Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, Performance Monitoring Committee Meeting, Tuesday, June 2, 2026

Date: Tuesday, June 2, 2026
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 1h 1m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/1198446608?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.

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

[00:00:06] All right. Good evening. I'm calling to order the Performance Monitoring Committee meeting for Tuesday, June 2, 2026. I am joined by Ms. April Chandler of Algonquian and Ms. Lauren Chernoff of Leesburg. Tonight we're going to be reviewing a couple of information items here on the stakeholder survey results and the data dashboard discussion.

[00:00:31] We have no public comment, I see, so we're going to move on to 3.0, the meeting minutes. Do I have a motion to approve the meeting minutes from our last meeting for May 5, 2026? So moved. Second. Second.

[00:00:47] Thank you. It was moved by Ms. Chernoff and seconded by Ms. Chandler. And those meeting minutes are all in favor say aye. Great. And the meeting minutes have been approved. We'll move on to 4.0, our information items.

[00:01:04] The Department of Academics is presenting on the annual stakeholder survey results. And I will turn the floor over to you guys. Thank you, Ms. Carty. Thank you for having me here this evening to talk about the annual survey.

[00:01:22] I want to walk through some of the results today. So if we could move to the next slide. So just a quick overview. Survey window is open from February 19th to March 17th. We deploy the survey a couple different ways. For families, we send an email out to the first two contacts in ParentVUE for every school in which they have a child enrolled.

[00:01:43] For school-based staff, we send them an email as well. students actually log in through a public url by entering their student id and that allows only that methodology allows for single taking of the survey only um things we want to talk about with that is that we send out reminders throughout the survey period so that should only go to non-participants we also sit and provide technical assistance we receive many emails about not finding links things like that so we support participants that way we do translate our family and student surveys into our top five languages, being Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, Vietnamese, and Urdu.

[00:02:22] And then for some schools, we do have some paper surveys upon request. We'll send them the template, and then we'll manually enter those data as well. Before we actually get into it, I do want to talk a little bit about how reporting is rolled out as well, so this is kind of the bookends of it. So we do reporting internally where we create a Qlik app for division-level staff, and from there we create separate click apps for principals to be able to review their own data we give them some time to review and process their data and then we open it up to all staff and then the next phase after that is we put out our public public pdfs on our research website so people can see all the

[00:02:57] results by each school move on to the next slide so what we're looking at here is going to be the participation a couple things that are noteworthy here is that the high school students they take the virginia department of education school climate survey it's high schoolers this year middle schoolers next year and whoever whichever group does not take that survey they take our survey so we'll go back and forth and that'll come up again in a little bit in terms of participation i would say this is probably the best participation by students that we've seen that i've seen since i've been here in four years school-based staff is pretty strong as well families we've seen some

[00:03:36] waning participation from families on our surveys as well. That said, it's a little bit of a balance because we don't want to dismiss the opinions of those who did take the survey, but at the same time think about, you know, how widespread those perceptions are. So if we could move to the next slide. So the way we're going to go through this part of it is we're going to go through strengths and opportunities for improvement. And strengths are going to be defined by the top five highest percentage of combined agreement and strongly agree responses. When we look at the calculations, we do not exclude the don't know from the calculations. We include them in that,

[00:04:15] because when we look at agreement, these are the people who are actively saying these things are happening, and that's what we want to focus on for this. On this slide, we have that for this year, and then we also have the three-year trend as well. So you can see that these are pretty consistent across the three years as well, and really the emphasis, the sort of the theme from these items is going to be on safety and respect. So if we go to the next slide. So conversely, this is the highest percentage of strongly disagree and disagree. And we do that for one reason is that we don't want to make sure that the don't know doesn't dilute anything,

[00:04:54] as well as these are the people who are actively saying these things are not happening. So similar to the last slide, the three-year trend is shown. And really what we're seeing here as far as the kind of the the focus of these items is going to be on feedback whether to be the school on student work academic risks and consistency going the next slide very similar concept one of the top five items really we're looking at the primary theme here being staff supporting each other as well as supporting students so we have a high level of agreement around those two concepts and on the

[00:05:32] next slide um you know we're looking to deal with the the disagreement pieces has to do with planning time, time to plan and collaborate, as well as discipline, specifically consistent enforcement and student awareness of consequences, and that's going to come back in just a few moments.

