Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County Public Schools, FY27 Operating Budget School Board Work Session to include a Closed Session, Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Date: Tuesday, January 20, 2026
Place: LCPS Administration Building / School Board Room, Ashburn, Virginia
Length: 3h 28m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/1154877500?rel=0

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 2026-10-12. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:35] Good evening. I call to order this January 20th, 2026 Loudoun County School Board Fiscal Year 27 Operating Budget Work Session to order. We will start tonight with disclosures. I'll start.

[00:00:52] 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.

[00:01:10] 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.

[00:01:26] 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. Mrs. Griffiths? She was just here. No. Okay.

[00:01:42] Okay. Ms. Chernoff. 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.

[00:02:02] 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 the excess of the 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 mrs griffiths thank you madam chair as a member of the loudon 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 in any other discussion that may include

[00:02:41] 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 while in excess of statutory three employees whose interests may be affected of which I am included.

[00:03:00] I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public's interest. This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the clerk of the school board for five years. Thank you. Thank you. This evening, we'll start with item 3.01, the fiscal year 27 base budget, which will be presented by Ms. Sharon Willoughby, our chief financial officer.

[00:03:23] Thank you. So this evening, we start off a series of presentations that are going to be in more detail and to support the C on that Dr. Spence presented last week. The presentation I'm going to give today is going to be related to the base budget changes.

[00:03:42] And I will just wait for the slide deck to appear.

[00:04:05] Okay, so you may recall from the Sion presentation, the pencil, and how we focused on the end of the pencil and then walked through a grouping of changes from the FY26 base budget.

[00:04:22] This slide is from one of two from that Sion presentation and highlights the net base changes from reduced division enrollment and turnover. These items changed FTEs with a net reduction of 46.8 positions and decreased the budget by $20.2 million.

[00:04:41] You will hear next a presentation about our staffing standards, but based currently on our currently adopted staffing standards that are driven off of enrollment, there is a net reduction of 46.8 positions. You can find the staffing standards in the appendix of the budget book.

[00:04:57] As an example, middle school gen ed teacher has a staffing formula that is based off the projected school enrollment for FY 27 and while the division overall is decreasing in students there may be some schools that are increasing after looking at all the schools and performing the calculations there will be a net reduction of forty six point eight positions the slide breaks those positions down by school based school facing and non school based starting with the first box on the left of the slide those are our school based positions in 56.8 positions are reduced. Those encompass general education

[00:05:34] teachers, elementary specials teachers, and some facilities positions that will be reduced. The reduction of these FTEs saves the division six million dollars. School facing and non-school based positions that have a staffing standard actually show a net increase. In the past there have been instances where these areas have deferred taking or adding a position to the budget even though the approved staffing standard allocated one. Past position deferments were to primarily avoid cost increases. However, with the reduction of almost 60 FTEs, the time seemed more appropriate

[00:06:12] to reallocate some of these savings to these needed deferred positions. And there are examples again on the slide for those two categories. Another area where enrollment drives the budget is in school allotments. Examples of allotments include instructional supplies, fine arts, sports, and other areas. In the budget book on page 207, you can find 13 different school allotments that are based on student enrollment. Again, we apply each school's projected FY27

[00:06:46] enrollment and calculate the allotment for FY27. When this was done, it yields about $166,000 in savings. The next area is our salary base adjustment. Each year, we experience a base adjustment related to employee turnover. When we create the FY26 budget, and that's our current budget. We use employee information from the fall of 2024. At that time, some employees may be near the top of the pay scale. So we budget assuming those employees will stay in their jobs

[00:07:22] for FY26 and that they will receive their normal step increase or top of skill pay. In the spring of 2025, the FY26 budget is officially approved. After the FY26 budget is approved, some employees may retire or leave at the end of the 24-25 school year. In fact, we had 268 employees retire that year and others left as well. Even though the budget includes their higher salaries those positions are usually filled by new employees who are earlier in their careers and earn lower salaries. This is the turnover and it yields savings. This turnover is typically called a

[00:07:57] salary-based adjustment when we are creating the new budget and we experience cost savings because we are able to fill those positions that were budgeted at higher salaries with employees who are anticipated to be paid less. The next grouping of base changes is year-over-year changes in operating expenses that are driven by inflation, enrollment, and other factors. And again, this is the other grouping that was included in Dr. Spence's presentation. We have grouped these in the following three slides into inflation impacts, reductions, and increases. But first, I wanted to

[00:08:32] share some information of how we prepare the budget related to these types of accounts. At the start the budget process, we develop and distribute to departments forms for more than 100 programs that capture their non-FTE salaries, their operating and maintenance accounts, and capital outlay accounts, budgets from the prior year, as well as three years of historical spend data. We provide training to the departments in how to review this data and how to capture and document their budget requests for the following year, with an emphasis on explaining year-over-year changes. We also collaborate with departments to assess needs and provide

[00:09:09] calculation support as requested. We also collect all the forms and review for a review across the division requesting additional detail support where necessary. Ultimately all data is entered into the budget software for aggregation analysis and then the budget team performs additional aggregated O&M and non-FTE salary request reviews at the program level looking again for trends against that three-year historical data set, as well as when that is done, identifying and working with departments if anything looks out of line.

[00:09:46] Ultimately, all this information is consolidated and presented to Cabinet for review. Some process improvements in recent years include revamping forms for departments to capture details on the base budget so it is even closer to a bottoms-up zero-based budget.

[00:10:03] We've also worked to revise our categorization approach to more easily identify budget changes that are a result of reorganizations or expense reclassifications, such as GASB required changes, so that we can better focus on true increases and decreases and provide appropriate context.

[00:10:23] And then we've also worked to rebuild key budget tools for more granular reporting and analysis. So as I shared, we grouped these into three categories, the first one being inflation impacts. This slide totals 4.2 million of inflation impacts on some of our largest expenditures, well as overall. For example, based on rate notices from vendors, a 3% increase to utilities has been factored in in the top box on the left, which would result in a $700,000 increase to the budget. You can also see on the far right a 5.7% increase to software and software

[00:11:01] licenses. And again, the source of this is looking at our vendor quotes, looking at our costing as well as what the market is showing as well. So again this is just one area that where we look at all the accounts trying to make sure that the budget is in line and that we aren't caught with any surprises. These examples also highlight the collaboration between the departments and procurement to budget on the best information available. The next grouping is captured as identified reductions. As the budget team scrubs through accounts and works with departments

[00:11:40] 8.3 million in reductions were identified. Examples here include reducing retention bonuses by two and a half million dollars based on hiring trends for FY25 and 26. Tutoring services are reduced by a million to right size the service based on the number of students using the service.

[00:11:59] We've also identified 1.3 million of savings that were identified across the division when looking at the historical spending and trends of all accounts. You heard earlier about turnover and its impact on the base budget separately we budget an annual lapse and turnover amount to capture the savings that will occur from turnover that occurs during the year as well as lapse lapse occurs when a position budgeted for the entire year sits vacant for a period of time due to recruitment hiring activities we roughly budget about two percent of total personnel cost for lapse and turnover and for fy27 with personnel cost increasing due to pay increases in new

[00:12:38] positions. The lapse in turnover savings is adjusted by a credit of $2.2 million. Another example is the current budget included $1.3 million for body-worn panic buttons, and once those are procured this year, the budget for next year would not include that funding. So again, reductions here totaled $8.3 million, and this helps offset the inflationary increases we just reviewed and will also help offset other increases that I will go through next. As the team works with departments and then departments submit their budget requests, additional needs may

[00:13:13] be identified as well. Here, these total additional needs total $14.9 million and were identified by departments and are included in the FY27C on. Examples here include increased utilization for software licenses, lab computers, and purchase of AP tests, among other items, that total $1.7 million. Substitutes continue to increase year over year in historical trend support a 1.2 million dollar increase. The Head Start program is funded by both grant and school

[00:13:46] operating funds and costs for this program outpace the grant funding and 1.1 million is added to the operating fund to support the needs of the program. Summer pay is next. It increases significantly by 4.4 million based on approved rates enacted last summer that are now programmed for FY27. Charter schools receives an allotment from LCPS based on our cost per pupil and their enrollment with our cost per pupil increasing their allotment has increased as well additionally the charter schools have separate service contracts with LCPS that are increased three self-insurance funds workers comp

[00:14:26] short-term disability and our BLDP receive funding directly from the school operating fund based on increased claims cost in those funds the funding for those benefits are reflected here to the tune of $800,000. Facilities maintenance is projected to increase by $800,000 to support school repairs and maintenance projects across the division.

[00:14:50] Overtime pay is also projected to increase by $100,000 based on historical trends and that the basis for overtime has increased due to pay increases. Equipment replacement of various items listed here total $1 million. 700,000 of additional supplies to support opening more school-based special education programs are also included. And last, fuel is increased by $1.2 million based on pricing from the U.S. Government Energy Information Administration, historical gallons used, and the

[00:15:23] estimated routes for next year. Last, there are other FTE-based changes that occurred. And a quick reminder that when the school board adopts the budget, they also adopt the authorized staffing level. The box on the left identifies a net reduction of 4.6 FTEs that occurred after the budget was adopted. Policy 4120 recognizes that various needs and situations can occur between budgets and authorizes the superintendent to make position changes outside of the budget process.

[00:15:54] Specifically, the policy references that the superintendent shall be authorized to modify existing positions that provided that any modification can be forwarded within the budget. the net number of positions is not increased and the school board is provided reasonable opportunity to provide feedback on those personal actions in advance of them taking effect further the superintendent shall be authorized to create additional positions not within the adopted budget provided that they can be afforded within the budget and are also approved by the school board in advance so again related to that policy we actually had a net reduction of 4.6 of those

[00:16:27] outside the budget changes. The box on the right identifies 30 FTE related to special education that had only the FTE moved from the grant fund to the school operating fund. The funding for these FTEs was budgeted in FY26 in the school operating fund to ensure that funds were available due to timing of the spend down of grants that are on a different fiscal cycle. Management of grants is complicated with various expenditure and reporting requirements and limitations this base

[00:17:00] adjustment aligns the FTEs and the FTEs only with its funding and FY 27 and that concludes my base budget presentation I'd be happy to take any questions and I have my many friends on cabinet to assist as well thank you miss Willoughby school board members will now open the floor to questions Mr. Pepper.

[00:17:26] I have two questions just related to the base budget. My first question has to do with the slide on the enrollment-driven net position changes per currently adopted staffing standards, particularly as it relates to decreases. Are we assuming that these decreases are going to be able to be fulfilled via attrition rather than?

