Labor Day and ending the school year in the second week of June, providing a two-week winter break and a full week for spring break, aiming for 180 student instructional days, although 2024, 25, and 2526 calendars include fewer days due to the

[03:46:10] election day conflict, which we now have included in our guiding principles, and designating one holiday for significant religious observance from recognized world religions. This chart provides an overview of key historical data HRTD reviewed during the calendar development process. While we're showing the past six years here, it's worth noting that going further back, the student

[03:46:44] calendar has traditionally included 100 instructional days or more, and the teacher calendar has consistently provided for 194 scheduled working days or more. Our objective is to provide three years of student school calendars in advance for our staff and families. With the 24-25 school year now underway, we are beginning the development of calendars for the 26-27 school year with plans to

[03:47:18] present 27-28 options to the board in the spring. We do not take lightly the responsibility this task requires. In preparation for tonight's presentation, our team has gathered extensive feedback from a variety of stakeholders through multiple formats. To inform the development of the 26-27 calendar options, HRTD has gathered input from a range of stakeholders through various channels. This feedback has been crucial in shaping the options we are presenting tonight. As in previous years,

[03:47:54] we've engaged with the school board and gathered input from the student teacher and principal advisory committees as well as conducting surveys with staff and families additionally this year we introduced a new calendar committee which includes representatives from across the division to ensure a broad perspective in the development process as part of the committee commitment to continuous improvement hrtd collaborated with teaching and learning this year to establish a calendar

[03:48:29] committee the committee's role was to offer feedback on the development of future school calendars beginning with the 26-27 school year to meet the evolving needs of our students staff and community while aligning with educational goals and best practices provide key recommendations to guide calendar development, facilitate communication between the committee and our diverse stakeholder groups. The committee met three times, dedicating each session to reviewing survey data, discussing student and departmental needs, and supporting the calendar recommendations

[03:49:08] we bring to you tonight. Additionally, we created a dedicated calendar development webpage, which provides an overview of the calendar process, historical meeting notes, links to current and upcoming calendars and a platform for ongoing feedback. The calendar committee was intentionally composed of a diverse group of stakeholders from various departments across the division. This ensured that a broad range of perspectives informed the development of future

[03:49:43] calendar school options. Additionally, members of the superintendent's advisory committee served as a key subgroup within the larger committee, providing essential feedback throughout the process. To gather comprehensive feedback, HRTD conducted multiple surveys focused on key aspects of the school calendar. Five distinct surveys were distributed to our student, teacher, and principal advisory groups, the calendar committee, and staff and families. These surveys asked for

[03:50:18] input on preferences regarding the start and end of the school year, lengths of breaks, school holidays, quarter lengths, alignment with neighboring counties, and total instructional days. Okay, let's move into the survey results.

[03:50:38] Over the next few slides, I'll walk you through key insights we've gathered. Our team has thoroughly reviewed and synthesized the survey results from the five groups we engaged. The student, teacher, and principal advisory committees, the calendar committee, and the broader survey distributed to staff and families.

[03:50:58] In total, we received 20,987 responses, which have been aggregated here for a comprehensive view of all groups' feedback. The data shown here highlights the major preferences that emerged.

[03:51:16] For your reference, full survey results are included in tonight's information item. But before we dive into specific survey data on the next few slides, I do want to briefly cover some key topics that HRTD regularly hears feedback on.

[03:51:32] First, the start and end dates for students. 35% of respondents favor a school start two weeks before Labor Day, with an earlier end date, while 26% support an early August start.

[03:51:47] Additionally, 31% expressed openness to alternative calendar options that would allow for an earlier start and an earlier end date to the school year. In regards to breaks, 73% support keeping a two-week winter break.

[03:52:06] For spring break, there's a preference for a one-week break, with 39% still supporting in alignment with Easter. Student instructional days, opinions on the number of instructional days are mixed.

[03:52:22] 35% support maintaining 180 instructional days, while 34% are open to reducing that number. And 24% have no preference. There's also no preference for aligning calendars with our neighboring counties.

[03:52:41] In fact, 49% indicated that this was either unimportant or irrelevant to them. The data also did not support a re-evaluation of holidays, and 55% of respondents preferred to maintain the current holiday schedule or expressed no preference at all.

[03:52:59] When asked of the interest to explore alternative calendar options, a majority 72% supported exploring at least one alternative calendar option, with 31% supporting an earlier start and end date as a top option.

[03:53:19] The following two slides provide a snapshot of the survey results broken down by specific questions related to the school calendar structure, calendar breaks, and alternative calendar options. A few key points that were not included in the earlier summary when asked if equal quarters were important in the structure of the school calendar, 27% of respondents indicated it was important, while 26% said it was somewhat important.

[03:53:48] We also inquired whether there was a specific day of the week that schools should avoid starting on. The most common responses were Monday and Friday, indicating preference to avoid these days for the first day of school. This slide offers a visual summary of the survey results, which we've already explored in more detail on slide 15.

[03:54:13] These visual highlight the most important preferences and trends related to school calendar structure breaks and alternative options. presenting the data in a more digestible format as a reminder these results reflect feedback gathered from all five surveys which included input from a wide range of stakeholders such as students teachers principals and families and now that we've reviewed the survey results let's move into the next section where we will discuss the proposed proposed calendar options the

[03:54:47] feedback resulted in the development of four draft calendar options i am presenting to you this evening. Option one maintains a 180-day instructional year for students and closely mirrors our current calendar structure. The main change is a shift from a Thursday start to a Monday start. And I know, while Monday is not the preferred start day based on feedback, this

[03:55:19] adjustment would be necessary to accommodate the election day move which is now on June 15th and ensure that sufficient instructional days occur prior to that date. So for students the first day of school would be Monday August 17th and the last day of school would be June 11th. This would allow for a two-week winter break and a one-week spring break and fairly balanced quarters. This calendar has teachers with 194 scheduled workdays, which is in alignment with their current number,

[03:55:59] and would have teachers return on Monday, August 10th, five days before students, with a last workday of Tuesday, June 15th. Options two and three are presented together as they both address a key concern raised by various stakeholders, the desire for an earlier end to the school year that aligns more closely with the completion of SOL and AP exams.

[03:56:32] Both options feature a two-week winter break, a one-week spring break, fairly balanced quarters, and a last day of school for students that would be Friday, May 28th. As with any option, an early end date comes with an early start date.

[03:56:54] However, while both options include early start dates, option two begins the school year slightly earlier than option three. In both cases, some compromises are necessary to accommodate these requests while maintaining balance in instructional time.

[03:57:15] Option two maintains the importance of 180 instructional days and allows for a first day of school for students to be on Tuesday, August 4th, meaning that teachers would return to work on Monday, July 27th, six days before students. Again, the last day of school for

[03:57:46] students in this calendar would be May 28th. If selected, we recognize this would be a significant shift, and the first year of this calendar would provide for a shorter summer break, which is why we have also included another variation that may be more palatable. Option three, however,

[03:58:15] reduces the number of instructional days from 180 to 174 in order to accomplish this. The first day of school is Wednesday, which is more favorable, August 12th, and teachers would return on Monday, August 3rd, seven days before students. So we're at least back in August. The last day of school for students would remain May 28th. It's important to note that with either of these options, we

[03:58:54] acknowledge that adopting an earlier start will result in a shorter summer break in the first year. However, if maintained, future years will see a return to a more typical break between school years. Option four is similar to option three in terms of the number of instructional days, so it would maintain the reduction from 180 to 174 instructional days for students. The main

[03:59:29] difference in this option is the shift of spring break to the week after Easter. The change was a committee recommendation aimed at slightly decreasing the number of instructional days between spring break and the end of the school year, providing a more balanced break schedule.

[03:59:49] Option four includes the first day of school on a Thursday, August 13th, which is aligned with our current practice of starting on a Thursday. The last day of school would remain at Friday, May 28th. It does have a two-week winter break and a one-week spring break. The first and third quarters are similar in length, with the second quarter being slightly longer and the fourth quarter slightly shorter. This option provides teachers with 193 scheduled work days, one day

[04:00:27] less scheduled than the typical 194, and a return to work date of Monday, August 3rd. Next steps. I know that was a lot to digest, and it is my hope that we have provided the board with well thought out and researched options and the information necessary to confidently discuss and ultimately decide how to move forward as a division to support our students and staff for future years. So what's next? As we move forward with finalizing the school calendar,

[04:01:06] the team will send out a survey to families and staff during the week of November 18th, asking them to prioritize or rank the four calendar options presented to the school board this evening. The goal is to distribute the survey before Thanksgiving break to maximize participation. Once the survey closes, HRTD will collaborate with the research office to gather and summarize the results.

[04:01:34] These will be provided to the school board along with the calendar options as an action item at the December 10th school board meeting. One last thing. Although we are not recommending implementing an alternative school calendar at this time, we thought it would be important to share a visual draft of what an alternative year-round calendar could look like.

[04:02:04] As mentioned earlier, over 72% of survey respondents supported at least one alternative calendar option, with 27% supporting year-round. As you can see, one of the main differences in a year-round calendar and a traditional school calendar is the length of the academic year and the frequency of breaks.

[04:02:29] This calendar option represents a fall break, winter break, and spring break. The sample displayed on this slide represents one of many options of what a year-round school calendar might look like. In this model, students would start in mid-July and end in early June with a two-week break in the fall, a three-week break in winter, and a two-week break in the spring.

[04:02:58] In this illustration, students have 180 instructional days, a start date of Thursday, July 16th, and an end date of Wednesday, June 2nd. Again, two-week fall break, three-week winter break, and a one-week spring break.

[04:03:19] Teachers would have 194 scheduled work days, so three unscheduled work days. They would return to work on Wednesday, July 8th, six days before students. and would have a last day of June 4th.

[04:03:37] You will see that the breaks marked with an I are intersessions, which are commonly used in a year-round calendar structure between instructional periods to provide students with opportunities for enrichment, remediation, or catching up on their studies.

[04:03:54] This model is similar to the school calendar in Chesterfield, which is a very close to a 45, 10, 15 model, which approximately 45 instructional days and between 10 to 15 days of breaks.

[04:04:10] The summer break would be approximately 45 days. Other models could include a 60-20 model with approximately 60 days of instructional time and 20 days off. I would like to point out that if we determine that there is interest in further exploring this type of an alternative calendar, it would require significant collaboration between multiple departments, staff, and families.

[04:04:37] For example, it would be imperative to work with support services, transportation, instruction, and other departments to determine how this type of calendar might impact any projects or strategic initiatives already planned for future years, current staff calendars, and the impact it might have on families for child care, work schedules, and related items.

[04:05:03] Additionally, depending on if there is interest in a year-round school model, there could be additional samples of various models to develop. This sample, along with a question inquiring as to the interest in year-round school, will be included on the survey to further inform us on future calendar development.

[04:05:28] And if that's not enough, that's all I have, but I'm happy to answer any questions. Board members, do you have any questions? Thank you, Ms. Boland. Yes, Ms. Donahue.

[04:05:44] Thank you, Madam Chair. Not a question, just I wanted to thank Ms. Boland and your team for the effort that you put in and the careful deliberation and communication that you and other staff put into this presentation and these efforts because this is definitely an area that we get a lot of feedback about.

[04:06:04] And for my own personal preference, I'm going to say down with tying spring break to Easter. Just my personal feeling. Thank you. Ms. Chandler. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you, Ms. Bolin, for this presentation.