[00:05:50] It is important to note that there's been steady improvement on each of these areas over the last three years. So you can see that, you know, we want the disagreement to decrease, and we're seeing that happen across these items. So looking at the middle school students survey, you know, as a reminder, they take the survey every other year.

[00:06:09] that's why they only have two years on here you know we're looking at the theme of basically positive relationships with teachers and peers one thing to point out is the difference in perspective between middle school students and staff about students knowing their consequences for their actions if you look back on the teacher one and the previous one of the staff one that was one of the highest levels of disagreement here it's one of the highest levels of agreement so we're seeing some disconnect between those two concepts um if we move on to the next slide um that said we also see some some consistency with

[00:06:46] that consistent enforcement of discipline between staff members and middle schoolers so the other thing that's important to point out is the improvement that we see in students treating each other with respect regardless of race or other differences as well as school cleanliness looking at the next slide for elementary students really the big strengths are going to be around peer and student relationships so relationships with each other you'll see those ones up there that do not have another one with them there's ones on the middle school those are new items that we added this year that's going to be part of the belonging scale which i'll talk about in

[00:07:25] just a moment or two but we can see very high percentages on those and then on the next slide what we're going to see here is that similar to all the others the staff as well as the middle school students that consistency and discipline has that high level of disagreement that we're looking at across those three populations as well so that's sort of the general through line across staff school-based staff middle school students and elementary school students so if we move on to the next slide and this is the introduction of our belonging scale what we did is we used

[00:08:01] we created 16 items based on information that's in the literature as well combined with some of the survey items sample survey items in the book belonging and a culture of dignity and so we combine those. When we're looking to develop a scale, we're going to create more items than we think we need. And then we'll do some analysis over the summer to see if that needs to be pared down at all to see if there's some overlap. Really, the themes of the items in the belonging scale are going to be about relationships with teachers, relationship with peers, and access and

[00:08:33] participation in different activities as well. Next up is going to be our net promoter score. So when we're looking at the net promoter, we're thinking about an individual's connection to a concept. It can also be used as a proxy for trust and or employee engagement. So in this case, what we're looking at here is that each of these is, I'm sorry, the family one is down a little bit from last year, but it still falls into the good category. And then the division level net promoter score from staff members is up from 30 last year. So it's up two points. So

[00:09:08] seeing some progress there. And then on the last slide is going to be the school level net promoter score. This is the first year we asked the students the net promoter score question. We know middle schoolers all love school, so there should be no surprises here. That said, the families and staff ones are down just a point from last year, but they would still, in this case, they would fall into the great category. So we're still seeing some very positive, you know, movement there. So with that said, I know I just walked through survey results very quickly.

[00:09:44] There's a lot of items, and that's why I focused on the strengths and opportunities for improvement concept. But with that, I will open it up to any questions. Thank you so much. Yes, sir. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[00:10:00] Thank you so much for the presentation. I'm curious. I believe this is something that's been happening within the division for quite some time. Do we ever take a look at what the trends indicate beyond three years? Like, if you were to reflect on what the perceptions were 10 or 15 years ago, would we have access to data that could give us that information?

[00:10:24] So that's a great question. And one of the things to consider to that is how long have we been administering the survey in this form, which has been for a number of years. But usually we've got up to, I think, four years in our survey platform right now, which is where we pull the data. We could probably look back a few years beyond that.

[00:10:42] But the survey, you know, changed a bit when I got here four years ago. And, you know, so what we need is we would need, like, what are the constant questions that we've seen across those? And we could certainly take a look into doing that. I wouldn't say we'd be able to go much beyond five years, though. And I would add to it that the sense of belonging and the equity work really took hold maybe six or seven years ago.

[00:11:06] So 10 or 15 years ago, we weren't necessarily collecting belonging data. we weren't is it's deep conceptual into the equity work so some of the questions and concepts are relatively new in the last like six or seven years okay thank you thank you madam chair and thank you guys for the presentation I think middle schoolers are hilarious I just especially right now with my two going out the door every morning like oh no more so I just thought that I gave me a chuckle because middle school it's just a tough time in a kid's life I am very

[00:11:45] And I want to thank Dr. Ellis for getting back to me earlier in the week, because really to me, this overarching data tells us some things like we're doing a generally pretty good job. And I really appreciate the consistency that we're seeing across. It is a little, a lot concerning to me that less than 10% of our families are responding.