[00:17:52] Yes, to answer your question, absolutely. And that's actually one of the considerations, one of the many considerations. Anytime we are in a situation where we're looking at a reduction of positions is looking to ensure that it can be handled by attrition. And if not, then there's a policy that helps drive what that process would look like.

[00:18:11] But to reemphasize, we fully expect attrition to manage these position reductions and expect no impact to staff losing any roles. And then the other question I have is I noticed that the $1.2 million increase for the cost of substitutes, is that simply based on utilization or is it based on rate?

[00:18:34] Have we increased the pay rate for substitutes or is there a way we can look perhaps creatively to try to reduce that amount? The FY27 budget does not change any of the sub rates or the program. So it's the same program. So it really is based on historical utilization and our continuing trend of just seeing increased usage year over year of subs.

[00:19:04] Chernoff? Thank you, Madam Chair. I also have, I just have two things I want to ask about. One is on slide eight when we're talking about the reductions that were identified. My understanding is the retention bonuses are not going away. It's just that people that would qualify for them are decreasing.

[00:19:22] Is that an accurate account? That would be accurate. Okay. And then for the body worn panic button, can you explain to me again one more time what that reduction is? And also, will that be something that will come into play next year then if we don't pay it out this year?

[00:19:39] Is that a $1.3 million that we'll need to pay eventually? So this was a one-time purchase, and because it was a significant purchase, it was captured in our reductions. Okay, so it's just less than we thought? The purchase will be complete in FY26 and will not need to be continued in FY27.

[00:20:02] I gotcha. Okay, thank you. And then on slide nine, in terms of the additional needs identified, I know we've talked about the self-insurance fund and the nutrition fund over and over again over the last year. So I see that the self-insurance fund is listed here as projected identified needs.

[00:20:18] Will the nutrition fund, will that come into play later in a different presentation, or is that something that we don't think we will have a need for increases? I'm going to kind of separate your question a little bit. So all the other funds, school nutrition, grant, lease purchase, and our self-insurance funds will be included in upcoming presentations.

[00:20:42] This specifically references the funding out of the school operating fund for those three particular self-insurance funds. The workers' comp fund, the STD, and the VLDP are purely funded from the transfer from the school operating fund.

[00:21:00] And so when we look at the claims activity in the fund themselves and the fact that we expect more claims, we have to pay for those. And our method of paying is from a transfer out of the school operating fund. And so this is recognizing the expense, that transfer out of the school operating fund.

[00:21:16] And then we will talk about why we're seeing more increases in the workers' comp, the short-term disability, and the BLDP fund, actually, I think, on Thursday evening. Excellent. Thank you so much for that clarification. School board members, are there any further questions?

[00:21:39] Seeing none, Ms. Donahue, could you please read your disclosure? Yes, 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.

[00:21:59] 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. These subjects include thousands of employees well in excess of the statutory three employees whose interests may be affected, of which my spouse, my minor children, my sister-in-law, and I am included.

[00:22:24] 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. With that, we will move on to Item 3.02, Staffing Standards. Tonight, this will be presented by Mr. Casey Jones, the Director of Budget and Financial Analytics.

[00:22:47] Good evening. This portion of today's presentations will review the LCPS concept and philosophy of staffing standards as a budgeting tool and discuss staffing standard enhancements that invest in our empowered students and enriched school system.

[00:23:05] LCPS first introduced staffing standards more than a decade ago during a time when enrollment was consistently and substantially increasing year over year. These standards met several objectives during a time of rapid growth and continue serving the school division well as a key budgeting tool as enrollment begins to decline.

[00:23:23] When the school board adopts and approves the standards each year, the standards are providing a base level of equity across all schools, ensuring transparency in the budgeting process and maintaining sufficient resources to meet and usually exceed state and industry standards. Today we have more than 200 standards that account for 12,329 or 87% of the 14,208 FTE in this year's CEON.

[00:23:47] And within the operating fund, 98.9 of the FTE generated by a staffing standard are school-based or school-facing. This extremely high concentration of school-based and school-facing staff demonstrates that the staffing standards are a collaborative budgeting tool focused on our students and our schools.

[00:24:07] We even use the slogan, budget calculates, departments allocate, to drive home how this works. At the beginning of each budget development cycle, departments review their existing standards and, as necessary, advocate for enhancements that meet the needs of the school system. These enhancements can be driven by, among other things, emerging needs raised by our principals, analysis of how flexible staffing has been recently utilized, or changes in the state's standards of quality.

[00:24:33] The Budget and Financial Analytics Division then calculates the FTE and cost impact of any proposed changes, and staff considers these revisions during the budget process. Ultimately, the final set of recommendations are included in the superintendent's estimate of needs, which the school board reviews, considers, and approves.

[00:24:51] Following budget adoption, staff from across the school system work collaboratively to prepare for the next school year. Departments closely monitor enrollment trends and school-based needs, assigning positions accordingly. The budget team tracks these position assignments within the ERP and maintains position control as required under School Board Policy 4120.

[00:25:11] The continuous needs assessment, position assignment, and position control occurs throughout the school year. Before we review the proposed staffing standard investments, it may be helpful to have a quick orientation of how staffing standards are written and how they work.

[00:25:28] There are two general types of standards. The first is tier-based. Under this construct, as you can see on your left, a school qualifies for successive FTE when their enrollment reaches certain thresholds. In this example, you will see that high schools gain an additional school counselor for every 250 students.

[00:25:46] The other type of standard is a targeted average, which you see on the right. Whereas one additional student can trigger additional FTE for a tiered staffing standard, the targeted average utilizes either a classroom average, school average, or district-wide average to generate FTEs.

[00:26:02] In this example, teachers are assigned to arrive at an average of 22 students per class. If a 23rd student arrives, another teacher would not be assigned. A cap has been placed so that if a class reaches 25 students, a teacher assistant is assigned with an overall ceiling of classes not to exceed 30 students.

[00:26:19] The district-wide average is reviewed during budget development to reach the target average of 22 students per class for elementary schools. Some classes and schools will be higher and some lower. An example of how a school may be higher is due to space limitations.

[00:26:35] The school just might not have the physical capacity to add another classroom. Our staffing standards also recognize that not every school is the same and that student and staff support may look different from school to school. To that end, LCPS has been developing and rolling out a separate category of support that is referred to collectively as "additional staffing" in the budget book and provides a total of 227.9 FTE.

[00:27:02] This additional staffing is comprised of three distinct supports as shown on the slide. The first is flexible staffing. These FTE are assigned to individual schools at the discretion of the chief academic officer and the chief of schools in consultation with the principal in alignment with school improvement plans, specific data such as proficiency levels, individualized student need, or enrollment patterns.

[00:27:27] These FTE can be used as any type of position that is already approved in LCPS and with current usage examples from this school year, including EL teachers, assistant principals and deans, and math and reading interventionists, to name just a few. In addition to the 81 FTE available for any school-based and school-facing use, there are an additional 32 FTE available to be used in a similar fashion, but set aside specifically for the delivery of special education services.

[00:27:56] The second category is differentiated staffing, which LCPS first introduced in FY17. These positions are assigned directly to each school based on the percentage of economically disadvantaged students at the school and can be used at the principal's discretion to meet and address their school's unique and specific needs. This category of staffing has been in place for a number of years and has been a valuable school-based resource. Finally, schools have the ability to swap a vacant position that may have been assigned for another school-based position. During this current school year, schools have swapped vacant positions to instead obtain

[00:28:30] librarians, world language teachers, teachers assistants, math interventionists, and ECSE resource teachers, again just as a few examples. We are proud to have introduced this level of flexible, needs-based support for our schools and look forward to collaborating with principals to continue making this as impactful as possible.

[00:28:52] Our staffing standards also include a hold harmless provision that seeks to avoid unnecessary disruption and provides school-level staffing stability. Hold Harmless considers two specific criteria. For tier-based standards that are based on student enrollment, if a school were to lose an FTE based on the school board approved staffing standards, such as a school counselor, then we look at that enrollment projection for the next three years to see if there is a year where the school would be expected to gain that same position back.

[00:29:20] In that instance, Hold Harmless would be applied and the school would retain the counselor. For division-wide enrollment standards, if the school board approved staffing standard would lead to a reduction, the budget office works with the department to determine if there are mitigating circumstances where the reduction would cause unique operational issues and evaluate whether to maintain the current FTE level.

[00:29:42] While this provision is not used in the FY27 superintendent's estimate of needs, an example of how it has been used is from the FY26 adopted budget when we held five of the school-based digital experience specialists harmless. This was done considering that the standard as written had not contemplated a decrease in enrollment and was designed before the rollout of one-to-one computers for students and the rapidly expanding rollout of educational technology in schools and classrooms.

[00:30:10] Accordingly, the FY27SEON proposes an enhancement to the digital experience specialist staffing standard that more closely aligns with school-based information technology support needs. At no point in time is a hold harmless provision used to generate FTE that would not otherwise have been available, and we are proposing that only 6.5 FTE be held harmless for FY27 as presented on the chart.

[00:30:35] The staffing standard also uses two different methods to identify economic need within a school. The first is whether the school is a Title I served school as identified in our consolidated grant application approved by the school board in the spring of each year prior to the beginning of the school year.

[00:30:51] To identify these schools, LCPS uses the VDOE's Community Eligibility Provision Identified student percentage report released each year on April 1st. The identified student percentage is defined as the percent of students at a school that are directly certified. Direct certification is a USDA approved method of providing students with free school meals without requiring an application based on whether the student is identified as Head Start eligible, in foster care, whose family is receiving SNAP benefits, or a number of other designated criteria. The second

[00:31:26] approach is economically disadvantaged percent. This is an LCPS metric using data from our student information system to identify students facing economic disadvantages based on two criteria. It includes both students that are directly certified, as just highlighted, as well as students with an approved free and reduced meal application. Definitionally, this will be a slightly more generous percentage as it includes an additional set of students facing economic hardship. When used for staffing standards, we pulled this information at the beginning of October during the budget development process.

[00:32:00] Often, the staffing standards will use the economically disadvantaged percent as it captures a more holistic view of need within the school and also allows for different percentage thresholds across different standards based on the support being provided. And finally, I would like to quickly orient you to our staffing standard format.

