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Loudoun County School Board, Student Services Committee Work Session, Wednesday, March 25, 2026

Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2026
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 58m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/1177063046?rel=0
BoardDocs (School Board): https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/loudoun/Board.nsf/Public

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-11. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:00] Let's start over with the microphone. I'm going to do it like this. I like standing because it's very teachery. Welcome, everybody. I'm John Pepper. I am the school member for the Dulles District and also the chair of the Student Services Committee. I am joined by my school board colleagues, Ms. Carrie LaBelle from Catoctin and Ms. April Chandler from Algonquian, also the school board chair, as well as our representatives from SEEK and GIAC and MSEC.

[00:00:23] I'm so excited to have us all here. So I am officially going to call our first work session to work on policy 5340, the safe and supportive removal of students from the educational setting. And with that, I am actually going to turn this meeting over to Ms. Tedra Richardson, our assistant superintendent of the Department of Special Services, who is going to lead us through the first of two work sessions.

[00:00:49] Thank you, Chair Pepper. I appreciate that. It is truly wonderful to have you all here with us. for our first work session. Here's an overview of our time together. You should have printed copies with your packets of the presentation for this afternoon.

[00:01:06] We are going to start with introductions, and so I will ask you to use the microphones at your table if you could state your first and last name and your role, whether you work for LCPS or you're a member of SEAC, MSAC, or GEAC. And so I will start with table one.

[00:01:28] Lyndria Bland, Edge Coordinator. Hello, I'm Cartland Floyd. I'm the Director of Diagnostic and Prevention Services. Hi, I'm Shanaz Khan. I'm the Chair of SEAC. Table 2, if you could introduce yourselves.

[00:01:49] I'm Donna Smith, the Director of Procedural Support here in Lyme County. Liz Crotty, the past Chair of SEAC. I'm Banan Malcawi, Delegate for MSAC. Hi, I'm April Chandler. I'm the Chair of the School Board, and I represent Algonquian District. Table 3.

[00:02:07] Good afternoon. I'm Carrie LaBelle. I'm the Catoctin District Representative. and also the SEAC representative for the school board hi i'm jennifer shea i am the GIAC co-chair and a gifted middle school teacher good afternoon everyone kirk dolson director of student services for loudon county thank you all and we do have an unnamed table four over here they're going to help with the facilitation we have laurie winslow she's the um she's the executive administrative assistant for the department of student services

[00:02:45] and Nakia Purnell is our new director of special education. All right, so the first thing up for us is to go over the basis for why we're here. And so you do have some reference documents at your tables for you to look through and work through as tabletop teams, but we are here because we have circumstances within the educational setting in which we have to remove students for disruptive behavior or interfering behaviors within the educational setting and they don't

[00:03:21] quite meet that threshold of restraint or or seclusion we've also been asked to draft this policy because the school board on february 25 2025 voted that seclusion is a prohibited practice here in lcps so this brand new policy that we're going to be working through was drafted the request of our school board members as you approach this work through today's work session and our work session scheduled in April you want to be mindful of some of the key changes to practice that are really highlighted

[00:03:58] and lifted up in this proposed policy which is the parent reporting and documentation piece of any of these safe and supportive situations and then And certainly our stakeholder impacts is also that level of documentation, what those procedures are going to be for documentation and any training aspects that we need to have for our administrators and staff members.

[00:04:25] All right. For your reference, you do have copies in your packet of Policy 5345, Restraint and Seclusion of Students, as well as Regulation 5345. You also have a copy of Policy 8210, which is the Introduction to Student Discipline, and then you have the Policy and Regulation 8215 in-school disciplinary measures, and those are all reference documents for you to use as we move through our tabletop work this afternoon.

[00:05:00] All right, now it's time for you all to individually, so as individuals, no talking at your tables, not yet, Please take out your red line copy of policy 5340.