[00:12:07] I don't know what that means. if maybe one could wonder if they're happy and so they don't feel like they need to fill that out or they just have survey fatigue so maybe we should give them a survey to find out. No, I'm just kidding. But we have been giving a lot of surveys recently so I found that interesting.

[00:12:25] But I actually find the school-based data to be really fascinating, especially to hear from our students. And I think the schools have gotten really strategic in making sure that they take the survey during advisory or at a certain point of the day to ensure that kids are having a chance to respond so that we really can see that. And I had asked earlier in the week where the data lives for the individual schools. And so if you all could just share that for the public, I think that that is an important point of reference. Thank you for that. And to that point, so the individual unit of analysis for the survey is the school. So it's all about the school that they're in. So the school level

[00:13:02] data is going to be what's key in this. Right now, we have the survey data in ClickApps inside of our own business intelligence software for principals to review, and that will be available for staff. For the public-facing view of it, what we will do is probably by the end of the month, we will generate a PDF for each survey, for each population, for each school that will be posted on the research website that's available for the public to see. We'll also try to put out some information about an overall survey summary. But ultimately,

[00:13:37] we have the school data living on the research website for people to be able to go there and look at the data for their own school. I appreciate that. And I believe last year's is still up because I was digging around. Oh, you pulled it up. Awesome. So I did pull it up. So if you go to the research webpage on the LCPS site and click on surveys, and then you'll get our beautiful division-wide survey calendar that Dr. Blakelock maintains. And then if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see the 24-25 school climate survey reports. There's a folder. I'm assuming

[00:14:14] you'll use the same format. There's a folder for each school. And then inside each folder, you'll see a summary document of each survey. That is helpful. And I'm very curious about getting to like the micro level of all of that, much like I've spoken in the past about achievement data. You know, it's great that overall LCPS is thriving, but there are things that get disguised in that overall overarching data. And so I guess my sort of question is, it's twofold. It's sort

[00:14:49] of, so what and now what? So what does it tell us? And then what does that spur us to do? So if someone could speak a little bit to the process that goes on behind the scenes, maybe at looking at that individual school climate data? Is there a pattern of looking back across years and seeing if trends change? Leadership does change in our schools. Curriculums change. Different initiatives come in. I would be interested to know what the county does with that data on a more micro level to address potential supports. So I'll take the first run at this and then pass it on. So basically

[00:15:28] what will happen is that the way that principals and school staff are able to look at the data is that they are able to compare how they did this year to the year previous and what that change looks like, as well as how they compare it to all the other schools at their school level. So they can see that context of where they fit into the whole and how they've changed over time. This year we actually put out some PDFs to them for them to be able to stand in front of their staff to present that actually had three years of data because people kept on asking me to download data from the click app so we just created reports for them so schools will actually use that to inform their school improvement plans they will look at the

[00:16:06] areas where they need to grow and their strengths and they will actually use that to inform their school improvement plans over the course of the next year when you pass it to some of my colleagues at the table to speak a little bit further about ways they could also be used thanks dr. Blake lock so in addition to everything that he just said I'll just add that the Department of school leadership the specifically the level directors and the executive principals use that data in conversations with the principals as they coach and evaluate the principals while it's not specifically used in the evaluation process in terms of using the survey to set goals for the principal we

[00:16:44] don't recommend principals do that it's a really important part of the conversation and to your point you know as leadership changes in a school it's It's really helpful for a new principal to have all of this information in front of them when they, you know, when they start in a new building, you know, set their own goals for how they're going to work with their students, their families, and their, and their staff.

[00:17:08] So that's, that's another key way. So I would say school improvement process and then in coaching conversations with the principals. I appreciate that. And I think, like, as we kind of wrap up the year, kind of looking at some of that transition data, looking at, you know, whether people are staying or going and whether or not that has to do with climate and then thinking about achievement.

[00:17:29] I mean, I think you could put a lot of layers here, especially for, you know, really, we are saying belonging matters here in Loudoun County Public Schools and that that's what kids need in order to learn. And is our data telling us that? Is that something that we're seeing? And I think we've talked about it before in PMC prior to it changing over.