[00:32:20] Each standard generally consists of four pieces of information, which we'll cover on this slide and the next. The first piece of information is the LCPS staffing ratio. This shows the tiered or targeted average standard most recently approved by the school board. The second column is the corresponding criteria established by the state commonly found in the standards of quality or SOQ.

[00:32:42] In instances where there is no state requirement, we will often reference a corresponding industry standard, benchmark, or best practice. This information is included to not only provide a side-by-side comparison to ensure compliance, but also highlight the degree to which the school system is committed to not just meeting the minimum, but truly focusing on delivering the quality education our community expects.

[00:33:05] The third column, which we will be highlighting during this presentation, identifies any enhancements to the staffing standard. This could include a change to an existing standard or the introduction of a new standard. And finally, we have the aspirational column. These are forward-looking assessments of where departments believe the division needs to be, even if it wasn't feasible in this year's budget.

[00:33:24] Generally, these aspirational standards are expected to be achievable within five years and signal where future SEANs may make additional investments. Of course, not having an aspirational standard today does not preclude enhancements in the future, as our schools and students will continue to have evolving needs.

[00:33:43] Now that we have covered the concept, philosophy, and structure of staffing standards, we'll focus on how they affect the FY27 superintendent's estimate of needs. As Dr. Spence highlighted last week, one of the first steps in building the budget is calculating changes in staffing per the currently adopted staffing standards based on enrollment projections and the hold harmless provision.

[00:34:02] The enrollment decline between the FY26 adopted budget and the FY27 CEON would generate a net 46.8 fewer FTEs based solely on the staffing standards, which you see as the first downward arrow. We'll discuss this reduction in more detail on the next slide.

[00:34:18] Then we see an increase of 79.5 FTEs that would occur based on proposed enhancements. We'll review these staffing standard changes this evening and other presentations during the budget process. We'll review them in more detail based on their investment objective, but I'll note upfront that 100% of the proposed staffing standard enhancements are for school-based positions.

[00:34:42] As highlighted on the previous slide, the existing staffing standards, as approved by the school board in the FY26 budget, would generate a net 46.8 FTE decrease for FY27 based on changes in enrollment. Note that I said net, however, as there are both increases and decreases included in that number.

[00:35:02] The box on the left focuses on the school-based positions, which have a net decrease of 56.8 FTE. Most of the decreases are in general education and EL, with smaller declines in elementary specials, school-based admin, school counselors, and other positions tied to enrollment.

[00:35:18] Conversely, there are increases in other categories, most notably in special education, where we forecast the population will continue to increase, as well as bus attendants who support exclusive transportation routes serving students with special education requirements. The next two boxes are for staffing standard changes for school-facing positions and non-school-based positions.

[00:35:40] where we have an increase of 6 FTE and 4 FTE respectively. You'll notice that most of these positions are support positions such as maintenance workers, distribution center assistants, service desk engineers, and vehicle technicians among others.

[00:35:56] While it may appear to be at odds to have FTE for these positions increase when enrollment is projected to decline, it is the reality that LCPS has been eligible to receive these increases based on the approved staffing standards for several years and have instead deferred and delayed these increases as long as possible to instead focus budget resources on school-based needs. However, this deferment means the teams have been operating above plan capacity during this time and continuing to do so would elevate risk to these support programs where it could affect our schools, staff, and students. And now we'll look at the proposed staffing standard enhancements

[00:36:35] including the FY27 superintendent's estimate of needs. There are nine groupings of positions that have adjustments. The first several enhancements that we'll cover are for school-based administrative positions. What we are proposing this evening is slightly different than what is included in the Sion book presented last week, and we can address that following the presentation.

[00:36:56] As you may recall, staff identified this as a potential new investment priority during the budget work session in October, noting the need to adjust school-based administrative positions to more equitably and consistently support varying student populations at schools. Across the three levels of elementary, middle, and high schools, it has been an ongoing challenge where the staffing standard tiers for assistant principals were not keeping pace with our largest schools.

[00:37:21] Here at the elementary school level, the Department of School Leadership is proposing two changes. The first is for the assistant principal staffing standard, where the revision would establish additional tiers that recognize and support our largest elementary schools, while providing additional differentiation and more appropriate support levels for smaller and mid-sized schools further this standard would provide an additional assistant principal for elementary schools that are served as title one the second proposed change at the elementary school level revises the dean standard by lowering the enrollment level by which a school qualifies from 600 students

[00:37:56] to 550 students it also removes the additional six discretionary deans added last year these were specifically added with the intent to support schools with higher economically disadvantaged ratios, and after consideration and review this year, the department feels that these complex school needs are better supported by assistant principals. Together, these standards would add 14 new elementary school assistant principals and four elementary school deans for FY27.

[00:38:24] Our middle schools have had similar challenges. The proposed staffing standard provides more distinct tiers, recognizing that there is a significant difference in administrative requirements for a school with just over 800 students compared to a school that is just under 1600 students also similar to elementary schools the department's proposed standards for middle schools add an additional assistant principal for title one served schools this would add 11 new middle school assistant principals for fy27 at the same time the department is proposing to remove the dean staffing standard for middle schools to be very clear the fy27 cion does not remove these

[00:39:03] positions from the budget it just establishes it just the established staffing standard that makes these positions automatic as part of the budget process the department of school leadership will provide more context for this change as well as an overview of next steps during the investing in our exemplary students presentation on thursday and finally for school-based administrators the department of school leadership is proposing an enhancement to high school assistant principals that provides more distinguished tiers while also recognizing the reality that there are some high schools that are projected to be significantly larger than what existed when these standards

[00:39:38] were originally developed. You will also notice the same inclusion of an additional assistant principal for Title I served high schools. This would add 14 new high school assistant principals for FY27. Moving on to the Department of Teaching and Learning, the FY27 SEON proposes an enhancement of an additional six discretionary elementary school librarian FTEs. This recognizes the important role librarians have in our schools, is supportive of the elementary master schedule, and is an incremental step towards achieving the aspirational standard of one librarian

[00:40:10] per 22 classrooms district-wide with a minimum of one per school. The Department of Teaching and Learning also includes proposed enhancements to the EL teacher staffing standards for grades kindergarten through fifth. The proposed standard includes two primary changes both of both of which are incremental movements towards the aspirational standard. The first is combining the separate kindergarten and grade one through five standards into a single standard that will be applied universally for our middle schools. The second is improving the student-teacher ratio at each

[00:40:44] proficiency level, moving from 1 to 30 to 1 to 28 for proficiency levels 1 to 2, and a 1 to 35 ratio to 1 to 33 ratio for proficiency levels 3 to 5. This adds 23 and a half new elementary school EL teachers for FY27. And at the middle school level, the Department of Teaching and Learning is also proposing a staffing standard enhancement to add an additional 8 FTE of discretionary EL teachers to use across our middle schools to support students who have struggled to make progress in the EL program. The Department of Teaching and Learning will provide additional information on these proposals and the important work our EL team does during the continuing to

[00:41:23] invest in our students' presentation on Thursday. The last proposed staffing standard enhancement from the Department of Teaching and Learning is an incremental addition to the standard for division instructional coaches. The school board approved the first five discretionary positions in FY26 to begin moving towards the aspirational standard of having one division instructional coach per school. An additional eight discretionary positions are proposed for FY27. This will also be covered on Thursday during the Investing in Our Students presentation. Additionally, the Department of Digital Innovation is proposing two staffing standard enhancements that change from a

[00:42:01] per-student ratio to a per-school or per-building ratio. As discussed earlier, this is an example of a department re-looking at staffing standards following use of the Hold Harmless provision focused on division-wide enrollment. When declining enrollment may have triggered a reduction in these positions in FY26, staff recommended holding the FTE harmless as a reduction may have led to an unacceptable reduction in service levels for our schools, students, and employees. Once this type of hold harmless was used, the department re-looked the entire standard to assess a new approach that more accurately reflected operational needs. They will talk more about this during the presentation

[00:42:37] this evening for our enriched school system. Moving to the Department of Support Services, the department is proposing to move the standard from one custodian per 19,708 gross square feet to one per 20,750 gross square feet, resulting in a reduction of 17 custodian FTEs.

[00:42:58] Similarly, the department will review this change during the continuing to invest in our enriched school system presentation this evening. Here, the safety and security office is proposing the addition of one FTE school security officer to be used discretionarily at the middle school level. In coordination with grant programs the office pursues, this is an incremental move towards the aspirational standard of two SSOs per middle school. And finally, the Department of Business and Financial Services is proposing a staffing standard enhancement for school nutrition specialists. This moves the standard from one per 13 schools to one per 12 schools and is aligned

[00:43:37] with providing additional school-facing leadership in support of the dynamic and evolving school nutrition program. Because this staffing standard affects the school nutrition fund, it will be discussed on the January 28th presentation on other funds. Thank you for your time, consideration and review of the staffing standards within the FY27 Superintendent's Estimate of Needs and we welcome your discussion.

[00:43:59] Thank you, Mr. Jones. All right, board members, do you have any questions? Ms. Chernoff. Thank you, Chair Chandler. Thank you so much for this presentation. I feel like this is really responsive to understanding kind of where we've been and what our goals are especially with staffing standards and i can only speak for myself but i know that there's going to be a lot of building principals that are absolutely thrilled to see a lot of these changes and so i know they've been advocating for

[00:44:38] these changes and so to see these staffing standards increase especially in terms of assistant principals i think it's well done i'm fully supportive of this change i think it will really help in so many areas across our schools one of the things i will look forward to miss Miss Mitchell, I'm assuming you'll be maybe covering it, is the whole Dean situation and AP.

[00:45:02] So I'll hold my questions once we get the context for that from your conversation. But my question surrounds on slide 11, where you talk about the loss of FTEs, fewer FTEs because of enrollment. You have EL listed in there, but those aren't really broken out by number.

[00:45:21] And then I'm very happy to see the increased staffing standards for EL on slide 17 and 18 as it relates to elementary and middle school i would like and you don't have to do this tonight but i'm wondering if we could have sort of a crosswalk of how many positions are lost because of enrollment and then the net gain with this staffing standard recommendation and seeing if we're just hitting that threshold if we're still below it or if we're actually above it and i don't know if you have that ballpark right now but i can wait for that to be in the packet but i would really appreciate seeing kind of where that fluctuates and where we fall because the needs

[00:45:57] are increasing. I want to make sure we have enough. We can provide that for you. Mr. Pepper. Thank you, Chair Chandler. Interestingly, Ms. Chernoff and I had very similar questions.