[04:06:21] I have to say, in having the opportunity to really dig into the data, this is very nuanced work, and it's a heavy lift. It's really hard, and I'm surprised, I think, given the fact that this really is the first time that we've looked at some of these questions.

[04:06:37] and committee to see that there aren't, aside from keeping the winter break and keeping the spring break, there aren't clear indicators of what people want and there are a lot of nuanced indicators of what people want and and it's hard when you look at two categories and they're so close in the 30s but not the same. So we will certainly have a lot of work to do on our part and I'll look forward to seeing the results from the survey but you know I just wanted to say

[04:07:10] it is a daunting task and thank you for heading it up. Yes, Ms. Chernoff. Thank you Chair Mansfield and thank you Ms. Boland. I echo what Ms. Chandler said. I know this is a heavy lift. I know it's always people take calendars super seriously. We learned that. We learned that the hard way. So I do tread lightly in terms of my own opinions this go around but I I want to ask a couple of questions about the survey in just thinking about the tremendous amount of productive feedback although sometimes harsh that we got from the unique let's

[04:07:48] talk link for the two-hour delay suggestion that was not popular is that something that we would consider as part of this survey not necessarily that it would be a let's talk link but a place for open feedback about why they feel they the way they do about the certain options that would help us kind of qualitatively look at some of the data in terms of also looking at it quantitatively? So we do allow for an open comment section and they do try their best to pull some similarities together in regards of trends but I'm sure you could get the breakdown

[04:08:27] of the responses. Yeah, just to pull some high points I think would maybe be nice if we had one of those for each of the options possibly or is it just one box at the end for all catch-all? I believe it is a one box at the end of all catch-all. I'm going to turn around. I think Nicole Davis is in the audience. Oh actually maybe she's responding. She's messaging you right now. Uh-huh. She probably is. It's one box. Okay so just something to consider in terms of I feel like the feedback for each option is going to be pretty

[04:09:03] specific since these are pretty revolutionary calendar ideas um just food for thought um another thing i was thinking about um in terms of if we were to switch to option two three or four with an ending date of may 28 that's correct all three of those end that date yes ma'am um and i will put in my two cents as an former educator and as someone who engages educators i will say that that time after the testing is done is extremely difficult in terms of managing what what you're going to do and what the purpose is and projects and behaviors and so I do think that that could be a good shift

[04:09:42] for us instructionally to support our students and our educators but I'm also wondering I don't know that people will be ready to make that jump to make that first summer super super short so I'm wondering if a combination of options might also be considered where you might have option three in year 26-27 and then option two in year 27-28 so that would give an extra week or even more so if you went option four and then option two. So keep in mind as I mentioned we

[04:10:13] we are trying to maintain our three-year pre-planning calendar approval process and so while we are bringing this evening 26-27 and it is our hope for the board to take action on 26 27 on december 10th the plan is to bring 27 28 options before this school board in the spring okay so if that is something this board would like to consider you will have the opportunity to present that phased two-year approach okay and then think about if we wanted to stay with

[04:10:49] that similar option two years in the last two we could consider that yes ma'am okay that would be something I would think about, and I am pleased to see that year-round school has at least entered the chat. I will say that. I think it's gonna be interesting to see what people think, and I'm looking forward to seeing the responses as well.

[04:11:07] Thank you so much for your work. - Board members, yes, Dr. Deans. - What are the dates? Are the dates for SOLs and the testing, are they generally the same from year to year?

[04:11:25] - They're not the exact same, but they have the range, and since we don't control them, they are typically April and May. And since we, LCPS does not control them, they're state controlled. The best we can do is control the calendar around them.

[04:11:44] - Thank you. - Yes, Ms. Kor. - Thank you, Chair. And thank you Ms. Boland for this awesome presentation. - Hello, I was talking about Ms. Kor over there. - So I wanted to ask if we end school on May 28th, would that affect things like Senior Summit or, I don't know if this is like county policy, but like I know seniors historically like end their school like a week early.

[04:12:18] But would that affect those things? So yes, the easy answer is yes. It would essentially have to back everything up. When seniors got out, when graduations would be held, we would have to work very closely with Dr. Ellis and Ms. Mitchell to make sure planning appropriately.

[04:12:44] Now, Dr. Rashid. Let me make sure I'm cleared on this side before I start. Thank you, Ms. Boland, for that great presentation. Just to-- maybe I missed it, but I was just wondering if there was any holidays that were included in the calendars or in the options, rather, because there's been some constituents that have reached out from the community about their holidays being included.

[04:13:13] So I was wondering if some observed days that are important could be included in some of the calendars, or did you present that? i don't know if i missed it so thank you for the question so there the days that are currently represented on all of these calendars are the current holidays presented in school board policy and regulation 7040 and they are essentially identified as one holiday school holiday

[04:13:46] observance based on what nationally recognized religions have represented we haven't we did not add any additional or take any away and the survey data really didn't support one way or the other adding any or taking any away yes dr deans are we um have we also placed our committee and school

[04:14:24] board meetings in those calendars because, for an example, this year we're having a school board meeting the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving. And so if we were to put the meetings in the calendars, we could adjust based on that also. No, ma'am, I'm sorry. You might want to talk to the chief of staff. I'll talk with him later. Just a reminder that the school board votes on its calendar and that we have an opportunity to discuss that every time the school board votes

[04:15:01] on its meeting calendar. Yes, Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. You know, we went back and forth on the calendar a couple of times. Can you just reiterate for me to do Columbus Day slash Indigenous Peoples Day on the calendar? Do we have to take a vote for that or how does that work? So HRTD does not make the decision on the naming convention of holidays or breaks.

[04:15:37] Those are currently listed in school board policy and regulation. It is my recollection that it was the school board that took action to change the naming convention of Columbus Day to Indigenous Peoples Day. So if a change was requested, I believe that would be action the board would need to take. Yes, ma'am. Is that something you would put through or we would have to do it on our end here? No, ma'am. I would not put that through. That would have to be a school

[04:16:13] board member. Yes. Any other questions? Yes, Dr. Rasheed. There's me. Let me make sure it's me. In the survey that you provided, did it include questions on holidays? Yes, ma'am. All right. Not not specific holidays just the number of holidays okay was there any questions like regards to religious holidays or anything of the sort so it just asked the question of whether or not they would like us to re-evaluate the number of student holidays offered whether they would like them

[04:16:48] increased decreased or to remain the same thank you okay any other questions seeing none thank you is boland and we will look forward to the december 10th survey okay and we're moving on to um 13.03 finance and operations committee revision of policy 4180 commercial promotional and corporate

[04:17:19] sponsorships and partnerships formerly policy 864 presented by our chair arvin estrafi chair of the finance and operations committee vice chair estrafi thank you very much madam chair um just presenting to the to the full board an item that came out of the finance and operations committee commercial promotional and corporate sponsorship and partnerships this item serves to clarify the the way that schools and institutions and LCPS enter into agreements for partnerships and it delineates the difference between

[04:17:59] educational partnerships and sponsorships and it provides all of the parameters around entering into partnerships or receiving sponsorships and the requirements in those agreements as well as some stipulations around where the school board can weigh in on some of those partnerships and sponsorships. So yeah, just open it up for questions. Yes, Mrs. Griffiths. Thanks, Madam Chair. This would involve Wes, if you don't mind pulling up the

[04:18:35] policy the clean policy i was just trying to figure out some of the lines in there maybe you can explain uh 51 to 55 exactly uh what is what is being like can you just clarify it for me as to what that is and i have some other questions on some other lines if you don't mind thank you mrs griffiths glad to do so uh lines 51 through 55 on the clean policy appear to be section d requirements, which reads, any agreement to enter into an educational sponsorship or educational

[04:19:15] partnership must be in writing and must be reviewed and approved by LCPS Procurement Services and Risk Management prior to the negotiation and signing of any agreement to ensure compliance with the Virginia Public Procurement Act. The written agreement shall at a minimum include and then list several requirements is that the correct spot yes it is um i'm not real sure on it i mean um i'm having with the language on here i'm just trying to decipher what all this means um so basically um approved by lcps procurement services i mean i'm not quite sure and risk

[04:19:55] management can you management can you explain that yes mrs griffiths so um and uh miss willoughby's here as well. She oversees both procurement services and risk management. However, the sentiment here is just to make sure that all contracts or agreements, which are educational sponsorship or educational partnerships or memorialize those, comply with the Virginia Public Procurement Act, which is part of the Virginia Code, which governs public contracts. So the Loudoun County School

[04:20:34] board as a public body must follow the code provisions set forth and the Virginia Public Procurement Act and it just makes sure from kind of a compliance and legal compliance aspect that the school board all the contracts that the school board is entering are legally enforceable and protects the

[04:20:56] school board thank thank you for that and also lines 86 89 and well 86 and 87 89 and 101 yes so taking each in turn 86 and 87 make sure that any kind of partnership that the school board enters into that the other party wouldn't be able to use the LCPS logo and that we would

[04:21:34] have a say in how they use it. That makes sure that there's no kind of tarnishing of the LCPS brand. I feel like if we were printing something or we had the logo on there, is there an issue there? Do we have to get permission for that? That's a great question. No, this is really to protect from the other party that we enter into using LCPS's logo and brand in a way that wouldn't comport with the mission of the school board or school division. Thank you and just if you can go

[04:22:14] over 89 and 101 real quick. 101 to 103. Thank you. Thank you. Just to clarify was it 89 and 90 and 102 and 103 or just? Oh yeah 89 and 90. Okay yes so 89 and 90 reads a statement that the school or school board must approve its identification as a partner or co-sponsor in all publicity materials. That's similar to what we just discussed. It makes sure that the school board's and LCPS's

[04:22:47] name is used in a manner that would comply with and comport with the mission of the school board and that if the partner that we enter an agreement into uses the school board's name and identifies as the school board or LCPS as a partner or co-sponsor, we'd wanna have the opportunity to review that publicity materials, again, to make sure that it passes muster for the school board.

[04:23:18] And then 102 and 101 to 103, that reads, a statement that the sponsor or partner assumes the responsibility for obtaining the consent of any student or school board employee whose likeness may appear in any materials disseminated by the partner or sponsor this is similar in vain to making sure that we protect the integrity of the school board and lcps but also ensures that proper consent for any kind of images that reflect lcps our school board employee or student that the proper consents are obtained

[04:23:56] before the other the partner uses that material in their promotional material i'm just trying to think when that would come up actually i'm just i'm just trying to go through my head but thank you um i might want to talk to you about this further but i was just trying to come up with a scenario in my head where this would come up yeah i'm happy to raise one just to clarify that here so um in past years we have the amazon think big space right and um simpson middle school i believe it is and so um in their promotional material for amazon they may mention you know with the school board, they have a partnership

[04:24:35] with the school board, they may take pictures of that space, the think big space there, that might have employees or students, and these requirements make sure that all the proper consents have, that LCPS, the school board has reviewed those materials before they're released to make sure, again, someone's image isn't being used without their consent.

[04:25:03] - Thank you very much, Wes. Mr. Allen, really quickly for this, or whoever, I don't know who it would be. The clean copy doesn't look so clean. There's some, looking at like page, line 86, there's like lines and things like that.

[04:25:22] So maybe by the next time we might want to clean it up a little bit. So any other questions? Yes, Ms. Chandler. Thank you, Madam Chair. I guess my question is most likely for Mr. Allen. I am curious about how the number from 15,000 to 5,000 changed, if that's actually something that's in code, or how that number came to be contemplated.