[00:17:47] but is, are the schools that have, you know, high achievement, do they also have a high sense of belonging? Are there schools that have a high sense of belonging and low achievement? And, you know, how are we kind of connecting all these dots? So I'd be curious. And I just had one other like food for thought. I was, it's curious to me that families and students seem to be in the disagree and the strongly disagree that they're talking a lot about feedback loops. And so to me, I was reflecting on this and wondering also, it made me think about the walkthrough data we did for the instructional framework and how the weakness we saw there, or an area

[00:18:24] for growth, sorry, an area for growth is goal setting. And I was thinking about how those two things could really strengthen one another. So if we can get really good at students knowing what they need to learn, how to set a goal, how to then reach their goal in that feedback loop, and then communicating that out back to the students and also to the families, I think that could be a two for one. And that's just my food for thought of the day. Definitely. Can I add one tiny tidbit to your thought? Sure. So I also think I'm connecting it to just things I've been thinking about in multiple conversations I've had over the past several weeks is how do we close that feedback loop? Because we get that, we get

[00:19:02] that feedback a lot that we don't seek input or staff don't feel their voices are heard or, you know, et cetera, right? On the flip side, I think people in, in our office think they are constantly asking for feedback and input, right? We have tons of examples of that, but how do we close the loop to let people know how we used their feedback, right? Just because we use your, just because we have gathered feedback doesn't mean you're going to see it in your own words in the final product, right? But it's important information to have and it's, and your ideas have been incorporated,

[00:19:41] but I don't know that that final, like, closing of the loop always happens. Yeah, it's definitely food for thought. And just being on this committee, and we get a lot of data every time we're together, but it's like some of these things are now starting to connect, for me, at a higher level of like, ooh, that's a trend.

[00:19:58] And, yeah, we are seeing that outside of school, too. That's how families also feel. So those could be some common threads, I think, as a school board that we could take and say, this really needs support, and whether that's directing, you know, the superintendent operationally or that's something that we can do with finances or initiatives i mean i think that that's something that's worth exploring in terms of how we can leverage this kind of data that's it anything else you want to add to sure um so just in reflecting on the participation rate for families

[00:20:30] has there been any discussion about what we could do to try to overcome this participation rate or what opportunities we have for engaging in a different way to collect more information so one thing I failed to mention during my presentation was that there is a very comprehensive communications campaign that we put out we put out newsletters we create principal toolkits we put out social media posts we do a lot to broadcast it out there I do think to some extent getting better at closing the loop like we were just talking about would help it so people can understand like the impact of their feedback and goes dr. Tyler and I were

[00:21:08] recently having some discussions about sort of a innovative way to do that don't want to reveal that in this conversation here so be on the edge of your seat but it's something it's sort of something we haven't it's the one thing we haven't tried yet that may be available to us just because to your point you know I would say just based on work I've done previously you know in a large district like this ten percent is probably the minimum you want to see given that you know hundred twenty two thousand that's you know twelve thousand responses and we've been above that before my time here but really trying to see what we can do to try to get people more engaged and it's more than I'm just like regurgitating back what we've heard but also being able to deliver to them like

[00:21:46] this is the change that occurred based on that feedback as well this was the impact of your feedback so it is something we are working on those in the research office know that as soon as that survey goes out I'm you know checking participation rate you know five times a day we do put out what's known as participation reports to the level directors and executive principals so that they can see participation level by school so if there's a place that they want to try to push or try to support that's data that's available for them as well and that's a dynamic report that they get real time every time they click it and I do think that helped the staff and student participation rate this

[00:22:23] year the challenge is reaching families and it comes out in newsletters and all the ways that we communicate with families and the one thing I'll add to that too is that that's going to be two contacts at least for student so you know maybe one parent takes it but not the other so there is a little bit of you know wiggle room in there is it the 7% being a truly 7% of our total population or if it's going to be a little higher than that because only one contact took it and not the other thank you guys for this this is really

[00:23:02] interesting information as always and I'm I guess one of my questions is just to make sure I understand so this is mostly just this is all sense of belonging questions do we have all no I mean it so slide 12 is the sense of belonging specific question okay the rest of it is going to be you know questions from across all the domains in the survey it's just going to be the highest five agreement and the highest five disagreement just for sake of brevity in this presentation okay could we get a list of all of the questions and all I mean you said you're gonna post it you post all the questions and all the results in that yes we will post all about the last one okay yeah

[00:23:39] that'll be really helpful I think I think also on the website where you guys post the results, I think it'd be really great for you to post some of the bullets that were outcomes from last year's underneath there, right? So you can say, well, this is the survey that was taken, and based on these results, these are the, I don't know, however many action things that we took from it, and this is how we've implemented it. That way, it's where the results are, and people can say, oh, this is what they did with that information. That might be a good place to put that, as far, and probably others, too, but I think that might be a good start. I guess one of my questions I have, I mean, I have a bunch of questions about this, and I always find surveying