[00:05:22] All right. So we've, yep, you got it. You all got it. Okay. You're going to have some individual think time, but your focus for today, we're going to go over the purpose section as tabletops. You're going to pick that apart. Then we're also going to do section B during today's work session, which is definitions.

[00:05:43] And then we're going to do section C, which is conditions for use. And D, expectations for professional learning. So we're going to focus on those four sections today. But now you have some individual time to really sort of look through that policy on your own and process just for yourself how you're feeling about what this policy is stating and putting forward for our practices as a division.

[00:06:15] So here's some ground rules for our feedback, right? focus on the policy, not individuals or specific incidents, be specific and actionable and constructive within your feedback, use evidence or examples when possible, and we will try our best to make sure that we don't have repetitive comments, okay, so we can really work to synthesize and narrow down our feedback. Okay, so with policy 5340, if you could please focus on the first four

[00:06:51] sections as individuals. And you're going to be asking yourselves these questions as you're looking at those first four sections. Areas of clarity or confusion, potential concerns or gaps, and initial suggestions or alternative approaches. Only for sections A, B, C, and D right now as individuals. And then we'll transition to our tabletop exercise. Give you about five minutes

[00:07:25] for that like three to five minutes for that okay certainly i don't want to interrupt your think

[00:16:27] time and you can continue to reflect and think about those guiding questions as as an individual as we transition now to our tabletop activities i want to give you guys enough collective time together so we're going to do our section by section tabletop all right so each of you you You have the copy of the policy.

[00:16:50] At your table, your recorder, so the person that is going to be typing into the Google document is the DSS director that has been assigned to your table. So for table one, it's Dr. Floyd. For table two, it's Mrs. Smith.

[00:17:06] And for table three, it's Mr. Dolson. All right, now you have to select the other roles. Who is going to facilitate and keep the conversation going at your tabletop? who might be the timekeeper, and then who is going to be the reporter.

[00:17:26] So after we conclude our tabletop time, who wants to be at the microphone to share out on behalf of your tabletop? So if you could select those roles first, please.

[00:17:48] Have you selected your roles?

[00:18:08] Can I see a thumbs up that we're all set at our tabletops with our roles? Table two is debating.

[00:18:29] Okay, so now that you've selected your roles, and Table 2 is still duking it out a little bit, that's okay. You do have three steps per each section, okay? And so the note taker is going to be recording your responses for Section A, what is the observation, what is clear or unclear, okay?

[00:18:56] Then impact, what are the implications for staff, students, and stakeholders? And then recommendation is suggestions, improvements, or alternatives. And so this is what the data collection sheet looks like for each of your tables.

[00:19:14] And so now is really your tabletop time to have that discussion. It is currently 4.50. We will come back together as a collective group about 5.20.

[00:31:03] Just to assist with your pacing, we have about 15 more minutes as a tabletop group before we will report out.

[00:42:55] Just a friendly reminder, five more minutes.

[00:49:05] Okay, we're going to wrap up our tabletop discussions.

[00:49:46] Thank you for your time in engaging in the review of the first four sections of our policy. Now is the time for your selected reporter to choose one policy section that really stood out that you had maybe the most robust discussion about and share for us the observation, impact, and recommendations.

[00:50:17] I will start with table three. One of the biggest issues for our table was the exclusion of the definitions of isolation and exclusion to then have them repeated in every section do you have any recommendations we have recommended including the definitions and possibly somewhere talking about the removal of the student from instead of the school environment

[00:50:54] from the current instructional setting and then it should also say supervised in that definition just because to some the school environment could mean the whole school not just that current instructional setting and there's a very big difference between removing a student from the school and removing them from PE or math thank you table three all right table two we also were talking about the language differences and how that made things confusing with the

[00:51:34] educational setting school environment instructional setting we really focused on the definitions section and what it is that we actually need to have defined You know, we have the isolation and exclusion, which we understand actually are prohibited practices.