[04:25:53] Thank you, Ms. Chandler. I believe Mr. Straffi may have comments there from the F&O Committee. I'm unaware that that's something that's been provided from that threshold has been decreased by code, but that may have come up in the F&O Committee.

[04:26:11] Are we still talking about the same, are we still in sponsorships and partnerships, or did we move to the next item? Okay, sorry. Thresholds. I will ask Ms. Willoughby to weigh in on that question.

[04:26:33] Thank you. Looking at the language, it looks like we attempted to expand the clarification, whereas before the $15,000 was, looks like it was more related to the division as a whole, and it was cumulative in value per year, and by breaking it out, I think it's just providing additional clarification. I can reach out to our procurement director and have a more precise answer if there's anything else beyond that in advance of the next school board meeting.

[04:27:10] Thank you, Ms. Willoughby. This really is not something that I've yet contemplated very deeply, but it's more of a wonder, and so in thinking about some of the projects and some of the things that we're hearing the community express a desire to move more quickly on, I wondered if this might be a way to provide services more effectively.

[04:27:36] And so obviously you can't have an inclusive playground for $5,000. But I was just curious if this might be something that has been contemplated in the past. And really the Amazon Think Big Space was the genesis of my wonder.

[04:27:56] and it's hard to imagine that that space came to be for five thousand dollars as well so i'm just i would love to know where that number comes from thank you any other questions um i'm assuming we're not taking this to consent since there's other questions and some thoughts so we will move on to information item 13.04 i think yes finance and operations committee revision

[04:28:30] of policy 4320 methods of procurement from vice chair astreffi he's also chair of the finance and operations committee thank you madam chair another revised policy 4320 methods of procurement and you'll board members you'll see in this in these updates revised dollar amount thresholds that now align with the updates from the commonwealth of virginia limits that's the most substantive change, but I'm happy to entertain any questions or pass the baton to Ms. Willoughby.

[04:29:04] Board members, you have any questions? No? Is this one that we could take to consent for the next? Yes? Okay. We can go ahead and put this on consent for the next November 26th school board meeting.

[04:29:24] We'll move on to 13.05, Human Resources and Talent Development Committee, Provisions to Policies 73-22, Records Required of Commercial Driver's License Holders, presented by Dena Griffiths, who's the chair of HRTD.

[04:29:42] Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, I'll have Ms. Bolin come and speak to this as far as any requirements that are now required for the alcohol testing and the commercial driver's license.

[04:29:57] So if you want to speak to it, I'd really appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Griffiths. A revision to school board policy 7322 records required of school bus drivers is being brought before the board this evening as an information item.

[04:30:13] The revisions recommended to this policy do not change the intent of the policy, but rather focus on adding clarifying language and references as required by code. Specifically, a title change to the policy to records required of commercial drivers licensed CDL holders was done to ensure the policy applies to all CDL holders, not just bus drivers.

[04:30:41] To specify the requirements, the opening was struck as those items are covered in sections throughout the policy. Additionally, for each employee group, we are proposing a section for each, so one for school bus drivers and a section for CDL holders, as some requirements vary by group, as well as creating two sections that clearly outline the requirements of applicants versus employees and what records are required for each staff population.

[04:31:17] Section A1 would then focus on requirements for school bus drivers who are already employed. And Section A2 focuses on the school bus applicants who are attempting to be hired by LCPS. Similarly, Section B, a new section with a new title, has been proposed to highlight records that are required of all staff who are CDL holders, not just bus drivers.

[04:31:43] and section B1 would cover current employees and section B2 would cover applicants that is the gist of it most of this is state federal or policy requirements and I'm available for any questions I just wanted to add that it's pretty straightforward for my colleagues thank you thank you um Ms. Griffith um Ms. Boland so the code of Virginia asked that we furnish to that the applicant furnish two moral character statements yes ma'am that is specific to bus drivers that's

[04:32:22] fascinating okay any other questions no do people want to put this on consent for the next school meeting miss chandler yeah okay we'll go ahead and put this on consent for the next school board meeting thank you that would be november 26th okay and again 13.06 human resources and talent Development Committee revisions to policy 7324 drug and alcohol testing for employees required to hold a commercial driver's license it will be presented by Mrs. Dina Griffiths chair of human

[04:33:00] resources and talent development committee again we have a straightforward policy coming out of HRTD the HRTD committee Ms. Bolin if you could speak to it I'd appreciate it thank you yes ma'am thank Thank you, Mrs. Griffiths.

[04:33:27] So, like the previous policy, the revisions recommended do not change the intent of the policy, and again, focus on adding clarifying language and references as required by code. Specifically, in Section B, it was updated to clarify when staff are utilizing their commercial driver's license and/or working in a safety-sensitive position, that they are subject to possible disciplinary action for certain violations.

[04:33:58] Section B2 was updated to clarify the process if or when a staff member tests positive for a controlled substance, including verbiage that lists the substance abuse professional information and clearly outlines the results.

[04:34:15] Section B3 and B4 were updated to include verbiage regarding the process of referring the employees to a substance abuse program which again is in code section c3a was also updated to include federal motor carrier safety administration current practices of notifying employers of a concern within 12 months of in pre pre-employment or annual search we did also include a cross reference to regulation 7324 and all other changes within the policy were grammatical and formatting

[04:34:51] changes thank you miss boland board members do you have any questions no would uh would the board like to entertain for this to go on to consent for the next school board meeting uh november 26th yes and we will put that on for consent for the next school board meeting on november 26th

[04:35:18] Okay, so we will be moving on to 13.07, Student Behavior and Accountability Committee, Revision of Policy 8230, Procedures for Student Disciplinary Appeals to the School Board, presented by Ms. Carrie LaBelle, Chair of the Student Behavior and Accountability Committee.

[04:35:35] Thank you, Madam Chair. At this point in time, I would like to withdraw this particular revision from discussion and information and return it back to our committee. This is a policy that we did not receive recommendations from two of our committees that needed to revise it.

[04:36:01] they came in late. And when I looked over those revisions, what I noticed is that a lot of the revisions from both those committees coincided and a lot of it had questions or wanted recommendations and it seemed to me it was because they didn't know what we do in closed committee. And I think that's why they asked for a lot of these changes. So I think that we as a committee need to go back, look at their requests and make the edits that they've asked for and then possibly at some other

[04:36:40] point in time let them know how this particular the student appeals process works so that it is more transparent. That is one of the reasons I would like to send it back to committee if the board will agree. So since this is coming from the chair of the committee we can want to I would like to take a thumbs up to take it back to committee looks like that's unanimous so we will

[04:37:12] take item policy 8230 back to the student behavior and accountability committee okay and we will be moving on to 13.08 from the student behavior and accountability committee revision of policy 8650 student technology acceptable responsibility use again presented by mrs. Carrie LaBelle chair of of Student Behavior and Accountability Committee.

[04:37:42] - Thank you, Madam Chair. We met and discussed this policy because we needed it separated from our new policy, which is 8655 personal devices.

[04:37:58] And this just talks about student appropriate use. Mr. Smith, would you like to say something? You made a marvelously short, concise presentation at our last meeting, so I will turn it over to you.

[04:38:13] - Well, thank you, no pressure. So there's really two changes in this policy. The first is removing the BYOT or bring your own technology language. As we have policy 8655, which governs student personal device usage, which would where this language should exist.

[04:38:30] And we did add a cross reference to that policy. And the second change was just adding some language around students being responsible and ethical with how they use the system, which include our network, our services, which includes that they don't use any device or application or method that violates the guidelines, tests, manipulates or bypasses any of our security measures that we have in place.

[04:38:51] So those are the two substantive changes and happy to take any questions. - Thank you, Mr. Smith. I think you knew I was gonna have a question about the bring your own technology. On the presentation, it showed that there were students who did not choose to use Chromebooks.

[04:39:14] And I'm wondering, if they choose not to use Chromebooks, then what is protecting them from using their own devices in schools? And I also say this as a part of assistive technology too, because we don't normally give out like iPads.

[04:39:33] And one of the things that I know as a mother of a child with dyslexia is that iPads are one of the best accessibility assistive technology for kids because they can write on it take a picture of it and a Chromebook is is a little bit more clunky there's a lot of better features so I have a I'm wondering about that so thank you for the question we actually do have a pretty substantial iPad repository and deployment we actually partner with our friends and student services and their assistive technology team where that's a code deployment where it's managed so the

[04:40:11] iPads are managed and inventory but they how they're used for the assistive technology so we have a whole solution suite there that we can kind of brief you on what that looks like and then as far as I'm sorry what was the other question that you had oh the take rate so our we have a 99.3% take rate for Chromebooks which is about 500 or 600 students that do that choose not to take an LCPS device now we still make those available they have to be available for things like SOL testing and those type of things but there's nothing in this policy or the other policy that would restrict them from using that device

[04:40:44] So I do think policy 8655 probably needs some clarification around that, and I think that that's where any language that we want to do around bring your own technology should be embedded potentially into that policy. Okay, if you wouldn't mind talking with me later about this kind of thing so I can be a little bit more educated, that would be helpful.

[04:41:10] Thank you. Any other questions from anyone? Okay, because I still have questions. I don't want to, I'm not going to put this on consent because I'd be taking it off probably. So we'll be moving on.

[04:41:27] Thank you, Mr. Smith. To 13.09, Student Services Committee Revised Policy 8155 School Assignment, presented by Ms. Ann Donahue, the Chair of the Student Services Committee.

[04:41:44] Thank you, Madam Chair. So this evening we are presenting to the board recommendations for proposed revisions to policy 8155 school assignment, which is more colloquially known as special permission. By a very short way of background, this policy was not up for review.

[04:42:06] I asked the student services staff to tackle revisions because when I was a candidate and also after I joined this board, I received a number of comments from parents and concerned constituents about the special permission policy, which I found strange and confusing having come from a district where we don't do this.

[04:42:32] So I asked staff to take a look at this, and I'm very proud of the work of our committee. We put in a lot of work at both regular committee meetings, and we had two work sessions on this topic. We had feedback from school-based LCPS employees in addition to our regular public comment opportunities and collected a lot of input and ideas about how to improve the special permission process.

[04:43:06] So I'm really proud of the work that we've done on these proposals. And I want to say at the outset a note about timing, because this was on as an action item in Student Services Committee last Thursday, November 7th, but for reasons that will become clear to you as Ms. Richardson and Mr. Dolson present the specifics about these proposals, I did move to suspend the rules, and our committee voted to go ahead and send this policy to the

[04:43:41] board for its for its review because of the compressed timing of my having made that that choice it's been posted for public feedback we don't have any yet I believe we will before this policy proposal comes before this board again whether that's at our November 26th board meeting or the or the one we have in December we will have public feedback at that point however Because of the compressed timing, I have put the advisory committees in a difficult spot

[04:44:19] because many of them, possibly all of them, will not be in a position to consider the specific redline proposals and vote on recommendations for the board to consider before we are faced with voting on, could be faced with voting on the revisions.