[00:24:17] questions and just survey processes interesting, too. And I'm wondering if we're surveying the right questions that people are wanting to provide feedback for. I mean, there's any number of a thousand reasons why people, the families didn't, you know, there's a low response rate for the families, and it could be that there are other questions that they would be more engaged in answering that aren't on here. So, and I'm not sure I know exactly what they are, but that may be something to kind of think about too, is instead of just asking the same questions year to year,

[00:24:51] which is also helpful to be able to get trends on these things that we're doing well. I would, I would wonder if now we need to move maybe to some other questions just to kind of stir the pot a little bit as far as the data that we're gathering. And as far as the opportunities go, obviously really interesting as well. And obviously they're mostly moving in the right, they're moving in the right direction.

[00:25:15] I'd be really curious about that middle, too, and kind of the middle six or so that are in there. You see there's 16 questions? Oh, no, there's 16 questions for the belonging scale alone. Oh, okay. There's probably roughly 30 to 35 questions. In the survey?

[00:25:31] Per, for each of the surveys, yes. Well, bless you guys. And that is something to consider for the participation rate, is that they are long, and seeing if there's anything we can do to pull them back a little bit, because they are fairly long surveys. Yeah, and they've just got the calendar survey, and they've gotten – what else have they gotten in this last month or so?

[00:25:48] They've gotten a few CIP surveys. There's been many surveys throughout the year, and we're trying to pace the calendar for every year. So we're starting to actually set up the calendar for next year right now so that we can try to create these windows and create some blackout periods around them so that we're not getting survey after survey after survey.

[00:26:05] Yeah, 30 questions is a lot. Yeah, I mean, it's just interesting. I mean, there's not a – it's hard to crack the nut on survey data and getting people to respond and whatnot. So I think it's really good. I would love to – for us to be able to take a look at this and then, again, cross-reference this against some things, but I'm not sure exactly what to cross-reference it against, which might be a conversation for later in this meeting.

[00:26:27] But it's definitely good information to have. And then, you know, the net promoter scores, I always find them fascinating and interesting and just not sure how much I put a lot of weight in them anymore. But you said that, and again, not having any historical information on here, you said they both went, the family numbers went down one or up one?

[00:26:53] Just down like a point or two. For context, the first year that we presented the net promoter score, the school staff one was like negative six, negative eight, somewhere in that way. So we've seen a fair amount of growth, at least at the division level, For the net promoter scores, it's just a matter of, like, what does that trend look like over time and making sure that it stays upright.

[00:27:14] So, you know, maybe next year middle schoolers will give us something above zero. Well, yeah, so when we're looking at this in the out years, I mean, the net promoter, like seeing that kind of growth would be really great to know because in and of itself a 47 or a 37 or a negative 6, which just makes me laugh at middle schoolers.

[00:27:32] It's fine, but it's really the context that that sits in what the historical trends have been that's the real the real key here so and then I'm just gonna go back because I looked at this but the school-based staff responses is a 42% that's pretty that's pretty high and so so that tells me a couple things to number one they clearly want to provide feedback and if they're willing to answer that many questions in a survey then that's that's telling to write that you've got a huge number of people that want to provide

[00:28:07] feedback. And so, um, you can slice that a whole bunch of different ways. Um, but it's interesting. And that makes me kind of wonder, are there other questions that we need to ask them, um, to further flush out some of the findings with, especially with the issues that they're having right now?

[00:28:26] I mean, I know they mentioned in here, um, staff prep time was the, yeah, not new and that's fine. And it's obviously it's getting better because it went from 66 two years ago down to 58, which is, um, which is a good trend, but that's still a pretty, you know, that's, by and far their biggest issue.

[00:28:46] And so then the question becomes, what are we doing right now to help with that? And there are probably initiatives in place for that. But I think with measuring those kind of things and what we're doing action-wise versus how are we continuing to trend and what's going to make really move that needle for our school-based staff is really important.

[00:29:05] So that's all I have on this one. The one data point that we haven't really done a lot with in this particular report because it is a fairly cumbersome task to analyze it is the feedback from the open-ended responses. So we will actually be working on that over the course of the summer.