[00:46:14] I also was going to ask about the dean program, but I will wait until Ms. Mitchell does her presentation later on. My question, and this is just really a clarification number on the discretionary pieces so for example on slide um let me give you an example slide 16 when we're talking about elementary school librarians there are um 6.0 discretionary positions it's is it my understanding that these are across the entire division and then division leadership will determine where those extra six positions are most needed that is correct thank you i just

[00:46:46] wanted to clarify exactly how those are being used mr ricardi thank you um so kind of piggybacking off of Mrs. Chernoff's things on slide 17 and 18 I'm really excited to see the addition of our English learner teacher cadre I think that's gonna be really important I guess my my big question to you and this might be a follow-up question for later is how far off are we from getting from the revised and new recommendations to the aspirational and how fast can we get there that would be a huge priority of mine on the elementary school one and then

[00:47:26] secondarily on the middle school one I don't see an aspirational goal on that so are we hitting that when we make these revisions or where are we on so we'll take down the first part of that down as a budget question on how many additional FTE would be required to reach the aspirational standard I hesitant to do that math quickly and I'll defer to mr. Slevin if he'd like to add anything for middle school staffing for EL so the question was if the additional eight positions meet the aspirational staffing standard I guess

[00:48:05] the question would be what's the gap between the addition of the 23.5 FTE in the revised new list to aspirational so is there still a gap there or does this get us there and maybe I can help mr. Slevin a little bit I don't know if he has the book probably open exactly to that page mr. Slevin you do publish we do have an aspirational standard at the elementary level for EL but we do not for middle and so as Mr. Jones stated we would provide information related to the cost to meet the aspirational at the elementary level but I think what Ms.

[00:48:41] Riccardi is asking is whether or not since you don't have an aspirational at the middle school level that by the revised new for FY 27 does that satisfy your long-term goals for EEL? I think we would I would answer that question by saying we are trying to be responsive to the needs of our of our middle schools in particular with some of our goals around EL growth and proficiency.

[00:49:08] We may in the future have an aspirational staffing standard, but we don't have one that exists, so it's hard to answer your question. But we did put forth the ask for the eight FTEs 'cause we feel that that would meet the needs that our middle schools have going into next year with the number of FTEs that they're dropping.

[00:49:28] That's based on their schedule, based on their allocations now, working with the English learner secondary office I think I would just I would just add to that both in elementary middle and in high school you know our English learner reading and math scores are really struggling and I don't want to see in personally I don't want to see incremental changes year to year I want to see dramatic changes year to year because for every year that we don't get this nailed and get these kids up to competency is a whole nother group of kids who are graduating that aren't reading at grade level. So you're going to hear

[00:50:06] me for the next four years hounding on this one all day long consistently. So I guess what I'd like to see is, you know, I want us to be really aggressive in our aspirational goals for this and make sure that we're really funding because, you know, we like to say, you know, we're the wealthiest county in the country, but we have a cadre of schools in Sterling where our students are not reading at grade level. And we've got a lot of other fantastic programs, but we've got to get a focus on this and really get there so I would love to see some big aspirational goals around this for all three categories for elementary middle and high school and figure out what we need to do to make that happen quickly

[00:50:43] so first thank you for the level of support for our teachers and our building leaders and when it comes to supporting our English learners we do have a section where we talk about the aspirational staffing standard and the enhancement on Thursday night so while there is information that I'll be sharing that night i'll take your feedback and add some additional context for our presentation on thursday and there's also some information on thursday night where we'll be talking about support for teachers and professional learning and we appreciate the board's consideration and

[00:51:17] support of that mrs griffiths thank you madam chair i was just curious about the reduction in custodians if you could go into more detail about that again also the nutrition um that that's cafeteria is nutrition that's cafeteria um there's always a concern that we're cutting down on uh our cafeteria workers so if you can give more detail into the custodians and the reduction um that that's uh here in your presentation but also get into more detail about

[00:51:55] nutrition if you don't mind thank you so i'll let mr lewis answer the one on uh custodians and then Ms. Willoughby can help with school nutrition. - So I do have a slide or two about custodians in my presentation we'll do here in a few minutes and I'll go through that entire thing, thank you.

[00:52:15] - And with school nutrition I'll just note that it was an enhancement to add a specialist and you'll hear on Thursday in my school nutrition presentation additional information but I'll share that it wasn't just the plus one, we actually are repurposing a coordinator.

[00:52:31] So again just trying to maximize use of resources And I can explain more then on the why behind that. I'm just trying to follow that. You're saying school nutrition specialist, but are we reducing workers in the cafeteria?

[00:52:54] This actually does not impact the school-based positions. The school nutrition specialist, we do consider a school-based, but I think you're just drawing the distinction of the staff that's working in the school, in the kitchen. The specialist position are assigned multiple schools, and they support all the managers and staff.

[00:53:14] So while this isn't directly in the kitchen staff, it is a school-based position that we're adding to support. Okay, thank you. Ms. Chernoff? I'm good. Thank you. Yep.

[00:53:32] From the school board members? I will just add my support for Ms. Riccardi's ask. I definitely think this is a huge priority for the division and would be supportive of trying to meet those goals as fast as possible. So thank you, and thank you for the presentation.

[00:53:50] With that, we will move on to item 4.01, continuing to invest in our Enriched School Division. This presentation tonight will be led by a team, including Mr. Lewis, our chief operations officer, Mr. Smith, our chief technology officer, Dr. Bergen, our chief of staff, Ms. Willoughby, again, our chief financial officer.

[00:54:11] Thank you. And I will start us off. As the chair mentioned, our team here will be sharing how we are continuing to invest in our Enriched School Division. And I will start with the Department of Business and Financial Services. You will hear, as well as we work through this presentation, as well as the remaining presentations, information about each department's base budget.

[00:54:41] And so for the Department of Business and Financial Services, I know there's a lot of information up here and it's not even a comprehensive list of all the things that we do however I will highlight that the business financial services department is composed of two primary components an operational side and a support side the operational side is the school nutrition division which is funded through the school nutrition fund and as I just mentioned I'll present more information on that particular budget to the school board next week but the support side of our department consists of 71 professionals, including analysts, accountants,

[00:55:19] specialists, coordinators, supervisors, and various support staff who ensure the division's financial operations are effective, efficient, and compliant. The team supports the full financial lifecycle from budget development and the procurement of goods and services to payroll processing, financial accounting, reporting, and the annual audit. Throughout this process, the department provides ongoing financial and risk analysis and direct support to schools, charter schools, and division-level program and account administrators. To ensure financial integrity and operational effectiveness, the department delivers services across several

[00:55:57] core functional areas. So with procurement and risk management, this area partners with schools and departments to procure goods and services in compliance with the Virginia Public Procurement Act. In collaboration with legal services, staff reviews and manages more than 2,100 contracts annually. Risk management responsibilities include administration of property damage reports, visitor and student incident reporting, and coordination of claims with legal services in VACorp, which is our insurance provider. The budget and financial analytics team prepares and administers the annual budget process across eight funds,

[00:56:38] manages more than 200 staffing standards that you just heard about, and maintains position control. Staff also prepares the annual school report for VDOE, quarterly financial projections that are presented to the school board, and numerous local, state, and federally mandated reports. Financial analysis and reporting support informed decision making at both the school and division levels. The payroll division ensures accurate and timely compensation for more than 18,000 employees every two weeks. Responsibilities include leave tracking and reporting, annual W-2

[00:57:15] processing, which is ongoing right now, and compliance with all federal and state tax and withholding requirements. The accounting and financial reporting function. This team manages financial activity across 16 funds, including invoice payments and customer billing.

[00:57:34] Responsibilities also include oversight of the annual audit for division funds and school activity funds, preparation of the annual comprehensive financial report, administration of our other post-employment benefits fund management, oversight of federal, state, and local grants, and establishment and monitoring of strong internal controls. All accounting and reporting functions comply with generally accepted accounting principles, also known as GAP, as well as Governmental Accounting Standards Board, GASB standards, and requirements of the Auditor of

[00:58:08] Public Accounts for the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as Federal Office and Office of Management and budget requirements, OMB. Additionally, we have what we call our FAST team, which is our financial application support team. This team provides internal compliance reviews of financial operations along with ongoing training and technical support for schools and departments, ensuring consistent and compliant financial practices across the division. While this overview highlights the department's primary functions, as I mentioned, it is not a comprehensive

[00:58:43] list of the work performed by business and financial services. In addition to these ongoing responsibilities, this department, along with HRTD and DDI, are leading a division-wide in enterprise resource planning, or ERP, system implementation, an effort that requires significant coordination, process redesign, data validation, training, and change management. This major initiative is being carried out concurrently with daily operations to modernize our financial systems, strengthen our internal controls, improve reporting and transparency, and better

[00:59:17] support schools and departments. So having shared information on what we do on a day-to-day basis that is covered by our base budget, we do have one initiative related to a cost savings associated with the elimination of division-wide credit card fees and subsidies. Historically, LCPS has absorbed credit card transaction fees on behalf of the payer, with these costs budgeted within business and financial services. Going forward, credit card transaction fees will be passed on

[00:59:56] to the payer consistent with common practice for electronic payments in other sectors. While LCPS policy and regulation 4020 identifies division charges, it did not previously account for the full cost of electronic payment processing. As a result, the division has effectively subsidized these fees. Discontinuing this practice and again aligning with a more common practice and other industries will generate significant savings for both the school operating fund and the school nutrition fund, while more accurately aligning costs with the method

[01:00:28] of payment. This slide outlines the fee structure associated with the current electronic payment platforms that we have, along with examples of the types of payments processed through the system.