[04:44:39] I did not take that lightly when I was contemplating how to move this policy forward, and that aspect of where we are does not sit well with me, and I am going to strongly encourage individual members of advisory committees to reach out to me, to post public feedback on the policies, um i regret that it is working out with this way in this timing and so i just wanted to say that

[04:45:15] with that ms richardson and mr dolson hold on before we continue on um i'm wondering uh first of all i just want to clarify that this is more than special permission right um and that um it's broader it's school assignment which is a little broader so it's not just special permission The other thing is I'm wondering, before we start, if there is space for SEAC or for some

[04:45:46] comments to be made and then vote by the December 10th, or is there such a huge time limit that we have to vote on it by November 26th? Thank you for that question, Chair Mansfield. Should it be the will of the board to not move this or take action on it on our scheduled November 26th meeting. I do believe that we have a SEAC meeting prior to our December 10th meeting. And so that

[04:46:23] would afford, at least to my knowledge, SEAC the opportunity to review the policy revisions and to give us feedback as a committee. I'm happy to follow up with SEAC leadership to confirm that.

[04:46:39] How much of a problem will it be? Because I know we're putting things in on the back end, right? And I want to be clear that I don't want to stop this process, but I do want to get some feedback from them. Sure. Mr. Dolson and I have had the opportunity to consult with Mr. Smith, And DDI is ready to roll if it is pushed out to December 10th.

[04:47:06] Thank you so much. You're welcome. So good evening, Chair Mansfield, Vice Chair Israfi, Dr. Spence, board members. I'm happy to sit here with you this evening and to just give you a high-level profile of some of the proposed revisions that we have been working on for Policy 8155.

[04:47:26] Next slide. And next slide. So the highlights of the proposed revisions, in the very beginning of our new policy 8155, we have added definitions in Section A, lines 10 through 42, of the following.

[04:47:45] What an over-enrolled school is, and then enumerated overall capacity, what that means for elementary schools, which is by grade level, what that means for secondary schools, which is by building. We've also informed the public about what it means to apply for special permission and then what it means to renew for special permission.

[04:48:08] One of the major proposed changes we are suggesting is that we change capacity from 95% to 90% for elementary grade levels and for secondary schools. Next slide. We have also removed the opportunity to apply for special permission to a projected over-enrolled school.

[04:48:34] We have changed the phrase regional assignment to school reassignment for clarity. We have adjusted the dates throughout this proposed policy to reflect option one, which is January through April for LCPS employees and February through April for LCPS families.

[04:48:57] We have clarified that relieving overcrowding and returning to a regular school of assignment is only applicable if it provided that overcrowding has been resolved. We have added language to lines 164 through 168 to clarify that an approval in middle school grades does not guarantee approval to attend the feeder high schools.

[04:49:25] Next slide, please. At the point of our discussion last Thursday, VHSL language was still being discussed by the Student Services Committee. We removed the term, the phrase I should say, school-based when referring to employees' provision of applying early in order to include all LCPS employees that provision.

[04:49:51] We also made provision for all school principals to allow children of LCPS employees to attend their respective schools. We removed lines 299 through 312 to reflect an end date of April 30th, and we added the phrase written confirmation and removed a letter of to clarify that emails may be accepted amongst principal communication.

[04:50:20] Next slide, please. And with that, I will take any questions and feedback. Board members, do you have any questions? Yes, Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you, Madam Chair. Yeah, we've gone back and forth a little bit, and I appreciate this presentation.

[04:50:40] But just to clarify for me, you know, I had a situation where somebody just moved here and the transportation, she was ready to sign a waiver to bring her child to a different school that would feed into a middle school.

[04:50:57] So are you saying now that if that situation were to happen again, they might be able to do that? Or are we going to be doing waivers? So we would be working with transportation specifically to ensure that routes were considered prior to.

[04:51:15] Currently, the region in LCPS, we have six regions. And so those regions don't necessarily, they may include more than one cluster. And to reference your specific situation, that is exactly what occurred. So we are working with the Transportation Office, if this goes through, to really ensure that that does not occur again.

[04:51:40] I think also, Mrs. Griffiths, that we are looking to do it to 90% as opposed to 95%. And I think that we're hoping to increase some of the seats there. Yes, ma'am. Go ahead.

[04:51:57] Thank you, Madam Chair. Per Ms. Donahue's amendment, I just want to get clarification on that. As far as, you know, we know in general with VHSL, can I get back to the VHSL? I hope you don't mind. You know, it's very hard to distinguish when somebody transfers to another school what the issue might be.

[04:52:19] So basically, the language that Ms. Donahue had provided, such waiver shall not be granted if the request is motivated by desire to circumvent the transfer rule and achieve a specific activity or athletic outcome among the VHL restrictions.

[04:52:39] Similar language can be found in the criteria for VHSL rules and appeals document. many it's so hard to distinguish why somebody would uh go to a different school and then want to be in that sport um can you just clarify your your statement for me um or your amendment that you wanted to as far as hardship is concerned madam chair yeah i'm sorry yes sorry miss donnie

[04:53:13] i'm sorry thank you uh and thank you for that question mrs griffiths um so we the staff had proposed some language to kind of address the VHSL wrinkle and we had we went back and forth about that language in the committee we're not entirely satisfied with it and so I in conjunction with the advice of some staff folks prepared an amendment and a proposed amendment which is on board docs and which I shared with my fellow board members prior to today to try and tackle

[04:53:51] that that wrinkle so my motivation was to make sure parents understand if they apply for special permission if we grant special permission that does that's not the end for them if they want to play sports that they the vhsl eligibility issues are separate from our school assignment policy um and that to me that was really the purpose of adding this language is to to make it very clear

[04:54:27] in writing uh to parents that if they obtain special permission under this policy uh to for their child to go to a school that is not the school that they're zoned for um it is very likely that they will be ineligible for a period of time for uh for sports and other vhsl activities unless they meet one of the exceptions or obtain a waiver under VHSL.

[04:54:53] So I tried to just import the VHSL's own language. And I stayed away from the specific undue hardship language because that's not the only basis on which VHSL potentially would grant a waiver, at least according to their own materials.

[04:55:13] They have multiple bases that could be grounds for a waiver. Yes, Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you, Ms. Donahue, and the committee for your work on this. I think it's really an important policy that we reevaluate after going through a full cycle of special permissions now ourselves.

[04:55:34] I definitely learned a lot and was glad to see that it was being addressed in such a careful and serious way because we know that this impacts a lot. But I will say I largely support Ms. Donahue's amendment in bringing that language into our own policy because I do think that that is a confusion for a lot of parents that they think that VHSL rules are different and our special permission process, the way it is now, to me, puts us in a difficult situation with a lot of the VHSL waivers and a unique situation to other districts.

[04:56:10] So I largely support it. The only thing I would maybe encourage, and we did see this throughout the process, is some increased clarity about what parents can submit in terms of documentation. And whether that has to do with undue hardship or the other things listed out by VHSL, I think it would do us well to make sure that our parents understand from the onset what the documentation is required.

[04:56:36] There seem to be times where parents seemed unsure that they could submit documentation or not and what that was and what was required so maybe some work on that end could be done and I know this is going to be I think an ongoing conversation from my understanding more the changes right now are related to the 90% and the timeline and I largely support both of those changes especially after hearing from school-based professionals in that area so I just would like for us as much as possible if we can be clear and transparent about what the process is and how that relates to VHSL I think that that would benefit our families and the school

[04:57:15] board yes miss Donahue thank you madam chair and thank you miss Chernoff for your for your comments the my understanding if I remember correctly I believe VHSL requires documentation if a family applies for a waiver is that I have that right and we could certainly add that into my amendment or elsewhere in the policy to emphasize to parents that they will have to provide documentation for VHSL, if not for us.

[04:57:48] Because currently we don't require documentation. And to address Mr. Knopf's comment about this being an ongoing conversation, we had discussed in committee the possibility of reviewing this policy again next year, spring, summer, fall at some point next year to review how the changes that we are recommending if they are approved by this board how they have played out if they have provided some benefit to the division and consider whether additional changes

[04:58:23] might be appropriate and to that end we had I had thought we might be able to to incorporate advisory committee feedback when we review again next year if we're not able to do it between now and the end of this calendar year.

[04:58:48] Thank you. I think as far as feedback, I know MSAC has a meeting November 20th. LEAF has their meeting November 18th, equity December 5th, and I think SEAC on December 4th. So maybe they would be able to do it by December 10th.

[04:59:08] Vice Chair Straffi. Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to echo the sentiments of other board members as well, that I very much appreciate the work that has gone into this policy and the amount of clarity this brings to not just us, but also the parents who are going through this process.

[04:59:25] And I also agree with the wording that is in Ms. Donahue's amendment. I think it brings the conversation around, It adds more transparency to the fact that there are VHSL rules in play, and it just, for anyone reading that policy, it's really important to be able to reference back to those.

[04:59:49] And so I do, by and large, I agree with the wording that's in that amendment. I am super happy about the changes in the policy related to that commitment to reduce overcrowding, specifically related to special permissioning, and specifically allowing families to see the insights.

[05:00:10] If a school is projected to be over capacity, to have them immediately be able to apply to a different school or look at capacity in other schools and just make that decision for their families as early as possible and reduce all of those cascading frustrations that we see in some of those hearings.

[05:00:30] So I'm very happy about this. I know that this will be an iterative process, and to get this through, get these changes through, we'll have to kind of accept this iteration of this policy, and I know it's gonna be a work in progress related to VHSL and that whole process, but I'm pretty excited about this.

[05:00:53] I look forward to other committees and public comment weighing in, because it is a big change. So, yeah, thank you very much. - Yes, Ms. Chandler. - Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you both, and thank you to the committee for making these edits.

[05:01:11] I will say I am also very pleased with how this came together in committee, and I wanna thank you for your hard work. I know there were lots of special meetings and lots of principals provided feedback. I think what delights me the most is changing the timeline because over the course of this year, I've heard from many school-based staff how challenging it is to find space when everything is done.

[05:01:39] And I truly hope that this timeline change will make it more manageable for our school counselors who manage schedules and our principals to make sure that we're doing everything in a timely manner. I also am very grateful that we're taking into account capacity.

[05:01:58] And I know it might feel like a hardship to families to hear 90, but I don't think that everyone is fully aware of the impact on the entire school when, especially at the high school level, when a school is bursting at the seams.

[05:02:16] If you're really at that 98 to 100% capacity, I'm aware of a school in my district that has a very high level of capacity. And at the beginning of the school year, I heard from lots of families that their seniors weren't allowed to do all of these electives that they had planned for over the course of their four-year career.

[05:02:37] And it's just because honestly, when a school is over full, there's no classroom space. So I think this revision of our policy really has done a good job in addressing the school-based hardships without necessarily taking this off the table for families.

[05:02:55] So thank you for that. And I'll look forward to our continued conversation. - I will also say for me, the biggest part was, And it's on the red line 129 through 133.

[05:03:10] That was a big part for me for special education. Sufficient capacity must exist to the requested school for the student to attend on special permission without causing or exacerbating overcrowding. A school reassignment without requiring additional staff or incurring additional cost to the school system.

[05:03:27] My hope is with the increased timeline that we will be able to accommodate with our, you know, flexible staffing or additional staff, and then we don't have to be subject to this and keep on denying them, because that was hard for me.

[05:03:46] The other thing is for VHSL. I mean, it says in their handbook that due to Virginia law stating the powers of local school boards as to internal decisions, all individual eligibility appeals of this exception lie exclusively with the local school board.

[05:04:03] And I think that if we're going to have a special permission, then we need to figure it out. So I think that we might be continuing to look at the VHSL part a little, maybe a little earlier, but do the rest of it.

[05:04:23] Like, you know, I think we're going to be continuing to look at that later, I'm thinking. Okay, Dr. Rasheed, did you have something? Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that it's pointed out that MSAC would want to weigh in also. I know that I have to, I would have to speak to Chair Kunkel, but it's a little of a, it's a little tight, but I just wanted to make sure that they're heard also.