[00:29:24] Tried to do something a little different with it for this meeting, but I was not able to get it to a presentation ready. But we will have some folks working on and analyzing and doing thematic analysis so we get a good understanding and are able to extract and use those data as well. And that might be something like similar to the strategic plan survey where we break it out from the net promoter score categories so we get those three different distinct categories.

[00:29:47] So one is not washing out the perception to the other. Yeah, one of my employee engagement survey tools that we use for clients does that. And it's really great to see your unhappy employee or most disengaged employees in what they have to say versus the most engaged in what they have to say.

[00:30:03] And then the middle is always really fascinating, too. So that may be a really interesting thing to look at as well. Yeah, I was going to ask you earlier about open-ended, but I forgot about that. So thanks for letting me know that that's on the table as well. What was the biggest kind of aha and then the one thing that's like the most concerning that you've seen out of the results so far?

[00:30:25] From these particular results, I really can't speak to one way or the other, just coming at it from a pure analytical perspective. The couple things that really do pop out at me is when we go back to that feedback on work, timely and helpful, thinking about the implications for how it relates to policy 50-30, which I spent a lot of time working with.

[00:30:48] um is one of the things that jumped off the page for me um looking at some of the pieces around discipline that have been somewhat consistent over the years as well as that disconnect between how staff feel about discipline and awareness of school rules and those sorts of things and then how families and students feel about it and that's disconnected it's going to be a connection there so those are the ones i mean i said i didn't have any but those are the ones that uh really data people always have something jump off the page at me um as well as digging in um a little

[00:31:21] bit more on what net promoter score looks like at the school level it's something we've not done a ton with but are looking to advance that we did something with it for the first time i think last year because to ms sharonoff's point like the disaggregation is really where the sort of the the meat of the data lie and looking at what that range is from you know who might be a negative 30 and who might be a positive 80 across the school, across the continuum from both families and staff members.

[00:31:50] It's not analysis we've done yet, but it's interesting things that we've seen in it and we've done it in the past. Do we have any demographic data for these survey results, too? Do we collect that at the beginning so that we know anything about the students or the people that are responding? It depends.

[00:32:05] So we have demographics data for the students. For families, it is self-report, and there's a prefer not to answer option with it as well. So we get a rough idea of at least how many of a particular group have taken it, but we don't get a true proportion because of that prefer not to answer a piece.

[00:32:22] For staff members, we ask, you know, I think we ask, like, length of service is going to be it and whether or not there are instructional staff because that drives some of the skip logic inside of the survey. That will be really fascinating because what we see in industry is early career, pretty engaged, then a big drop-off of the like five to ten year and then and then in a re-engagement from like 11 to 15 years and then a kind of a plateauing beyond that so be really fascinating to see how that trends to what we get here so engagement work I've done it's in my previous life as a consultant very similar as far as you know first-year teachers that are out to change the

[00:33:00] world they're engaged up to five years and then you know other life events start happening and engagement trips off and then you know maybe there's more less responsibilities and starts picking up there around like 15-20 years in that period as well so very similar trend yeah it'll be very interesting to see that thank you guys so much for this anything else all right let's move along to the next so we're at 4.

[00:33:30] 02 so this is data dashboard discussion all right so I will kick us off and then turn it over to mr. Smith and dr. Blake lock to talk through some of the details so this really is meant to just be a quick follow-up to our conversation at our last meeting and we wanted to talk a little bit about the dashboard categories that staff is now thinking of based on your feedback and discussion and we have some updates in terms of our

[00:34:07] plans for this summer what we will be working on with the phase one data elements and then mr. Smith has an update for you on our data modernization project so just as a reminder this is what we started with last time we talked we had six categories and multiple data elements inside each category we talked about splitting them up making them collapsing of them having three having 12 this is sort of where we've landed based on all of that conversation which

[00:34:41] was really helpful for us to think about. So we're thinking high-level students, staff, family, and community, and operations and finance. Within students, we think it's really important to separate achievement, engagement, and belonging, and enrollment data. There are enough discrete pieces of data in each of these buckets that we would have a category for each, but we also want to avoid having the user have to click, click, click through many layers.

[00:35:18] So starting with those four buckets of students, staff, family, and community, and operations and finance. So what we would do is ultimately take all of the data elements that you all talked about and that we continue to come up with and sort them into these buckets.