[01:00:47] Implementing this change, effective July 1, would allow for clear and proactive communication, ensuring families are aware of the credit card transaction fee, and understand that fee-free payment options will continue to be available. So here you can see, for example, School Cash Online is one of our vendors, and that covers payments where families may pay for additional AP exams or Summer in the Arts program, as a few examples. The fee associated with that is a 4% plus a 10 cent per transaction. In the middle is our My School Bucks, which also is used

[01:01:25] for facility use payments as well as virtual, loud, and online tuition as a few examples. The fee there would be a 3.75 percent of the cost of the, or the value of the transaction. And the last column is LINC, which is our, related for our school nutrition fund system, and that transaction would be $2.60 per transaction, and that is associated with deposits to student meal accounts. As Dr. Spence shared in his presentation one of the areas that we are really

[01:02:05] focusing on this year and introducing is measuring outcomes for our new investments and so this one is a little different because while it doesn't really it's not really a new investment but this change would yield a $700,000 savings for our school operating fund as well as a 1.5 million savings in the school nutrition fund that again i will present more information on next week so again this um this specific initiative would help drive savings for our operations and with

[01:02:42] that i will now turn it to mr aaron smith to talk about ddi excellent good evening i'm pleased to be here tonight to present the department of digital innovation or ddi's budget ddi serves as the technology backbone for the entire lcps community our award-winning team supports more than 225 000 students, staff, and parents across 110 plus LCBS locations who rely on more than 700 applications and a fleet of more than 140,000 managed staff and student devices. We are not bored. Our budget, which can be found on pages 125 to 134 in your budget books, funds the staffing and resources

[01:03:18] required to maintain this ecosystem, including regular technology refresh cycles, cyber security, IT project management, system administration, including our student information system, financial and human capital management systems as Ms. Willoughby just referenced, application development, data science, cloud services, communications, and our technology support center. As Ms. Willoughby noted earlier, the primary drivers for the DDI budget increase for FY27 are rising costs for goods and services. There are no new technology projects or implementation included in DDI's FY27 operating budget. The funding request increases reflect market-wide price escalation for devices, software, and essential services. For example,

[01:03:57] licensing costs for existing systems are expected to rise next year, and device prices continue to climb due to the increased global demand for components such as RAM, memory storage, and chipsets, which are being driven by the rapid expansion of generative AI. This company needs those tools and creates a shortage in the market. The DDI team was able to mitigate this issue for this year as the team made significant device purchases before the price increases began earlier this month but that will not be an option moving forward. There are two staffing items included in the FY27C on that I would like to highlight for you this evening. Next slide please. The first change

[01:04:37] that you saw a couple minutes ago is requested for our digital experience team. The digital experience team includes our hands-on technical support staff who play a critical role in supporting technology across all our schools and office locations. Our current staffing standard is based solely on student enrollment, however this does not reflect how our staff are actually deployed to meet staff and student support needs. The updated staffing standard would align with the staffing deployment model already in place. Under those structure there is one digital experience lead who supports five schools to provide tier 2 supports, two digital experience specialists at each high school in the academies of Loudoun, one digital experience specialist at each

[01:05:15] middle school, and one digital experience specialist at each elementary school. It is important to note that the staffing standard update does not add any new digital experience specialist positions the change simply formalizes the existing staffing model already in use ensuring our standards accurately reflect our current allocation and operational reality next slide please the updated staffing standard also ensures that our budgeting process keeps pace with school openings for example in high school 14 opens it will require two digital experience specialists to support staff and students under the revised standard those positions would be reflected in the Sion based off of the staffing standards for the year that the school opens rather than requiring separate

[01:05:54] adjustments. Again, it's important to emphasize that this enhancement does not add any new digital experience specialist positions. Instead, it preserves the staffing already in place. Without this update, six existing digital experience positions would be removed from the budget, significantly impacting our ability to support schools effectively. Next slide, please. The second staffing standard update for tonight calls for the adding of two positions to our technology support center team, a lead service desk engineer and a service desk engineer. These FTEs could have been added during each of the last three budget cycles, but were deferred due to competing priorities. During that time, the need for those positions has continued to grow over

[01:06:33] the past several years. We have seen more than 3,500 additional staff members issued in using LCPS devices, a 33% increase, a large portion of that based off of teacher assistants getting devices, site-based substitutes getting devices, and then also new staff that have been added. We've had a significant expansion in the number of tools and services this team is responsible for managing, including our change management processes, knowledge management, problem management, and systems such as enhanced password protection and privileged access management.

[01:07:03] And that last year, the team performed a workload of over 154,000 support requests and handled 273 significant issues, enterprise-wide issues, last year alone. These positions are essential to maintaining timely, high-quality support for our schools as demands continue to rise.

[01:07:25] Next slide, please. The overall net change reflects two key adjustments, maintaining the six existing digital experience team members and adding two additional technology support center staff. The cost of these changes is approximately $200,000. These investments directly support our ability to deliver high quality technology services across the division.

[01:07:44] The expected outcomes include continued delivery of excellent technology support for all students, staff and parents, faster response time for incidents and service requests, a stronger escalation process and improved enterprise level problem management during major outages and shorter wait times for users who need immediate assistance and contact the service desk directly.

[01:08:04] These enhancements ensure that we can meet the growing demand for reliable, responsive technology support through LCPS. I will now hand it back over to Ms. Willoughby for the next section. - So in the budget book, we have a department called non-departmental.

[01:08:24] And really this houses a lot of our centrally budgeted division-wide costs. And the examples are listed here on this slide. The most significant one is where, this is where we kind of park our proposed compensation investments. They're not spread across all the department budgets, but rather it's a placeholder related for the step increase and the cost of living adjustments is budgeted in the non-departmental fund, or department, We also include the division-wide insurance premium.

[01:09:00] So the employer share of the 20% premium increase is budgeted and non-departmental for the division and the school operating fund. We also have the distribution of athletic ticket revenue back to schools.

[01:09:15] And so we have a revenue-sharing model that we have implemented a few years ago of sharing athletic ticket revenues. So while those revenues are received and recorded in the school operating fund, dispersing those are recorded as an expense to the individual schools or the individual high schools.

[01:09:35] And so that distribution is budgeted here. We also have budget expenses to support the Loudon Education Foundation. There's also the employer contributions for workers' comp, the disability programs, retiree health care, and OPEB is included here.

[01:09:54] The bonus programs that we have talked about earlier related to recruitment, retention, and retiree payments are budgeted and non-departmental. And last but not least, we also have our flexible staffing pot of FTEs is budgeted and non-departmental.

[01:10:12] And when they are portioned out, then they are actually assigned to the appropriate department. But from a budget perspective, they are housed and non-departmental. So, again, there's significant costs in non-departmental for the base budget as well as the initiatives to support FY27.

[01:10:30] Next, we'll move to the school board, and I will turn that over to Dr. Bergen to present information there. Next slide, please. As listed in the 27C on, there are school board allotments of $100,000 being maintained in FY27.

[01:10:56] There's overtime increasing for additional staff time for board meetings, and there are modest increases in operating accounts due to inflation on materials and supplies and increases in consultant fees for the school board. Next I'm going to provide an overview of the FTEs within the department of the superintendent. Next slide please. As listed on this slide there are 146 FTEs within the superintendent's budget that is spread across

[01:11:34] the offices and departments as listed on this slide including in addition to the superintendent's office, the chief of staff office, division council, the ombuds, the auditor general, the division of diversity, equity, inclusion, and equity, and safety and security. I believe you're familiar board members with the functions and responsibilities of these offices and departments. There are some bullet points to describe what their major responsibilities are. I do want to spend a little more time talking about safety and security as 120 of the 146 FTEs are within safety and

[01:12:08] security. Next slide, please. Included in the 120 FTEs would be first the leadership team, including the director of safety and security. We have 86 school security officers spread about our schools. We have patrol officers who patrol during the day and evening and nighttime. We operate a security operations center 24-7, and there are dispatchers in that SOC. And we have training in emergency management unit personnel. Other resources include school resource officers

[01:12:48] which are not employed by the school division but by the sheriff but are placed in our schools through our MOU. By contract we have allied visitor management personnel in all of our schools. They also provide security here in this building. We have the Raptor management Raptor emergency management platform. We have body worn panic badges in this year's operating budget. I think as was noted earlier, we're in the procurement process of securing the body-worn panic badges.

[01:13:20] And this year, we completed the first phase of an AI camera analytics, which I'll describe in a little more detail on the next slide, please. There are no increases in FTEs within the office of the superintendent, with the exception of, in safety and security, one additional SSO for middle school. This would help move us along in our aspirational staffing standard of two per middle school, and in next year's budget, we would be building on the next phase for AI camera

[01:13:54] analytics. Currently, we operate AI camera analytics in all of our high schools and in our SOC. The increase of $700,000 would allow for the expansion to the middle school cameras. Elementary would be in a future budget cycle, and if you're not familiar from previous presentations, the AI camera analytics do not replace our safety and security monitoring of our cameras. They augment their effectiveness. The AI can pick up or detect things such as weapons, trespassers, fights,

[01:14:27] medical incidents, other things that look or appear out of place and will alert the safety and security individuals who are monitoring those cameras to pay closer attention to particular camera angle as AI has detected it that covers the base budget and the increases within the superintendent's office for next year's budget so I will turn it over to support services Mr. Lewis thank you Dr. Bergen good evening board members I come to you tonight very proud to represent

[01:15:04] 2,000 members of the support services family and the team that keep the lights on to keep the heat flowing keep the IAQ the indoor air quality safe our access to our buildings secure we do this in facilities that are very well designed and very well constructed kept very clean and operating very efficiently that particular team is also supported by a group of folks that manage all the finances related to the capital budget to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis our campuses are neatly mowed and if you've been

[01:15:39] watching the weather service will earn our keep here in the next few days with also clear of snow and ice. We also manage a very robust playground program as you're all aware and we do our classrooms are stocked with furniture and with paper. We support the entire division with the planning and GIS folks with a very significant operation that supports this budget that we're talking about tonight, the capital budget, all the enrollment, all the staffing, and all the schools

[01:16:16] is supported by that group in planning. We also have a systemic focus on sustainable building practices and also the environmental literacy done through our sustainability offices. We top all that off with the transportation department that runs eight million miles a year, providing our students quality and safe transportation, and that is supported with a very top-notch maintenance facility over on Sickland Road as well so digging a little bit deeper into that we'll go some highlights starting with the construction department on the next slide you'll see there the construction manages and

[01:16:51] designs all the projects that's a a very significant collaboration with teaching and learning and Department of School leadership with what the schools what we require in the buildings we manage those projects you may or may not be aware of we have someone on site of all of our projects every day representing the school system. We're involved in the capital planning and that also includes a pretty significant collaboration with county staff for the budget process. I'm sure you're aware our big projects right now are HS14 underway, Parkview High School replacements underway as is Banneker Elementary and Waterford Elementary

[01:17:28] renovations. Regarding the environmental health and safety it's a group of folks that is very highly skilled and credentialed that you may or may not see a lot of and those folks take care of their environmental compliance with asbestos, radon, drinking water systems, indoor air quality, hazardous waste, those types of things. In addition to occupational safety, which mostly relies or faces the staff, and we have workplace equipment safety, training, and responses to all different types of exposures that exposures or suspected exposures that may happen in our school. These folks have very few changes.