[05:04:43] Any other questions, concerns? So, school board, can I get a thumbs up for taking it, for waiting until December 10th?

[05:05:03] Or Ms. Chernoff, you'd like to say something? Can we clarify that this can still roll out on 1-1, new year, if 1-7, sorry, forgot we're not here on the new year um with a december 10th pushback i just want to get confirmation because i don't want to get in a situation where we can't roll it out and it's a deal breaker thank you mrs chernoff for seeking that clarity again um again mr dolson and i have spoken to mr smith his ddi team is aware that this might have been something that the board would contemplate this

[05:05:38] evening and so they feel comfortable and confident that we can support the changes that are required on the back end in collaboration with Mr. Dolson's team for the first business day of January for things to go live. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other clarity or anything? What do you guys feel about December 10th? Thumbs up? Yeah, okay, December 10th. Okay, so it's, we'll bring it back on December 10th for a vote, and thank you, Mr. Smith, for your team and everybody to be

[05:06:17] accommodating. I appreciate that. Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr. Dolson, for an amazing amount of work oh my goodness and really being thoughtful and checking everything out allowing principals to come in and give their input to you during office hours and miss richardson as always thank you for listening and for um taking this on because i know when we first started this there was we didn't nobody really wanted to take this on and chair donahue was like yeah we're gonna do it and so we did it and i i think it's going to be a

[05:06:55] good thing so thank you okay here we go uh item 1310 department of support services transportation

[05:07:13] update bell time studies presented by mr kevin lewis our chief operations officer good evening again board members mr davies and i are here to share with you the information tonight and while While I get set up to do that, I am going to ask him to introduce our guests who are with us tonight to help us put this information together.

[05:07:50] Good evening. First, I'd like to introduce members of my team, Ms. Kathleen Guarini and Suzanne Menserup, who oversee our routing for all of our bus stuff, plus Gary Gerhardt from HRTD, who we work very closely with, Dave Blalock from Razzie, and then our vendors from TransFinder, Patrick Quirk and Danielle Roberts, who conducted this study.

[05:08:13] and done all the heavy lifting and from Grove Slade Adam from Grove Slade that helped us with some of the second load information all right so we're going to get started and we'll take you through some slides and we'll plenty of time for questions I'm sure you may have questions but so on the first slide we're going to talk about what we're going to talk about tonight and so as you know this is an overall transportation update we're going to talk about recruitment and retention efforts we're going to talk about the community survey about our bell times study we have some a great deal of information about the bell time study and the scenarios we

[05:08:52] put together and we also want to talk about transportation for special programs and then recommendations moving forward so i did want to share that we give the school board these updates every week about the bus driver shortage and we continue to have a shortage and have for a number of years last year i think is the only year we ever finished the year with a full roster this number shows at the bottom of that page that we were 24 drivers short i think today's number was 26 so i'll just share that as an indication that that number has the potential to change

[05:09:27] every single day as people come and go people leave the county but we add people in there we also give you a report each week it shows you how many people are in the training process and so we are constantly running a training system through the transportation department to try to bring new drivers on board as quickly as possible as far as recruitment efforts so I'll just share that we have done a great deal of work and you have done a great deal of work and you and previous boards to bring us to the point where we are the highest paid starting wage for drivers and you see the comparison over the other drivers of the other counties we also have a higher bonus

[05:10:07] process and you see over on the bottom left that we have to date this year year to date, $29,500 worth of bonuses paid out for the sign-on and referrals for another 5,000. So we're constantly working towards helping our drivers recruit our next set of drivers. So I did want to talk a little bit about the challenge of hiring a driver. So what we've done is we've collected some data here, and you'll see from October of 2023 to September of 2024, a 12-month

[05:10:44] period, we had 464 applicants for folks that showed an interest in being bus drivers. Of that group, only 198 of them, less than half of them, actually made it through to have an offer to begin the training process. And the reason for some of that gap is we have sometimes there are communications skills, sometimes there is just an awareness that they really don't want to be a bus driver. We heard earlier in a policy they have to provide two letters of reference, and sometimes We just don't get all that information, and folks that begin the process don't ever finish the process.

[05:11:21] Over the last couple of years, we've had this ongoing and fantastic program with HRTD, where they have what we call a one-stop shop, where they bring folks in to our recruiting events to make sure that there are people there to help folks run through that system. And those that may have trouble navigating the application process, help them through that to get as many people through so we can get them cleared and ready to go through a training process.

[05:11:49] So you see there that 138 of them were cleared by HR to go into the training process. 126 of those actually started the class. 92 drivers actually finished, so 92 of 126.

[05:12:04] This is not an easy thing to do. Driving a bus is a very complicated position. It's got a $200,000 to $300,000 piece of equipment to be responsible for, 50 to 60 very well-behaved students on every bus.

[05:12:21] And so it is a challenging job to be able to do that. And so some folks, just as they get through that process, realize that it's not the job for them. So we ended up, in that period of time, we had 86 new drivers take a contract.

[05:12:37] But during that same period of time, our attrition rate, which is this, the actual data was 68 during that period, but that's also a fairly average number of folks that either retire or move on to other careers. And so a net game of 18.

[05:12:54] So all that information to show how challenging it is and what an effort it is to continue to bring drivers on. And I think as you're paying attention to the region, we're probably doing better than most, but it's still a challenge for us. And so I'll just leave that number with you that we're 24 to 26 drivers short right now.

[05:13:14] So the other things we're going to talk about tonight will affect that. The other thing I want to show on the slide is on the right-hand side you'll see just a little graph that shows how long it takes. So it's a two-month process to go through the training and get out on the other side and be able to drive a bus.

[05:13:30] So it's not something that happens quickly. It's not something that you can just jump into and do. It really requires some significant training and skills gaining to be able to drive the bus and take care of our students. So in an effort to try to continue to improve our recruitment and retention efforts, we looked at all kinds of things.

[05:13:52] And so many of these things aren't going to be viable and we won't bring to the board as future things. But I just wanted to share that we just didn't want to leave any stone unturned and try to figure out what things could we do. So we looked at changing the hours. We looked at equalized pay.

[05:14:08] Essentially that is right now drivers get paid over the full 12-month period when they really only work nine months. And so some drivers would opt to do pay, you know, just get all their pay during a nine-month period because many have other jobs in the summer. That is not possible right now with our current system, but we may be able to do that in the future.

[05:14:27] So things we're looking at, increasing the sign-on bonus, adding additional attendance, changing 11-month, 10-month driver, nine month driver contracts to 10 11 months to cover summer school right now they do that as extra time and so folks volunteer to run the summer times and then we are looking to create a ranger position between the lead driver and the drivers themselves to help think I've probably described this group before if a bus straight breaks down or has an accident even it's a fender bender even if there's no one hurt there's a group of folks that travel the county lead

[05:15:04] drivers and area coordinators that come to the scene help manage the students get them off the bus, get them on to a new bus, pick up a spare bus and go out there. And so this position would help with that and make sure that any things that happen during that route have as little impact on the students as possible.

[05:15:21] So that is something that we're looking at. It also creates more of a career ladder for folks as they progress through their careers. So switching now a little bit to the survey, we want to find out how happy folks are with our current bell schedule.

[05:15:40] So we sent out a survey, and we have, you see here where we had 89,000 families, 15,000 staff members with a response rate of 16 and 36 percent, respectively. Dr. Blake Locke from Rousey is here with us, tells us that's a pretty good number response, so we're happy with that.

[05:15:59] And then so we went through that to try to figure out where we have opportunities to consider making changes and where we should stay the way we are. So as we start to go through that, one of the questions I got from somebody at some point in time is, well, what kind of efforts did you make sure that people saw the survey and were able to do that?

[05:16:19] So you have a list here we work with Ms. Allen and her group to try to put out and get as much awareness out there as possible. So I won't go through all those, but we just had a number of opportunities to make sure that people saw the survey and had the opportunity to make sure that we were aware of how they felt like the service was going.

[05:16:40] So, results of the survey. Here we are. There's a lot of information on here, and so I'll go through that as slowly as I can to make sure everyone understands. The questions were essentially, how dissatisfied or satisfied are you with the current bail times for the start of the school day?

[05:17:00] And you see there a combined number of all the respondents, 14,420 respondents. We had 38%, and you see the different colors at the bottom, very satisfied as a dark blue, satisfied as blue. And then we go to orange and dark orange, for lack of a better term, for dissatisfied and very dissatisfied.

[05:17:23] So for that combined group, 75% were either satisfied or very satisfied with the current bell schedule as it is right now. And then the next line down there, you see the 730, which we anticipated was a drop in popularity.

[05:17:39] And so 41% of those folks were satisfied or very satisfied. And then it jumps back up for 7.45, 8 o'clock. And as board members know, we've had the complaints we've had about our current bell schedule have been with the 7.30 start time.

[05:17:54] So that panned out from here. And then also just going toward the bottom, the middle and high schools, most folks are happy with that as well as the staff. 72% of staff were happy with the current bell times as they are set up.

[05:18:12] So the other thing we quizzed people in the survey was how happy are you with the current schedule of elementary first, middle, and then high school. We had a number of questions for that. You see that 57% of the folks were happy with the current order.

[05:18:30] And then we also, the next one down was 20% of the people were interested in the high school first, middle school, and then elementary school. being last. And then the rates of response went down from there with middle school starting first and then high school, then elementary and middle school. So those are the different things, plus 7% of folks didn't have a preference at all. So those are the results of the study. And so from that information, we reached out to the consultants that Mr. Davies just introduced and said, okay, what can we do? How can we stand up some scenarios to try to figure out exactly

[05:19:10] um what the best way forward is um i forgot one slide here we also talked about part of our recruiting in the survey we asked for folks anybody that would be interested in a part-time position you know if you have a job that you could possibly come when you come to work early and you you leave early maybe you could ride a bus or drive a bus in the afternoon or vice versa in the morning and so um we had 121 we were really pleased we had 21 people say that they were interested in driving a bus. The only challenge with that is, because of the nature of the survey, it was anonymous, so now we're putting together a, yeah, so we're putting together

[05:19:49] another campaign to go out and reach out to see if folks can re-engage with that and we can get some folks to drive buses for us. Okay, so here is our current bell schedule. As you know, we currently have three tiers for elementary. One starts at 7.30, one at 7.45, and one at 8 o'clock, Two for the middle school at 8.30 and 8.50, and then the academies in high school both start at 9.30.

[05:20:17] And so this survey, or this current bell schedule, was developed to solve a problem that we had completely unacceptable service in terms of our on-time ratio and our ability to serve students before we implemented this.

[05:20:34] And the reason for that, we had over 100, 115 to be exact, second loads. And so every single day, kids were late, hundreds of kids were late, hundreds of kids were being affected, and we needed to find a way that we could shore that up and have a better level of service to our students and to our staff who are at schools trying to manage these late buses coming in there.

[05:20:56] So this is the scenario that we developed, and I will say that we solved that problem. And then there are unintended consequences. As you know, we've had the conversation about the 7.30 start time. So this does reflect the 7.45 time. If you recall, when we first did it, it was 7.30 and 8 o'clock, and we moved 10 schools to 7.45.

[05:21:17] And that was a group that was also happy or satisfied or very satisfied as well. Those folks started at 7.45. So there is where we are today. And I want to just pause for a minute and talk a little bit more about second loads to make sure that I'm just saying a term that's not resonating what it means.