[00:51:55] And so maybe rather than having those as the definitions and seclusion, of course, having a prohibited practices section later on that, you know, and that might make sense to have also closer to where we have our expectations for professional learning since we get into, like, the ethics and all of that.

[00:52:19] We also spoke a lot about the word removal at our table and how that still feels like a very negative kind of connotation. And we were throwing out a lot of different kinds of languages. We're not sure that we landed on what would be better.

[00:52:38] But because there's such a difference between a situation where a student is taking a break and it's voluntary versus, all right, friend, we need to exit this space. And so how we can kind of capture the expanse of those situations that are occurring so that people know what it is that they're doing.

[00:53:02] Thank you, Table 2. Now it's Table 1's turn. So we took a different tack a little bit with the isolation and exclusion. Because they were removed in Section B in the definitions, we just took out their references and the remainder of the policy because it didn't make sense to have them later on if they weren't in Section B.

[00:53:26] And because we don't really have these definitions anywhere else, it didn't feel like they just fit in this one kind of unique policy, particularly with the time limits. And there's a lot of, like, other kind of unusual things about them that make them very specific.

[00:53:44] The other thing when we're looking at definitions, a couple things that we thought about adding, particularly in number three, where students may take a break under supervision, we wanted that defined as LCPS staff supervision. So that we know it's one of our staff members who's actually supervising these students who've been trained and we can talk about that later on And some just a little bit of like wordsmithing in there as well with things like these areas must remain unlocked be free from hazards Just very kind of overstating what these rooms or locations

[00:54:18] Look like the other thing that we had a tough time with was how are we going to guarantee what a calm environment is? Because what's calm for me might not be a calming environment for you so whether we the goal obviously is calming to you know return that student to a situation where learning is possible um but how do we reconcile are those words needed because realistically we're trying to keep the students safe and we're trying to get them to back to where they want to be but i can't ensure a calm environment if it's in policy it's very difficult obviously we all

[00:54:56] don't want just you know the blank room with a little window in it but it's going to be it's going to be different for for everybody and then if i may i know we're supposed to talk about one we had a really robust discussion on um as well we're talking about um the really kind of the two big things in there one we felt like that part from in addition did not fit with everything else that was going on in this policy this policy was really about the safe and supportive removal from students and it didn't fit about staff and i got why it kind of was in there but it didn't feel like this portion on staff mental health fit necessarily with the rest of the policy

[00:55:35] and then we're also concerned about what all staff meant for training and what that's going to look like and I'll just I'll just leave I'll just just drop that little bomb in here at 527. Thank you all sounds like you had some great discussions at your tabletops and thank you for that so our next steps staff will take this information we will synthesize it yes likely with the assistance of AI

[00:56:13] because it's going to be a lot of information. We will plan to have section-by-section summaries. We'll blow them up. They'll be around the room the next time we meet for you to look at sort of that summarized information from all three groups.

[00:56:32] And then we will have the same sort of exercise for the remaining sections of the policy. We do meet again on April 23rd, 2026, 4.30 in this same room, and we'll be focusing on sections E through I.

[00:56:53] At the end of our collective work, through our two work sessions, staff will then take all of that feedback and rework each section and bring back an entirely new policy to our Student Services Committee on May 21st at 4.30.

[00:57:12] And I will make sure to extend invitations to all of you to come to that meeting, to hear and to see the revised policy. And so we just really are truly appreciative for your collaboration. I've made the recommendation that this is how every committee meeting should be.

[00:57:31] That's what I informed Dr. Ellis of. before she left that this is going to be our new structure moving forward for all committee meetings so I'm just wanted to say thank you guys again thank you for your time thank you for your willingness to collaborate with us and to give us the honest feedback that is needed so we can continue to support and serve our students schools and families at this time chair pepper I turn the meeting back over to you thank you miss Richardson thank you once again all for being here thank you for your time and feedback and just care and creating and

[00:58:07] helping create a policy that works for all of our students and with that I am going to adjourn this Student Services Committee work session March 25th 2026 and I will see you all in April

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