[00:35:36] And I'll ask Dr. Blakelock to add anything I missed, and then go on. You can talk about the next slide. No, I just want to emphasize, we had a really good conversation last time around user experience as far as the navigation piece of it, and really trying to find that balance between having only a few categories but not having to have people click a student and then go to another page and then another page before they can actually get to the data.

[00:36:02] So minimizing clicks has been a big emphasis of it, and that's why we broke down the students into these three categories to try to minimize that. So this is our summer roadmap for right now. Right now we're working on finalizing our landing page.

[00:36:19] There's been a beta put up, which ultimately I've taken a look at. I'm going to be working with our web designer on it a little bit more. And then once we have the proper link embedded in it, we'll be testing that beta page for the compliance piece, the WAG compliance piece. It does work outside of the page.

[00:36:34] We just don't know what it feels like when it's embedded inside of the page. As we mentioned last time, we were using Qlik as the engine for the business intelligence that will drive the dashboard. Not to steal too much from Mr. Smith, but that might be something that evolves as we move in the direction of what he's going to talk about into a different entity that we do that.

[00:36:52] But right now, we're working on inside of Qlik to be able to stand that up. So if you remember last time, I talked about the three different buckets. Bucket number one are things that are on our dashboard now. They're built, and they're public-facing. Bucket number two is things that are built that are not public-facing, and then bucket number three is things that are not built.

[00:37:12] So on our suburb roadmap is going to be, looking at the data elements we have up here, is going to be achievement, which is going to be the APSAT data, which is in bucket number one. Map data is in bucket number two. As far as it's built, it just needs to be made public-facing.

[00:37:29] The engagement and belonging piece for attendance, that is something that we have currently honored, the public casing dashboard. We have it built. We just need to have it embedded into the new dashboard piece of it. And then enrollment, the demographics piece is going to be all in one as opposed to the different tabs that we had.

[00:37:49] So you can have a singular view of all the demographics rather than having to toggle back and forth between them. And then the advanced course pathways, this one right now is going to be focused on high school honors, AP, DE, and IB enrollment. Just because that is something we do already have built that's not public-facing that we could then translate into it.

[00:38:08] Now, one of the things I think we mentioned in the past is that the data has to pass through something we refer to as an anonymous tenant so that the data is secured and confidentiality is not broken. so we it's a collaboration between um department of communications community engagement data science team and the research office to bring all of this to life and get them up there so that is the summer roadmap for what we are potentially hoping to have up there if we can get beyond that great but that is what i'm potentially committing us to right now potentially uh excellent so a quick update on our

[00:38:47] data modernization um so we had talked about this kind of some of the struggles we had how many data sources the manual processing the lift of staff and resources it was taking so this year we have been reviewing solutions and the team has evaluated and selected snowflake so we'll be moving forward with snowflake you'll hear it more referenced as snowflake but really what it is it's a fully managed cloud based data platform will allow us to take all of our large data sets and instead of piecemealing them together incorporate them all into a single managed platform with improved security one of the challenges we have now really is that role-based security, making sure that only people who are supposed to see data are able to

[00:39:27] see them. That is still a manual process right now for us. So when we build something for a teacher to make sure they can only see their class, there's a lot of back-end moving pieces to manage that. So this will really reduce that complexity and allow us to automate, simplify, and then audit against that to make sure we're in compliance. And then the automation of the data processes, like we talked about, so we're not doing as many manual processes coming in every morning and checking which of the 200 data feeds failed and making sure that we actually have accurate data and that it's the most current data. And then the one I think most people are most excited for once we get there is some natural language clearing using generative AI. So being able to just have

[00:40:03] conversational interactions with data versus having to have some sort of pre-built chart or graph. So allowing you to kind of take next steps and be more inquisitive with the data. So current timeline with that is we've procured the product and the services through our friends of business and finance helping us out we're having the project kickoff in a I think next week and then we will begin project implementation in July with the goal of delivering a fully functional environment with some of those data pieces this is going to be kind of an iterative delivery so it'll happen based off of some of the prioritization in alignment with some of the work the data that we already have data we need to bring in and then we really want to have

[00:40:41] a phase one kind of like initial release to do something with that data in January so the team has some beta ideas of what that will look like I think one of the ones that were most intrigued about is providing access to a teacher and having them be able to talk interact with their student data and really you know what does this mean how is this and really use that natural language instead of needing to be kind of like a data scientist to map it all together so we're really excited about that we think it's going to kind of revolutionize how quickly we're able to respond how much we're able to bring in from a data perspective and then help us kind of redirect those resources that are doing that manual work now to then begin doing the backlog of work that we have for all the other

[00:41:19] data sources. So more to come, but very much in motion at this point. Great. Thank you guys so much. Any questions? Thank you so much. So can you talk to me about what the difference between Snowflake and Qlik is and how those are interrelated, phasing out? What is that? What is happening with that? So Qlik is a business intelligent tool. And what we have right now is a data warehouse that's piecemeal that Qlik references.