[05:21:39] This has, second load has a definite impact on our students and on our staff. When you think about it, a bus has to pick up students half a mile to a mile away from the school. They drive in. We don't open the doors until 20 minutes before the bell.

[05:21:54] So that bus can get there no sooner than 20 minutes before the bell. Kids get off. And so to be on time, we have to be 20 minutes before, no more than 20 minutes before, no less than five minutes before to be on time. So it gives us a 15-minute window for that bus to unload, get back out to another neighborhood, pick up another load of kids and get back to the school five minutes before the bell so that they have time to get breakfast, they have time to go to the locker, they have time to get ready to go to school.

[05:22:23] And so it's a real impact. This is another slide that just talks about it. The orange depicts the morning route, the blue in the afternoon. We're dropping off kids late every day. They're losing instructional time.

[05:22:38] They have a lost opportunity for breakfast, and essentially it causes stress in the day. So we had to get rid of as many of those second loads as we could, and that's how we ended up again where we are. Same thing happens in the afternoon. We're just late getting home, and so it's a real impact. The other thing I didn't mention is at the school level, staff members have to come in early to manage those students that get in there on the first run because they're not ready to go to their classes.

[05:23:03] And then another group of staff has to stay after school to manage those kids while that bus is taking the first load out and coming back and picking them up. So there is a significant amount of impact in a day's time. So we hired these consultants, and we took that work.

[05:23:23] Mr. Davey is in his staff as well, and we worked for months to try to figure out what are other scenarios that we can do, how can we go about trying to do that. So I don't want to minimize how much work is involved with here. This group of people actually routed every student that we have and produce routes and create entire routing systems to try to make sure we develop this and can make them work.

[05:23:44] We can't just guess at that, so there's a tremendous amount of work, hundreds of hours worth of work into each one of these scenarios. So the first one they came up with was, okay, we're going to go to all 745 and 8 o'clock start times for the elementary schools, and then the middle school stayed at two tiers as did the high schools.

[05:24:02] And so those are the start times you see there on the right side of the screen. If you look at the left side of the screen, the cost of that is 83 additional routes. So you might ask, how can we go that many more just to go back to the way it used to be? And that's because this scenario eliminates the second loads because we have to continue.

[05:24:22] It does us no good to go back to the problem we had before. We have to solve the second load. So there's results in driver salaries of $6.5 million annually, so every year, and $12.5 million in buses, additional bus purchases that would have to be done through the capital budget.

[05:24:43] And again, there's 83 drivers in addition to the 24 to 26 they already don't have. So saying that we would just implement this, this is the great way to do that, then we still don't have enough drivers to do that, and we're back to second loads again. So the next scenario, we went through one single start time at the elementary school, and that was at 7.50.

[05:25:04] And that really goes back to what it used to be. It was not 8 o'clock before. It was 7.50 for several years. But in this case, we kept two tiers for the middle school and the two tiers for the high school. The results of that on the left-hand side you see is 117 additional routes.

[05:25:22] And so that's $9.2 million in driver salaries and $17.5 million in capital expenses to buy those buses for those additional routes. The third scenario, and I will apologize to the whole group when I briefed you all, I just lost track of this.

[05:25:43] We did not present this before. It was not very popular on the survey, but board members asked for it. And so I think Ms. Chernoff and Ms. Donahoe for reminding me of that, and Mr. Davies reminded me that we already had the scenario done, so it was pretty easy to add the slide.

[05:26:00] So here is the scenario that we would take high school first, and then the middle schools and the elementary schools would be last. The results of that is 46 additional drivers, $3.6 million in salaries annually, and $6.9 million in buses.

[05:26:18] But I have to give a caveat that at this point in time, You see the note there, we have not accommodated athletics because right now, because high schools end at the end of the day, those drivers are now all available to go take athletic runs where if high schools ended in the middle of the day or in the middle of the runs, then some of the drivers that we would be taking athletics may be running middle school or elementary school runs.

[05:26:41] Not to say that it would be a complete wash with those, but something we have not put into this scenario now. So that's something else that would likely end up being a few more drivers and routes that we would have to do. So that's the third scenario.

[05:26:58] And then I want to switch now, because I'm sure there will be plenty of questions, and we'll go back. But I want to go through as much as this is possible. So we have, I want to talk about special programs. So switching gears to special programs. Right now, we use hub stops. So students are responsible to make their way to a hub stop, and that is for the programs you see there, the IB programs, the HAMSI programs, TJ, and the ROTC programs, all done on a hub stops.

[05:27:28] There is another method that we don't use very often, maybe not at all, with primary roads, so we'll skip really to residential stops, which essentially means we pick up students at their home. And so we do that now for the Academies of Loudoun, the Alternative School, the North Star School, and Robey.

[05:27:47] And so that is different. So those programs, Academies being one of them, is treated differently than the other programs. And we'll talk a little bit more about where we want to go with that here in a minute. What we're going to talk about on this slide.

[05:28:03] That's right. We eliminated the slide. That's right. So what we want to do is continue to do the hub stops for all those programs we mentioned. And those are, you see there, the model for elective countywide programs. Programs students go to voluntarily if you're placed at a program, that's a totally different thing.

[05:28:19] But what we plan to do for the fall of 2025 is move the academies to the Hub Stop program as well. And it's really not going to save us any drivers or buses. But what it is going to do is allow us to get those students to school in time.

[05:28:38] The academy starts at the same time as all the other high schools. So we can't get a student to their home high school, get on a shuttle, and get to the academies building across the county at the exact same time they have to be at the high school. So what we've done over time is there are some areas where they're close enough by that we can get there.

[05:28:57] In other areas of the county, we have academy students riding a middle school bus to a middle school and then being picked up there and then taken to there. So we get there in that half hour a little bit, half hour quicker. What we're proposing to do is we would do away with that. And I think there was some confusion in our briefings as well.

[05:29:15] So the students that are doing the middle school run now would no longer do that. So this would be a total hub thing just like all the others. And so students would be required to make their way to a hub, whether it's at an elementary school or at high school. I think we prefer the elementary schools for the hubs for the most part because they're in the communities.

[05:29:34] And so that would be a change we would do. And that's simply to improve that level of service as well. because I mentioned we are tardy getting students to the academies on a daily basis. And so Mr. Davies has a group of folks that are working on that, but it's a huge challenge given the location.

[05:29:53] We are fortunate that the academies is in the center of the county, but it's still a challenge to get folks there on time. So that's a proposal to change for the fall of 2025. So kind of a summary slide.

[05:30:10] We have, based on what we've heard from the surveys, from a staff perspective, we're recommending to stay with the current bill schedule as we have. But we put the options there, and we're happy to take feedback, any input, guidance the board would like to say about any of the three options that we talked about.

[05:30:34] And you see those there summarized with the cost that they are associated with those. And then I believe I'm going to leave that up there because I have a feeling that's where some of the questions are going to be. So that's the end of information, and my voice made it through, so I'm happy about that. And so we're happy to take any questions, comments, feedback, suggestions you may have.

[05:30:56] Thank you, Mr. Lewis. I have one question. So we do one, I think it's one mile, or is it 1.5 mile walk zone? So it's 1.0 for elementary and 1.2 for secondary.

[05:31:15] Was, did the consultants or anything look at, I know we can go up to two miles, right? I believe the Virginia code is 2.5 for compulsory education, compulsory transportation. So I'm wondering if the consultants ever looked at that.

[05:31:31] To expand the walkthrough? Sorry, yeah, they're laughing at me. I'm just wondering, I mean, okay, yeah, I'm an old person, and I walked very long to school, but we didn't have the same kind of problems.

[05:31:55] I mean, they just let us walk over four lane highways. We don't do that here, but I don't recommend that. But I'm just wondering if there was anything that we looked at for that in combination with this. So for this scenario, we did not ask for that.

[05:32:14] As I mentioned, it was quite a heavy lift to get the scenarios that we did, and to change the walk zone would be a pretty significant policy change. And I've been here a while, and those conversations are usually not easily done when changing the walk zone.

[05:32:30] So we did not ask the board or the consultants to look at that. Okay. Board members, I just want to let you know that it's almost 10 o'clock, and per our policy, I'm supposed to take a little time check if you guys want to keep on going.

[05:32:54] That is majority. Okay, we're going to keep on going. Any other questions? And do you have a question? Okay. Vice Chair Strafi. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Lewis, and the team for putting all of this together and presenting it to us in such a clear way.

[05:33:09] For me, well, before I get to the bell schedules, I just want to make a comment around bus driver recruitment and retention. I really love the idea. We've talked about this at length. Love the idea of this ranger position or any way that we can create kind of that ladder that you were talking about.

[05:33:31] And I know I keep pestering and asking about other retention strategies, and we've gone through this at length. But just seeing that, and I know folks when they leave, they leave for many different types of reasons. And we've talked about this, that there isn't one specific reason.

[05:33:49] It's all retirement or it's all something else. And those reasons vary. But if there's a way that we can do better in terms of retaining bus drivers, then we wouldn't have to worry as much around recruiting them, which I think maybe recruiting them is a lot harder, right, with the cycle and everything.

[05:34:10] So I just want to add that. That plays into the bell schedule discussion, right? for me, I don't know how we could consider, and I'm still thinking through this, but I don't know how we can consider any of the options if we can't recruit bus drivers. We're talking about 83 additional bus drivers for option one. It's not about the funding, really. It's how would we even recruit them, and so that's the biggest issue for me at the moment, so I'm going to keep asking you about retention. Anyway, thank you very much. Yeah, that was my only comment. Yes, Ms. Donahue.

[05:34:48] Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Thank you, Mr. Lewis, Mr. Davies, and members of your staff for doing all of this work and for answering our questions and for providing all of this information. As you alluded to earlier, Ms. Chernoff and I have been working on this issue since pretty much the beginning of the year because we both have had a number of constituents reach out.

[05:35:18] because of their concern of the negative impact of the early start times on their families and it's not that i want to upset the entire apple cart if that is not an overall good decision for the division but i really have wanted to make sure that we are doing our complete due diligence and gathering all of the information we can to see if there is a way to solve that problem for that group of families.

[05:35:46] I'm not, I have not been ready to say, sorry, elementary school families, you're gonna have to suck it up because we can't create a better solution for you yet. We might get there, I don't know.

[05:36:01] But that's why I have continued to ask the questions and ask for the information and ask for the proposals. And I am really grateful that you all have been, have been receptive to that. In particular, Mr. Davies, thank you for, I sent an email with a lot of questions over the weekend.

[05:36:20] Thank you for answering my questions. I had two specific thoughts and feedback. One is I had some communications from the community, and I applaud the outreach efforts to make sure that people were aware of the survey and to try and get them to take the survey. Notwithstanding that there were a lot of efforts, I did have some contact with people in the community who advised me that even though

[05:36:56] they're LCPS parents, they did not receive any emails about the survey, which was surprising. And I understand there's always a possibility maybe things go to people's junk mail, they don't see it, like these things happen, But also, I am aware that some parents asked some questions on social media because they had received links and were afraid to open them because they were concerned it might be spam or phishing.

[05:37:25] So they asked questions directed to LCPS on social media, you know, is this for real? And there was never any response. So I realized that's probably more of a not transportation-related issue, but I wanted to flag that feedback, you know, for future purposes.