[01:18:08] i'll say the construction department has reduced their operations by a million dollars and the ehs folks are pretty stable in terms of cost and ftes moving on the next slide you'll see we start talking about facilities operations which is probably our one of our biggest most complicated divisions we have several functions that are there you know maintenance in particular 60,000 work orders either emergency routine or preventive work in all of our schools and that includes mechanical electrical plumbing roofing artificial turf we also operate five public water

[01:18:47] systems in five of our schools that have wells they take care of asset management including the life cycle management of all of our schools the custodial operations I challenge you to find a school system anywhere with cleaner and nicer looking schools they do a fantastic job of keeping 13 million square feet clean every day. The technical security folks take care of the security cameras. Dr. Birkin just mentioned a minute ago about the system that overlays on top of that. Those are part of that system that we maintain the actual hard equipment. Radio

[01:19:21] systems, access control, fire alarm, restroom technology, and body-worn panic hardware is also part of our enterprise and technical security. The last part of that is the energy management group, and they take and manage all the facility uses in conjunction with management and coordination, so folks that reserve our spaces are able to use those and have the heat on.

[01:19:47] They also, we have amassed $127 million in savings since 1993, and one day I'm going to do the present value of that, because that number would be astronomical if we actually did that. Solar arrays at 22 schools, LED light retrofits, building automation system.

[01:20:06] And if you can imagine reconciling your power bill every month, we do 400 of those on a monthly basis for utility bills. One thing I want to point out is we just recently received a check for $2.2 million for our participation in Inflation Reduction Act and got a tax credit for that.

[01:20:24] So I know Mrs. Griffiths, you and I have talked many times about immediate payback on some of these programs. We actually received a check for that and for the tax credit, in addition to the savings we make with not paying the bills for the power generated. So regarding management and coordination, it may be hard to believe, but we have 214,000 facility use reservations in our schools over this year.

[01:20:52] And that is part of 920 organization, and Mr. Stocks and his team takes care of all those reservations, including the furniture lifecycle management, building automation support, support for elections, and all the relationships with Parks and Rec.

[01:21:09] You will see an increase in the management and coordination budget, and that's related to moving a contract for the copy center equipment from Mr. Smith over in DDI to our office. So no change in the total cost to LCPS, but it will show up in our budget.

[01:21:27] I'll talk a little bit more about lead head custodians on the next couple of slides in terms of how we're investing. We could go into the next slide, investing in our school environment, and just go ahead and jump to the next slide. You'll see in our budget we're asking for three FTEs for lead head custodians, and this is, I'll talk about the why for that right now.

[01:21:51] and these are folks that are supervising and leading our custodial teams and it's really focused on making sure that our schools are as clean as they can possibly be and also enhanced emergency response. We have a lot of things that happen in our buildings on a regular basis that require folks to be there.

[01:22:10] These positions have not historically been included in the staffing standards and we got a little behind. We've built 10 schools and hired 89 more custodial FTEs we added to this supervisory group and as a result of that especially during the summer hours when we have every school has to be completely cleaned from head to toe those folks are getting an average of a hundred hours overtime in the summertime which is not sustainable so that's something we want to do that and also picture one of the things we do custodians we have quite a few and we have some attrition there these folks participate in 185 interviews this past

[01:22:49] year to hire the new folks come in so that's a huge lift and these folks can use some support I dig a little bit deeper on the next slide into that and how we better support their schools and the classroom environment these folks are also the subject matter expert for things like disinfection if we have you know some of you recall we had mold in three of our schools the week before school opened this year and this is a crew that came in and cleaned that out we also have from time to time we have the potential for skin infections in some of our schools and these are also the folks that come in and manage and

[01:23:24] help the the crews at the schools manage those issues this will reduce our the supervisory role of this group right now they supervise custodial crews at 16 schools each this extra three would reduce those to 11 schools each mention little bit about emergency response we are working the best we can to minimize the response of that if you can picture last year we had the academies allowed in the 6-inch water main blew off and we had water in the entire first floor this is a group that comes in and manages that reconciliation of the space they

[01:24:03] also do fire and rescue responses and equipment repairs you know simple we have lots of equipment these folks use and these folks are trained to get those back in operating condition. They also serve as mentor for our future leaders. We have 700 FTEs in the custodial crews, and these folks are the ones that help bring the staff along and ready them for leadership positions.

[01:24:30] And the last thing they do is support the school staff in any type of disciplinary measures that may be there. So the next slide, we talk about the measuring those outcomes. You see it's an investment of $336,000, and I won't go over that list again because that's what we've just been talking about.

[01:24:47] But we currently have six of these lead head custodians. The extra three will bring us up to nine. And as I said, that will be a great strides toward having that be a more efficient group and not have so much overtime and put those folks into those stressful work environments.

[01:25:06] So the next slide, Mrs. Griffith, you asked about the custodians. We looked at the staffing standard and we believe that we are able to reduce that staffing standard which result in a reduction of 17 FTEs countywide as I mentioned we have 185 interviews a year no one is at risk of losing their position we have many many opportunities fill those positions but we do believe we can maintain the buildings with the new staffing standard moving that from 19,000 square feet per custodian to 20,000 which essentially reduces the number if you do

[01:25:42] math the next page talks a little bit about the investment for that and that's a 1.2 million dollar reduction that's associated with the 17 FTEs moving to the next play page we talk I want to talk a little bit about playing in GIS services it's probably the most understated and critical relationship we have with the entire school system affects this budget the capital budget projections of income students with a very close working relationship with teaching learning and department of school leadership the student

[01:26:20] information system admin teachers special ed all those types of things and I know if you get beyond the jovial demeanor of Mrs. Tate you'll find probably one of the most serious numbers wizards you'll ever meet to be able to put this together every year in a fantastic program that we've been supporting the school system with they also do school naming and many other things that sometimes remain behind the scenes they're asking for no changes in their operating budget this year from either FTE or operations perspective

[01:26:56] you'll see sustainability there I'm going to talk a little bit more about that the sustainability folks not only support the built environment and support services but the entire school system with a real focus on environmental literacy as we move forward with our these efforts in that area so the next slide I think maybe two slides yeah go ahead and go to the next one we talk about this this is our newest division it supports the facilities team and also Department of School leadership and teaching and learning and all of our

[01:27:32] staff and this also was a huge contributor to our IRA tax credit I mentioned a few minutes ago and receiving that check for the 2.2 million in tax credits the school board might remember and for those of you that are new I'm sure you saw that we approved the sustainability framework last year in June and that includes a lots of goals and targets for this group includes the development of a really cool program portfolio of different programs that are being done in the school to engage the students engage the staff and gauge the

[01:28:08] the admin, but it also gives a student voice in this critical sustainability as we look through our future of our school system and our facilities and our environment altogether. We're also leading by example and nurturing that culture of sustainability. Mrs. Seip is out in schools almost every single day working with students and staff. On the next slide, I want to talk a little bit about the budget request for this. As I mentioned, we have the program portfolio and the framework has these goals. We have food recovery program, recycling program, school gardens, green

[01:28:45] teams. Those of you who may remember the gallery will walk out here. We have with the students and their faculties, the sustainability council for students, and the professional development for staff. So currently the sustainability division is a single person, and she's done an amazing job developing all these programs and what we're asking for here is a single FTE as a staff person to help support and execute all those programs as we continue to look forward to developing those the new programs. If you go to the next slide you'll see that the investment for that is $196,000

[01:29:22] and as far as I can see the return on that investment is immeasurable as we see what an impact it's had in our schools with our students already to date. So the next slide we go into the transportation division you know one of the things that amazes me about the transportation division is the things that happen on an every single day basis. Picture they make 60 routing changes every single day. So the students and their transportation arrangements change 60 times every single day and that's what our routing staff manages each day. They have 73 field trips, 153

[01:30:02] daily special needs trips and 40 average daily field trips for athletic events, museums, local farms, those types of things. The new programs that we're developing with teaching and learning and Department of Academics will continue to stretch the Department of Transportation as we increase our number of routes on a daily basis.

[01:30:23] Currently, we have 767 buses and over 500 light fleet vehicles that serve other functions in the school system. You'll see the changes in their budget. We're adding 19 bus attendants, and those are done by staffing standard based on routes.

[01:30:41] So we've estimated the number of routes we'll have next year for specialties runs, and we expect that to increase by 19 for this coming year. We have two area supervisors and one central vehicle maintenance technician that are also staffing standards that Mr. Jones mentioned earlier that we had earned those as far as the staffing standard in the years prior but hadn't taken those, and we put that off as long as possible.

[01:31:05] So that really concludes my overview of the department, the life work of nearly 2,000 dedicated folks of individual and team contributors to the LCPS mission. And I welcome any comments or questions. Thank you.

[01:31:21] Thank you, everyone, for the presentation. Board members, do you have any questions? Mrs. Griffiths. Thank you, Mr. Lewis, for that presentation. I still feel like we're cutting custodians, but I did want to ask you about the 2.2 million that you received, the check that you got.

[01:31:41] Where are those funds going? Also, I see that the sustainability person would make 196K. So if you can explain, are we cutting?

[01:31:56] I think it's two separate questions. Are we cutting custodians to hire a sustainability person? But also, where is the 2.2 million going? Thank you. So I'll have to defer to Mrs. Willoughby for help with where the money is and how that gets deposited in the general fund.

[01:32:20] And Mr. Lewis actually did a great job of explaining. We don't necessarily tie revenues received to specific programs or departments. So this revenue would just be additional funds to the school operating fund to support overall division needs.

[01:32:40] Is that where we get our year-end funds from, the extra year-end funds? Our year-end funds are a result of a variety of factors of either receiving additional unanticipated funding. It can come from savings, additional savings throughout the year.

[01:33:00] So this in particular, while I can't recall what fiscal year, like are we expecting the 2.2 for FY26 that it wasn't budgeted for FY26, So this would be an additional revenue, but while I wouldn't say it necessarily falls to the fund balance, it helps to offset revenue shortfalls that we are experiencing this year due to reduced enrollment.

[01:33:27] So again, there's always pluses and minuses in revenues and pluses and minuses when it comes to expenditures. I would just think that if we're receiving $2.2 million from sustainability, that money could go back into our schools that need renovation. Because, as I had mentioned previously, a lot of schools want to see now what the renovations are.