[05:37:48] Thank you for putting option three out there. have been very interested in this information and I'm really grateful to see a proposal that has an alternative to elementary school starting first um and and not to be like now give me more things I I am curious if there had been any thought about looking at uh like a high school elementary school middle school setup and I ask that because um some of the questions that I asked over the weekend that you responded to Mr. Davies

[05:38:25] I asked about the number of students who ride the bus and the number of trips that are made broken out by those levels and I see from your responses that elementary school has the most ridership and has the most trips which makes sense and then middle school is next and high school has the least so that did make me wonder if it would be feasible to do that order of high school, elementary school, middle school, and what the results of a scenario like that would be,

[05:39:05] if it would be similar to the additional needs that we're seeing here for option three or better or worse. So we didn't actually do the routing and produce the scenario with the result, but we did put that in one of the surveys, and there was, I think you said high school, elementary, middle school, and we only had 4% of the respondents that said that that was something we're interested in, so we did not engage a consultant to do that.

[05:39:34] If I could ask one more follow-up, Madam Chair. Yes, and then Ms. Chandler. If we wanted to see information about a scenario like that, how long would that take?

[05:39:51] How much would that cost? We will ask our friends in the back and then take that as a question and answer that back for you. It's not a simple process, but it's something that can certainly be done.

[05:40:08] Thank you very much. Ms. Chandler. Thank you, Madam Chair. And thank you both for this presentation and for the effort to put together as much information and to capture a sense of what the community's thoughts are on this process.

[05:40:26] It's hard for me to say this. I cannot get past what Vice Chair Estreffi has said. Honestly, it's hard to imagine that we could fix this problem if we can't recruit the bus drivers. That said, I know there are many families in Algonquian District who are disappointed at this news tonight, and I know that they're listening, and I feel like it would be remiss on my part not to say.

[05:40:54] I think, unfortunately, what we might have done is taken the burden of the second loads and placed it on particular families and that is a hard scenario for me to accept but looking at all of the information I understand. I'm sure we'll continue to hear from these families. I think you know that they have shared with us a lot over the past several

[05:41:29] years how challenging this timeline is and you know I just feel like it would be remiss to to leave this conversation without saying that so thank you yes Ms. Chernoff and then Dr. Rashid and then Ms. Mark Corey thank you thank you Madam Chair I agree with a lot of what my colleagues have said I sort of took up this battle in the beginning of the year I brought it forward because the constituent I really like never thought this was going to be like the thing for me but here we

[05:42:08] are but it was it was the people and and you know I'm really I do I say a lot like we want to make data-driven decisions and data isn't always just about numbers it's also when I look at those numbers and I see how many are very dissatisfied and I know I've been at those bus stops when it's dark with those little little kids and so there's a lot of layers here and when I look at these options and i think about what mr astreffy said i agree so i i'm really torn because i don't feel

[05:42:42] like i'm quite where miss chandler is in totally like accepting that this is the end of the road so as i consider the options i understand the weight that this would put on an already fragile system where we are we're really in the balance here with needing bus drivers and needing to retain and recruit them. And so maybe this isn't a next year thing. I think I could get to that point. But I do, there is one option on the table, and I do thank you for putting it out there this morning and being responsive, that does eliminate early start times for elementary school students,

[05:43:20] which in my opinion, when I think about making sure that I'm considering academic outcomes and safety and maintaining a quality education for our youngest learners I still think that that is a concern and I'm still in that place and I know that there are significant costs tied to these solutions we've discussed and it does continue to highlight the issues of the bus shortage and this is an absolutely an area that I think this board is committed to prioritizing and

[05:43:50] working with you and figuring that out but given that I do want to open up a dialogue about potentially looking at option three down the road and I'm not one to want to raise a flag or alarm families and put it out there you know to create a storm around this happening and I'm not saying that but I do think it is something to consider I mean our comments tonight I have heard from other high schoolers as well, the benefits of maybe getting out early in terms of options for jobs

[05:44:27] and sports and different things like that. And I think about child care with high schoolers being home when elementary school, again, this is a far reaching, it would be a significant shift if we switched high school and elementary. And I don't take that lightly, but I just feel like we need more input on the community in a rar sense to see if there is even broader interest to continue to pursue this dialogue especially since only 20% who responded supported this option and again I'm going to go back to open feedback I think that having people

[05:45:02] be able to express openly how they would really feel about that change in a unique link or an open box is a little bit more informative than checking a box in a long line of survey questions and so I really would like to hear from people in a more meaningful way rather than them just checking the box through a survey. So to that end, I'm sort of asking my colleagues if that would be something, a next step that they might support, if they feel that option three would be something that we could consider in the future

[05:45:35] while we continue to prioritize making sure that we have bus drivers. Because I do see that as a problem and I could consider the cost. I think we, you know, in supporting the pay of our bus drivers and buying buses, if that could fix this for student outcomes and safety issues, but having that many bus drivers is just not feasible right now. So, that's kind of where I'm sitting with this. I really appreciate your work. I know you've taken this on, kind of telling us that this might be where we end up, and I really do appreciate the due diligence, and again, if it's the will of the

[05:46:12] board to take on option one, or to take on the option of just staying where we are, I will get there, and I can accept that, but I feel like one more step could be taken. Thank you, Ms. Chernoff, Ms. Corr, or with Dr. Rasheed. Oops, sorry, Dr. Rasheed. Are you sure, Chair Mansfield? Okay, thank you, Chair. Can I continue? Thank you, Chair. I agree with Ms. Chandler and Mr. Streffi that we need to have retention. I echo that. There's a no-brainer. All of these options and all that, there's just no

[05:46:49] point in discussing it without the retention and also recruitment and I you know just to piggyback off what Ms. Chernoff said in terms of opening a dialogue I'd also like to open up the dialogue with on slide on slide 18 if I may and I know it doesn't really help that much but I think we need to open the dialogue here from all school board members about the TJ buses I know it's only eight buses and I know it's not going to be a huge help to offset the

[05:47:23] numbers that was displayed in all the slides, but I mean, I know it ruffles feathers too. I understand parents want their kids to go to TJ. It's far away, but it's something that needs to be talked about because, you know, we have lots of opportunities here in Loudoun County.

[05:47:40] We have lots of, we have HAMSI, we have IB, we have AOL. I mean, it's just something that should not be ignored. And also, I didn't know what, and again, this could be a side conversation with mr lewis that um i don't know the cost of the eight buses like i don't know if if it depends on how far they drive i i i don't know i know once again it's not gonna cure any of these um any of these issues but it's something that needs to be talked about and just for one thing i know it says eight buses does can that increase or is that just part of all four years of being at tj all the

[05:48:18] students that go from Loudoun County that go to TJ. Is it all four years? I'm assuming it is. No, the eight buses is completely dependent on the number of students that are enrolled at TJ that sign up for transportation any given year. Last year, I think it was seven buses. So the enrollment grew this year. So we had to add an eight bus. So there is a potential to increase the buses based on enrollment. So again, I asked my school board members here to start, just think about it. I mean, I'm not saying let's be rash, but it needs to be talked about.

[05:48:49] thank you um hold i told uh miss miss cory that she could go and then i'll get dr deans and then um miss donahue thank you madam chair and thank you so much for the information that you presented tonight i kind of have like a comment plus a question within that um i think i definitely understand sort of the whole breast shortage like the driver shortage and sort of the weightage of that but i'm also kind of surprised because i feel like so many people in my school community specifically, I don't know if this is like county-wide, so many students have expressed sort of dislike for the current bell schedule and they don't want to be getting home at 5 p.m.,

[05:49:29] especially right now when it gets dark right away and then no one, not only do you not feel like studying, but also like athletic events, you know, any academic team, club meetings, all of those things get affected by that. So I'm kind of surprised that the survey shows, you know, only 20% of the people going for like the switched schedule.

[05:49:48] So I wanted to ask when the survey was sent out to staff and family, did that include students or was that just like the parents of the students? And I know that it's possible that maybe like that student survey might just end up, you know, portraying the same results as the current survey.

[05:50:08] But I think it might be beneficial to send one out just for students to see and maybe just high school students just to see what their sort of comments are on their current schedule. I feel maybe elementary kids are too young for that and maybe middle school and high school secondary students would be more sort of at that level mentally to be able to you know actually give informative advice but what do you think about that? So I always appreciate the student voice. I believe that the survey went to families and not directly to students but Dr. Blakelock

[05:50:42] is here who managed that service for us so i asked him to confirm that is correct mr lewis the survey went to staff members and uh family parents guardians so we appreciate that insight and as we move forward i think that's something that we would really appreciate hearing from from students thank you and that's why we have student representatives on the school board so thank you very much ms core you can come anytime um dr deans here it says according to

[05:51:15] Johns Hopkins, teens need nine to nine and a half hours of sleep per night. That's an hour or so more than they needed at age 10. So are we basing our decisions on research or are we basing it on the will of the parents? And that's a rhetorical question that we may not have the answer to, but I think that we should consider the fact that teens may need more sleep than do the younger

[05:51:51] kids based on what I just read. And I've always had a discussion in schools about who needed the most sleep. And not that they get the nine and a half hours, but who would we make decisions based on research or based on the will of the parents? A rhetorical question. Okay. Ms. Corr, and then

[05:52:28] Ms. Corr and then Ms. LaBelle and then Ms. Donahue and then I'm going to have to bring it together I think. Thank you Madam Chair. So I know that was kind of a rhetorical question but I also think a lot about like in terms of like how much sleep we're getting. I honestly think that the sleep stays the same right like the amount of sleep regardless of start time is going to remain the same because right now if we're starting school at 9 30 in high school we get home at 5 and say we want to get eight hours of sleep we would work or do homework or whatever till midnight so if you go to bed at midnight wake up at 8:00 like for

[05:53:05] example my bus comes at 8:30 5:00 ish so then I wake up at 8:00 that's eight hours but then if I were to come home at 2:30 maybe 3:00 after the bus drops me off so if I were to come home at 3:00 and then you know if I'm waking up at say I don't know what time would the bus come 7:00 maybe so if the bus comes at 7:00 and I want to get eight hours of sleep then I would sleep at 11 p.m. so the net change I think remains the same and also I feel like high schoolers don't get the amount of sleep we should anyway that's just college board and AP classes and all of that but I think that the net amount of sleep that we're getting is

[05:53:45] gonna remain the same regardless of start time so I think maybe the focus isn't who's getting more sleep but I think the focus is more so like the younger kids I feel like it's my sister she's in second grade and she has to wake up at six o'clock because her bus comes at 6 45. So I feel like, and kindergarteners are five years old. So I feel like for high schoolers, it's so much easier to get up at that early time rather than five-year-olds having to get up at, you know, six o'clock. Ms. LaBelle. All I wanted to

[05:54:18] indicate was that we had another question down here and I wasn't sure you saw her arm, but I agree with her entirely. And I think back to when most of us were in school, we did not die because I mean, we're obviously still here because we had to get up early.

[05:54:39] And obviously, we walked five miles to school every way uphill in all kinds of weather. And we're still active. So I think that overall, teens need a certain amount of sleep.

[05:54:55] Well, then they can regulate the time they go to bed so they can get that amount of sleep and still get up and make it to school at whatever time school starts. Dr. Spence can you hold because I asked miss Donahue and then Dr. Spence. Thank you madam chair I I wanted to second the suggestions from Mr. and often Dr.