[01:33:49] They don't want to wait 10, 20 years for, you know, a check to come through. That wouldn't happen to be quick, but it should really go back into the schools. That is my thought, and I think a lot of our schools that need renovations would agree with me.

[01:34:06] Thank you. Ms. Riccardi? So I just, again, maybe a newbie question. You've got to explain to me the custodian scenario here because I saw that you wanted to add the custodian supervisors but reduce the number of custodians.

[01:34:26] Is that right? How does this do the math for me? Okay, so the math is that we have allocated, and I'll get the exact numbers, 19,000-some-odd square feet that each individual custodian is responsible for.

[01:34:46] So, at each school, we take the size of the school, divide it by that number, and that gives you how many custodians we have to do that. What we've done, and we've challenged ourselves, and Dr. Spence has challenged us, the board has challenged us, is to look for ways that are we making sure that we need to continue to do things the way we've always done them.

[01:35:03] And so, we've looked at that, and we believe that if we change that number to 20,750, that that still provides us with an adequate number of custodians to clean our facilities and not have any reduction in the level of care and the level of cleanliness we have and allows us to do that with a smaller group.

[01:35:22] The lead head custodians are in a supervisory role, and so we would be adding those. And I will say there's also three custodians generated by this staffing standard that we would be adding to the custodial team that kind of offset at least three of those for the Parkview High School because the new building is larger than the older building, So it is going to generate a higher number of custodial crew.

[01:35:52] Dr. Rasheed. Thank you, Chair. My question was about LINC and how much LINC collected from LCPS in fees last year. And then in terms of that change, how will the change be communicated? Thank you for the question.

[01:36:09] We'll take down as written the cost of the fees related to, well, actually, now that I say it out loud, light bulb moment, The savings that we expect to incur, the $1.5 million, is in line with what our costs are. And so, again, that's across the whole division.

[01:36:26] That's the fees that we have been paying to link. In terms of communication, absolutely. This is why we wanted to start the conversation today and start sharing information about the elimination of the district-wide fees. I would envision we would work with our communications area to highlight the change.

[01:36:46] We could also look at how it's also very transparent when you're paying. I'm thinking of if you happen to pay online for your county taxes, it's very up front in terms of what those additional fees are. I'm envisioning something like that. And lastly, related to that, also emphasizing for our families that we also continue to take good old cash or check, which would avoid those fees.

[01:37:17] Mr. Pepper? Thank you, Chair Chandler. I'm going to piggyback a little bit off of what Dr. Rashid said with the link. I assume that the, so their fee structure is different than School Cash Online, MySchoolBox.

[01:37:33] In a lot of ways, the link charging per transaction is inequitable, particularly for our students who are not as financially well off and maybe are unable to make large deposits all at once, right? If you go in every month and I have, you know, 20 bucks I can allocate to my student at lunch, That's going to be $260 in fees every month, whereas at the beginning of the year, if I can throw $200 in, it's a one-time $260 fee.

[01:38:01] Is there a way we can work with Link to make it a percentage, or is there another company we can use, or is there something we can do as I think about our families that really have very tight monthly budgets that maybe don't qualify for free and reduced lunch? We have already started conversations with Link.

[01:38:19] Link is our, they're not just our electronic payment platform. They're actually our ERP system, let's say, for school nutrition. So it makes it a little more difficult of wanting to look for another vendor. However, as I mentioned, we are engaging in conversations with contract renewal in terms of trying to negotiate a different fee structure.

[01:38:42] You'll hear on next week when I present information on School Nutrition Fund, more information about that because absolutely we've done a lot of analysis in terms of the impact to families and I'll just give a preview our analysis is if a family did I think it was either a monthly or a bi-weekly deposit for just the student lunch that that equates to roughly about the you know four percent which was in line with the other payment platforms and four percent is more of what you see out across other sectors in terms of

[01:39:18] of payment processing so we would absolutely you know again work with communications to highlight trying to be aware that it's a per transaction fee currently and trying to maximize what those deposits look like and again highlighting though that we can also take cash or check mrs griffiths thank you madam chair mr lewis i also had a question about the electric buses. Where are we with the electric buses? How many do we have? I know we were able to

[01:39:58] obtain those buses through a grant, correct? Have they been working out? I'd like to have some details on that, if I may. Sure, we'll take that down as a question and get some information back to you. We did have a slide during the capital budget that talked about the electric buses versus the propane buses and the grants and where we plan to move forward and since i don't have that in my memory we'll get that in and share that with the board and the questions thank you mr spenson thank you madam chair um question for mr smith um i was just wondering if there was an aspirational

[01:40:37] staffing standard for digital experience or if this current staff or the revised staffing standard kind of meets that aspiration there is not one because we are at that so um if with the staffing standard changes, we will be proficient to provide all the support we need for schools.

[01:40:53] Great. Thank you. Mr. Chernoff. Thank you, Chair Chandler. I think I'm sharing similar concerns about the credit card fees. It's just sort of jumping out at me. I mean, we've had lots of conversations over the past two years about fees. We've had them about athletics fees, fine arts fees, CTE fees, there's fees for everything. So I guess it's sort of, I know that there are some alleviation of fine arts fees being proposed. I think that'll be covered a different day and I'm very grateful for that because we push that through curriculum and instruction and we've had fulsome conversations about those things. I just want to make sure it's

[01:41:27] not one for the other and I really want to make sure that we're thinking about access for our students and their families. I mean as a parent in LCPS I use all three of these platforms very frequently and in some cases it's the only choice and in turn I hear that you're saying like we can use cash or check, that's an additional step for a lot of people. And access is about convenience these days. And so for parents, using these online platforms is a huge convenience. And like I said, a lot of times, if you want to buy spiritware, you got to do it through these platforms or show

[01:42:03] up in an event and buy it with cash, which is, again, an additional step. So I just want to be mindful. I understand the savings and I understand what we're doing with that. I just want to make sure to my colleagues point to just reiterate that the communication is clear and that people understand that and that if we do is there a backup plan for families if we sense that that is limiting their access is just something I'm sort of thinking about I don't really need an answer to that sort of hypothetical but it does worry me because a lot of kids being able to do the things that they want to do in school rely on these platforms so I'm just echoing some of the things that I've heard here and I'm gonna ponder that

[01:42:42] a bit. Additionally, I have a question for Mr. Smith as well. In our, I'm sure you won't be surprised by this, but in our December curriculum and instruction meeting, we had a very robust conversation around device usage, particularly one-to-one device usage for primary grades.

[01:43:01] And this was sort of a push that came from me, from my community, hearing from my parents that this over-reliance on screen time especially as it relates to our youngest learners is something that parents are concerned about and as an educator and someone who studied child development I also have my concerns post-COVID that we've become heavily reliant it's sort of become the norm so we had like I said we had a very robust conversation about that I'm very appreciative for the usage data that was brought to us by the various teams and departments I'm just wondering

[01:43:33] because we talked about potentially looking at an option for moving or offering choice even for first grade to move to carts. We do that for kindergarten right now. I obviously want more than just first grade in kindergarten. I think that that would make sense to at least minimum extend to K through two. And so I just wanted to look because we had talked about potential options for the budget and I did not see them in the budget requests that were not filled as well as in the SION. So if you could speak to where we are with that, and if that's something that a board member would need to bring forward, I would appreciate that. Thank you. So that's correct. We

[01:44:12] had that conversation in December. DDI's budget was due, I think, the first week of October. So we had already submitted our FY27 budget and all of that process that goes behind the scenes to make this wonderful book, that process. So it would need to be something that brought up as part of process with the board, or it could potentially be an end-of-year funding allocation, since those would be single one-time purchase with no refresh cycles needed to them. So you're looking at about $300,000 for a grade level. $300,000 to move first grade? Correct. It's about $300,000 a grade level.

[01:44:46] It's $850 a cart times classroom, so it just depends on how many classrooms we have allocated to those grades. All right. I appreciate that. I'll formalize that question just so we have it in writing and I'll get it to you but that is probably board members going to be part of the discussion for me at least thank you Mr. Pepper this is just kind of a thank you chair channel this is a follow-up really to Mr. Chernoff's question about the cost of a cart if we do switch to a system of cards I understand there's a cost per cart but would not the cost of providing

[01:45:18] laptops go down since now the educators would be sharing laptops so the conversation that we had revolved around just giving a place to store the devices, not a reduction in total devices. We would still provide a one-to-one device for students. They still need them for things like standardized testing. Every single student needs a device. So we would still assign them one per student, but they would not do things like travel back and forth from home, and they would be located in a central location in the classroom. Ms. Chernoff? Can I piggyback on that, though? I do

[01:45:53] think there was some discussion about the future cost savings if we didn't have to keep reassigning them to kindergartners because they would live on the carts? Is that something that could potentially be looked at down the road? We'd still have to deploy devices and they have things like warranties, which we'd have to take into consideration. So we have a pretty large logistical shift of doing, we do kindergarten devices and then they don't get a new device until third grade. So even if we were to keep them on carts, if as new kindergartners would come in, then we'd have to give devices to first graders or there'd have to be some sort of additional device deployment that's built into that.

[01:46:27] Like a placeholder? So we could have some conversations around what that looks like. But currently, devices are deployed to kindergarteners, third graders, sixth graders, and ninth graders, and they last between three to four years. So we would still have to have those refresh cycles in place. Makes sense. Thank you. Well, I want to thank my colleagues for bringing up these issues.

[01:46:48] These are also issues that are very important to me. When it comes to the devices, this is something that I'm hearing more and more from constituents than I have ever before, especially at the elementary school age. I am curious if there has been any sort of check-in across the division, if there's a standardized approach to storing devices in the classroom already.

[01:47:14] I can think of some classrooms that I've been in where teachers are not necessarily allowing students to keep the devices at their desks or at their tables, and they may already have a solution beyond a cart. And I think that might be something that could be worthwhile to explore.

[01:47:32] And, again, as a parent, I often add money through links incrementally because it's a way for me to control access for my children, right? I don't necessarily want them to pay for school lunch every day.

[01:47:50] So I definitely appreciate the fact that you're looking into some other options, and I wonder if there might be a more equitable approach to that that would allow us for better access. So thank you for looking into that. And with that, Ms. LaBelle, could I please ask you to read your disclosure?

[01:48:11] Oh, sure.

[01:48:54] 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 items 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.

[01:49:13] Specifically, as a school board member, I am eligible to receive health insurance and related benefits as an LCPS employee. In addition, as a former LCPS employee, I, as well as my spouse, receive Medicare Advantage insurance benefits through LCPS.

[01:49:32] These benefits, however, affect thousands of employees well in excess of the statuatory three employees whose interests may also be affected, of which my spouse and I are included. I can and will participate fairly, objectively, and in the public interest.

[01:49:48] This disclosure will be reflected in the public records of the Clerk of the School Board for five years. Thank you. With that, we'll move on to the final item of our work session, Item 4.02, Continuing to Invest in our Engaged Community.

[01:50:04] This item will be presented by Ms. Natalie Allen, our Chief Communications Officer. Good evening, Chair Chandler and members of the Board. Thank you for the opportunity to share information that spotlights the critical work happening regarding continuing to engage our LCPS community.

[01:50:20] In this Sion, you'll see starting on page 115 that we have allocated five additional school-based family liaison positions as well as software that creates efficiencies related to translation services as part of this category. As you have heard recently, both in a board presentation from Mrs. Dawson and Mrs. Boyes and for new school board members during board orientation, our family liaison's primary goal is to serve as a bridge between families, schools in the broader Loudoun County community. While they serve all families, their work is

[01:50:57] intentionally focused on those with higher needs. This work helps ensure students' basic needs are met so they can come to school ready to learn and succeed academically. In addition, family liaisons support families in engaging meaningfully with their schools and becoming active participants in their children's education. They help families navigate school and division technology, understand available opportunities and resources, and build confidence in supporting their children's learning, attendance, and academic engagement. This slide illustrates the continued and growing impact of our family liaisons across the division and reflects a

[01:51:36] comparison between last year's data and what we are already seeing this school year. During the 24-25 school year, family liaisons supported an average of 3,000 to 4,000 families and 4,000 to 5,000 students each month. This year's data shows that needs remain high and in several months have increased. These numbers reflect both sustained demand and a growing reliance on family liaisons as trusted connectors for our families.

[01:52:05] Also, as part of this budget, we have an ask for new translation software. The current avenue for staff to request translation services is sunsetting and will no longer be in service as of the end of this school year. This is an opportunity for us to find software that will best meet our needs and streamline our process, as well as eliminate duplication of effort.

[01:52:24] As you know, multilingual services are another key component of FACE and are essential to ensuring that all families can fully participate in their child's education. LCPS provides both interpretation and translation supports to help families communicate with school staff in the language they know best.

[01:52:41] Our team includes part-time, on-staff interpreters who collectively represent 24 languages. Families and staff can request an interpreter or written translation through their school's family liaison. In addition to our in-person and scheduled supports, we offer on-demand interpretation through two platforms.

[01:52:58] These services help ensure that language is never a barrier to understanding school information, meetings or supporting student learning. This slide illustrates the scope of multilingual service requests across the division and how those needs continue to evolve over time.

[01:53:17] Each year Loudoun County Public Schools supports thousands of requests for written translation and spoken interpretation to ensure families can fully understand school communications and engage in meaningful conversations about their child's education. Ensuring that these services and supports are available to our families is essential to making LCPS accessible and responsive.

[01:53:41] And while what I just spoke to were the additions you'll see in this year's Sion, it is also important to remind the board about some of the items the LCPS-based budget covers in regard to our engaged community. Our budget covers many of our division-wide communications platforms, including what we use for our division and schools' websites, rapid notification system, and newsletters.

[01:54:00] It also includes funding for graphic design and video production services, family and community engagement efforts, social media management, employee recruitment and retention efforts, and more. let me know if you have any questions regarding supporting our engaged community. Thank you.

[01:54:20] School board members, do we have questions? Mrs. Griffiths. Regarding the school liaisons, did you say that's going to be under face now? I am familiar with several liaisons at the different schools. That was not under face before. So if you could clarify for me. Sure. When we re-orged last year the family liaisons who were under outreach under outreach services under sarah

[01:54:48] boys came over under my department yes mr. carty thank you so much um so i'm just i'm really excited about the fate of the face program and our family liaisons in our schools with a district that's about 87 percent minority majority we have just about every language you can imagine but particularly our English learner and our Spanish population in Sterling is a really hard population to connect with

[01:55:25] because they're busy working, in many cases, multiple jobs in the household and throughout the district. It's just a really big challenge, so I'm very excited about that. One of my questions for you all is when we're looking at the staffing standards for family liaisons, And, again, I'm going to kind of push this the same way I was pushing Dr. Slevin in this whole process, too.

[01:55:50] What is the ideal? Because having just one family liaison in a school of 500 or 600 students doesn't cut it. I know that just by gut. I know that that doesn't work, right? Yeah, just being there, you know. So I would love to see kind of what the aspirational goal is for that to serve our students.

[01:56:12] it's all part of this increasing reading and learning and engaging with our families in that community in particular so i would love to see kind of what the stretch goal is and i know we're meeting separately so we're going to have this conversation privately as well but i want to make sure that we get this kind of on the record too that i really would like to see what we need to really support our students in all of our title one schools and of course i'm particularly concerned about sterling but all of eastern loud and we have you know this is a concern absolutely and we are so glad you asked that question. I would say, and I'll not speak for Mrs. Lawson if she wants to speak as well, but we've had these ongoing conversations, and we couldn't agree more that

[01:56:52] family liaisons are an integral part of every single school community, and we would love to see the number increase, especially in our higher-need schools. I just have one follow-up to that, too. So I also know that we've got a lot of community organizations helping out in a lot of different ways with our schools as well and I'm excited about that well I guess one of my big questions is do we have kind of protocols for how we're vetting the the organizations that are supporting these schools I'll just put a question mark after that yes we take everything through risk management and procurement

[01:57:30] and we have a system in place regarding you know mo use and those kinds of things and I if mr. Austin if you want to talk further about that yes we do we vet those partners through our risk management and procurement and Sarah and I miss Boyce and I work to create MOUs with them to ensure that our students are safe our partners are appropriate for the school division and supporting the needs of our students thank you school board members and thank

[01:58:08] you to the administration for the presentations this evening with that we will now move on to our closed meeting vice chair Donahue do you have a motion yes thank you madam chair I move that the Loudoun County School Board recess this public meeting and enter into a closed meeting pursuant to Section 2.2-3712 of the Code of Virginia for the following.

[01:58:32] Consultation with legal counsel and briefings by staff members or consultants pertaining to actual or probable litigation where such consultation or briefing in open meeting would adversely affect the negotiating or litigating posture of the public body as authorized by Section 2.2-3711 sub-A sub-7 of the Code of Virginia and consultation with legal counsel employed or retained by a public body regarding a specific legal matter requiring the provision of legal advice by such counsel as authorized by section 2.2-3711 sub a sub 8 of the code of virginia let's see vice chair donahue has made a motion

[01:59:08] do i have a second second thank you um it has been properly moved and seconded that the loudon county school board go into closed session is there any discussion seeing none um clerk please open the vote board members please record your vote clerk please close and display the vote the motion passes unanimously with all board members

[01:59:39] present the board is now in closed meeting the board is now coming out of

[03:21:52] closed vice chair Donahue do you have a motion yes thank you madam chair I move that the closed meeting be adjourned that the Loudoun County School Board reconvene its public meeting and that the minutes of the public meeting reflect that no formal action was taken in the closed meeting vice chair Donahue made motion to adjourn the closed meeting do I have a second second thank you I have a second by miss Chernoff it has been properly moved and seconded that the Loudoun County School Board adjourn the closed meeting is there any discussion seeing none clerk please open the vote board members please record your vote

[03:22:29] clerk please close and display the vote the motion passes unanimously with all school board members present by sure Donahue do you have another motion yes thank you madam chair I move that the following resolution certifying the closed meeting be adopted and reflected in the minutes of this public meeting.

[03:22:47] Resolution number 22-25-26, whereas the Loudoun County School Board has convened a closed meeting on this date pursuant to an affirmative recorded vote and in accordance with the provisions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, and whereas section 2.2-3712 sub D of the Code of Virginia requires a certification by the school board that such closed meeting was conducted in conformity with Virginia law, now therefore be it resolved that the Loudoun County School Board hereby certifies that, to the best of each member's knowledge, one, only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by Virginia law were discussed in the closed meeting to which the certification applies, and two, only such public business matters

[03:23:25] as were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered by the Loudoun County School Board. Thank you. I have a motion by Vice Chair Donohue. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you. I have a second by Mr. Pepper.

[03:23:41] it has been properly moved and seconded that the Loudoun County School Board certify the closed meeting. Is there any discussion? Seeing none, clerk please open the vote. School board members please record your vote. Clerk please close and display the vote. The motion passes 8 to 1 with Mr. Svensson, Ms. Chernoff, Ms.

[03:24:06] Chandler, our vice chair or excuse me is there and actually if we could get a a point of clarification to certify the closed meeting.

[03:24:28] - Yes, thank you, Ms. LaBelle. My understanding is if there's a member who doesn't vote in favor of the certification, then they would need to state what scope they felt went out of that topic on the record.

[03:24:50] - We can reconsider. - All right, we'd like to take another vote, please, to certify. Clerk, thank you for clearing the vote. school board members, please record your vote. Clerk, please close and display the vote. This motion passes unanimously with all nine school board members present. Now, Vice Chair Donohue, do we have another motion? Yes, thank you, Madam Chair. I move that the Loudoun County School Board authorize counsel for the school board to proceed in the manner outlined in closed session. Thank

[03:25:30] you. I have a motion by Vice Chair Donohue. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you. It has been seconded by Mr. Svensson. It has been properly moved and seconded that the Loudoun County school board um is there any discussion i'm seeing no discussion we will go ahead with the vote clerk please open the vote board members please record your vote clerk please close and display

[03:26:04] the vote all right that motion passes five to four with mr svensson chair chandler vice chair donahue mr pepper and dr rasheed voting yes and miss ricardi mishernoff mrs griffiths and and Ms. LaBelle voting no.

[03:26:23] With that, seeing as there's no more business, January 20th, 2026, Loudoun County School Board. I'm sorry. - I'm sorry, just very quickly. No, no, super quick. Ms. Willoughby just asked me to just to remind you one more time of the process for questions.

[03:26:40] Just if you do have questions from tonight's session, if you would just forward those to her, she will handle getting responses to those. We'll get them as quickly as possible. Thank you. - Thank you very much for that kind reminder. And seeing as there is no new business, the January 20th, 2026 Loudoun County School Board fiscal year 27 operating budget school board work session to include a closed session is now adjourned. Thank you. And please drive home safely.

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