[05:55:20] Rashid of additional conversations that we need to be having around these issues and also applaud Ms. Gower for some excellent questions thoughts points very happy to have always happy to have the students here but particularly enjoying your participation and just wanted to add when I suggested earlier the possibility of a high school elementary school middle school start time for consideration part of my motivation for doing that was a concern that there may be childcare issues if we if we were to explore shifting could doing a complete inversion of the start time so that elementary school students aren't

[05:55:59] starting until 9:00 or 9:30 that may cause childcare issues for families in our community and that would be something that we would need to address that could offset you know some of the advantages that we would be looking at from changing around the bell schedule. Thank you. Dr. Spence. Thank you Madam Chair. I just wanted to weigh in just briefly and say we appreciate the robust conversation. I think it's a really good start for this dialogue but I don't want to or I would encourage I want to encourage as we proceed forward with this dialogue not

[05:56:37] dismissing a question that was raised, which is, you know, what is the science and the research also telling us, right? And I only mention that because in my experience with this conversation in other places, it has been the opposite conversation. It has been wrangling to try to move high schools later when they have, in fact, been earlier because of concerns that have been raised by, for example, the American Academy for Pediatrics, right, where they've talked about the need to have later start times for teens so i just want to make sure that we do as we move

[05:57:10] forward all talk at length and engage in this robust conversation um you know considering kind of all of the issues because there are a lot of issues here and the other thing i want to mention that has been looked at in terms of the presentation but not really discussed is as we head into the budget season and the budget conversation there are significant budget implications for these changes as well that that in my estimation are are at least as important if not more important than the availability of bus drivers right it isn't just whether or not they're available but can we afford what's in the budget and and that's a conversation that

[05:57:47] as you know my team and I are currently going through and trying to remove gigantic swaths of things that we think are important from the budget in order to accommodate what we anticipate will be available to us then we also need to be thinking about what else do want to add to the budget and and that will of course create trade-offs so there's just a lot there and i just want to remind us that those are all going to be part of the conversation thank you dr spence and my plug for the looking at the five-year boundary might also be a plug to

[05:58:22] look at walking attendance zones for middle and high school make them maybe making them a little bigger i don't know i mean i know mr lewis has just taken a big breath but i think that that's something to look into and and if it's feasible or not i mean that would be one way uh to look at decreasing but you know again that's in the future not right now not today but something to take note of when we're looking at possibly looking at that policy to investigate and that's

[05:59:00] not going to be tomorrow so i appreciate the conversation board members and i appreciate you and your team thank you very much for coming mr lewis what's what do you mean the next step there's no next steps this is just for information right that's my understanding this is just for information there's no next steps i think that's right um in terms of how it was put onto the agenda it was put on for information at the request of the board to bring you information about what the options could be,

[05:59:39] and so I think it would be incumbent upon the board at this point to make a decision about did you want to, and we can talk about this offline and just have a conversation about do you want to try to bring something forward on an agenda, a future agenda for taking a recommendation, making a recommendation, do you want to have this as a part of a budget dialogue, or do you want to, you know, recognizing the challenges and then perhaps the need for further dialogue and discussion, think about a way forward for that, and that may be something we can begin with with an offline conversation after this meeting and then figure out where to go from there.

[06:00:10] I will also say that having the student voice is pretty important, too. I did like that maybe a little part later to think about. Okay, so thank you very much. And we will move on to item 14, board member comment and committee reports.

[06:00:30] Everybody has three minutes. Ms. LaBelle. Yes, I got it on. I'm good. I haven't got Sumaira next to me to turn the buttons on for me anymore, so. We did in SBAC, Student Behavior and Accountability, have a lot going on.

[06:00:55] We went through a lot of the policy with a fine-tooth comb for the special permissions. And as I said, we're going to take it back. We're going to look at it. We're going to make some edits. The edits are because people, because we do our work in a closed session, nobody really knows the procedure we go through and so a lot of the things that we did see as suggestions was like well we do that but then it occurred to me they don't know that so we need to get a little more transparent and get that

[06:01:29] out the other thing that that we worked on was the the use of devices to make sure that they're compliant and so with those two up at our last meeting I'm I'm proud to announce that we had our best time ever.

[06:01:49] In fact, we finished that meeting so quickly that I did not believe what time it was when I looked at that clock. So I have to say thank you group, everybody who helped for that to make it efficient. I appreciate that and we will go back and make changes that we need to make, clarifications and so forth.

[06:02:09] Thank you. - Thank you, Ms. LaBelle. Dr. Rasheed. - Thank you, Chair. I attended earlier last week, I went to John Champ High School, where I attended a Diwali event by Heartland Community, it was great, it was joyous, it was fun, but on a serious note also, at this month's SPCC Committee Meeting, or Special Programs Committee Meeting, we received updates about some existing programs, we also got information about some upcoming initiatives.

[06:02:37] We received an update on the proposed Academy of Global and Linguistic Studies, which could become the next program to provide career pathways for in-demand leadership in business fields. The staff provided an overview of applicant admissions and enrollment data across LCPS special programs as well as LCPS outreach efforts to promote these programs. I'm just interested in how we can continue to increase diversity and access to students who will most benefit from these diverse pathways. LCPS school leadership staff presented a summary of annual report of the academic standing of Hillsboro Charter School and

[06:03:13] Middleburg Community Charter Schools. While these schools are in good academic standing, it's important for LCPS to watch for stagnant or downward trends for students with disabilities at both charter schools. Policy 5150 adult education is up for its five-year review and staff has suggested updates in language for clarity and alignment with programs currently offered um so looking for so look for your opportunity to provide feedback at the lcps website thanks thank you dr asheed ms shirnoff uh thank you madam chair last week we held our curriculum and instruction committee meeting we had one action item as well as three information

[06:03:53] items um as the chair of this committee i just wanted to say we're really hitting our stride i think it's exciting we're starting to develop some new policies and some different things and And I feel like we're really in a nice rhythm, and it was a very productive meeting. So I'm appreciative of my colleagues.

[06:04:09] We voted to send a revised red-line version of Policy 5130 on textbook adoption to the full board, which was updated to reflect LCPS policies as well as Virginia Code. We also integrated several suggestions from the advisory councils, and we're grateful for those.

[06:04:25] We had three very robust conversations on the information items. The first was a review of a recent curriculum audit. The review covered a curriculum audit conducted by Insight Education Group, which happened from August to October 2024, across seven K-12 content areas.

[06:04:41] The audit assessed curriculum materials, systems, and practices division-wide, gathering artifacts, and teacher feedback through surveys and focus groups. It also reviewed LCPS curriculum for alignment with its instructional framework. The audit highlighted several key issues. Teachers reported feeling overwhelmed by the volume of resources, making it difficult to prioritize at times.

[06:05:00] They also requested more time to collaborate on unit planning across the division. A key recommendation was to provide teachers with that time throughout the year to do more collaborative work to increase consistency. On a positive note, the audit praised LCPS educators for their efforts in unpacking standards and tailoring instruction to their diverse learners.

[06:05:20] The full 196-page report offers detailed recommendations for next steps, which I encourage you all to review in your free time. The next item was a brand new policy, policy 5430, use of generative artificial intelligence, which was drafted at the request of the committee.

[06:05:37] The committee reviewed the first draft and suggested adding sections requiring teachers to provide clearer guidance of expectations and learning objectives when using AI. This will help ensure accountability in line with the dishonesty and assigned work section of the Students' Rights and Responsibilities Handbook.

[06:05:53] The policy aims to promote AI as a learning tool while holding students ethically accountable, preventing plagiarism. Additionally, it mandates an annual review of AI applications to ensure they are reliable and effective. The policy will be revisited at our next meeting before it is released to the public. Finally, oh I'm running out of time, we went over technology integration, a draft document outlining how LCPS uses technology to support student learning. It included recommended screen time limits for K through 5 learners, defined appropriate categories for tech use um the committee has been concerned about screen time especially for our

[06:06:29] youngest learners um while it's a valuable tool it needs to have a clear purpose and that document is on the website also and will go out for feedback to teachers i made it ms donahue thank you madam chair um student services committee had our monthly meeting last week and we have talked a whole lot about special permission, as you all now know. Next up is restraint and seclusion on December 19th. It's going to be a great way for us to go into the break in the

[06:07:01] holiday season. Also, the Loudoun Education Foundation was a finalist for an award for non-profit organizations through the Loudoun Chamber of Commerce. The awards dinner and program was on Friday and unfortunately LEF did not win. That honor went to Loud and Hunger Relief which does partner with LEF to support the fueled program that benefits LCPS students but it was it was a fantastic event there were a lot of folks from LEF there and it was really nice to get together. The

[06:07:38] LEF the next Board of Trustees meeting is this Thursday at 8 a.m. here at the admin building and they have lots of other good events coming up in the spring and I think that's all I have just also wanted to say a quick thank you to all the veterans and LCPS and their families for their service thank you miss Donahue vice chair Struffy thank you madam chair I'll be brief just we have our second performance monitoring committee meeting tomorrow we'll be discussing kind of a roadmap of potential topics brainstorming on those

[06:08:17] we'll also cover we'll also cover the format of some of the discussions so talk about the data some of the insights and actions and recommended actions as well as how we will spotlight certain schools as we look at that data to contextualize it so we'll also be covering chronic absenteeism so an update on that as well. Thank you Vice Chair Struffy. Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you Madam Chair. I first off want to say how excited I am about this student over

[06:08:49] here, Ms. Kaur. This is the first time I think a student has stayed to the very end, right? Right? And has asked the best questions and shared your experiences. And I think it was extremely helpful for us tonight. So thank you so much for being here. I was quite impressed, I have to tell you. But I also want to mention that I had a great day yesterday. I was the keynote speaker at belmont station for our veterans for our veterans day celebration and it was just absolutely wonderful all the kids singing different songs and it was just really

[06:09:28] wonderful wonderfully planned and i was excited to be there i also got to go to trailside middle school as well in the evening they they do an annual dinner for the veterans so um i was very happy to celebrate all that yesterday and you know um excited to be with our veterans and i hope they had a great veterans day as well thank you thank you mrs griffiths miss chandler thank you madam chair um i want to take a moment um to acknowledge how wonderful um the legislative breakfast was it

[06:10:04] seems like it was a little while ago now um but it was really so nice to be together with everyone in our Loudon delegation, and to be able to share in a very productive conversation with students, as well as our legislators and the core members of the superintendent's team in cabinet, and with so many of our school board members, to have a conversation about our priorities in just such a productive and focused way.

[06:10:35] And I really want to thank Ms. Casserly for doing such a beautiful job putting the event together at Douglas and just really taking the vision that our committee had and bringing it to life. It was just wonderful. So thank you. Thank you, Ms. Chandler. Dr. Deans. I'd like to share that our equity committee this month had Ms. Carrie Williams, who is the Ombudsman. Can I say

[06:11:05] ombudsman and it was very very very very applicable and and great for us in that I was very pleased that even many multiple multiple members of the equity committee were were they leaned into using her services to resolve issues rather than writing to their school board representative because there would not be a third party in between their needs or their questions and so we were

[06:11:43] very pleased about that. The other thing is I've met with some librarians over the past couple of weeks and they were very they invited me and were very excited to be able to talk with someone from outside Loughton County Public schools they consider me an outsider because I didn't work in the school division and that was very productive and I also attended two veterans day activities one of which was at Moorfield

[06:12:18] Station Elementary and I found myself jumping with the kids so I've had a very good good month thank you that's great um okay with that we'll move on to item 15 new business is there any new business no seeing no new business um we will go ahead and this no adjourn this november 12 2024 loudon county school board meeting is now adjourned and please drive safely home

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Coraggio Consulting · aguyonx.com