[00:41:50] So Qlik is basically pointed to a data warehouse that the teams are managing to make sure that the data is being put there. So the data, making sure it's verified, it's clean, it's validated, and that's what's going into the data warehouse. And then from there, Qlik is resigning over top of that to give you that business intelligence.

[00:42:07] So Snowflake will automate some of that and provide some level of business intelligence, but it won't fully replace what Qlik is delivering right now because we will still we'll still be here correct okay because we put a lot into that for teachers to understand and be able to manipulate and use that but the ai thing sounds really cool because it's can summarize all the data stuff like that i just wanted to this is an example of you guys closing the feedback loop on slide four so we gave our feedback and then you told us how it mattered one thing i really love this i think this is better i think it's more user-friendly i think

[00:42:43] the other one had too much on it. The thing I love about this that it inadvertently does, which I don't know if that was the purpose or not, is it really showcases that students are the main thing because they have the most to say in the data dashboard. And I really love that because I think that that is something fundamental to LCPS. And so whether or not you meant for that, it definitely appears that way. Not that the other data categories don't hold weight, but we want our students to have the majority of the focus. Ms. Chandler? Well, it's not so much question, but I will just say I'm really happy to see how all of the feedback from our last session

[00:43:21] was integrated into really meaningful updates, and I will reiterate your point. I do think it's incredibly important that students are at the heart of everything that we do, and it shows in this update, so thanks. Yeah, I agree, and then I guess the question is, so we have a lot of data.

[00:43:38] I was just digging around in there today, so we have a lot of data that's in the dashboard now um, that's public facing. So what are we thinking as far as, you know, staff subsets or family and community subsets of data? Do we have ideas on what we want to put in there for that?

[00:44:00] So we don't have a final answer for sure. Um, but I do think that looking at items on, well, let me back up for just a second. One thing I wanted to say in response to Ms. Chernoff and Ms. Chandler's comments, uh, one thing that Dr. Single and I have been talking about in our, I'm really excited about is that these buckets are starting to really closely align with what's coming out of the strategic planning process. So it's just like a beautiful alignment of stars that I see ahead of us in the next year or so, which is really exciting. And to answer your

[00:44:39] question about other buckets, I think that we could take each of these pieces. So for example, Rather than having a static page for stakeholder surveys, we would have the family survey in the family and community bucket.

[00:45:02] Because if you want to know how families are feeling, instead of trying to guess where on the LCPS website you might find that PDF, you would go to the dashboard and click on families. So those are the types of things that we're sorting through.

[00:45:18] Does that answer your question? Yeah, it does. And then the workforce, on the other side, the workforce stuff would probably go under staff. Yes, exactly. Yeah, the workforce number five. So all of the things that we get asked about all the time, like attrition, diversity of staff, position fill rates, substitute data I know is top of mind, you know, bus driver fill rate, all of those things, those are items that would be under the staff.

[00:45:44] So, again, thinking in terms of what are the fewest clicks and what's the logical progression in someone's mind about where I might find something. Yeah, and then at some point in time down the road, would you then, either through the AI tools or other things, be able to then cross-reference between tabs?

[00:46:06] Can you provide more clarity on the question? Sure, I'll see if I can just come up with an idea off the top of my head. So if I wanted to see student achievement data and staff attrition, yeah, we talked about that, right?

[00:46:28] Staff attrition, right, rates, would we be able to cross-reference those, like that data, either with the AI tool or whatever down the road? So it depends on, you know, what large language model we actually put together in terms of, you know, what's available publicly.

[00:46:46] Again, we get into that idea of, you know, how do we protect student data and staff data by, you know, putting it all in there, but also being able to make that capability. So the possibility is going to be there to do that, but to what level of detail is to be determined at this point.

[00:47:05] Yeah, and then, like, who has the right access to be able to access this kind of thing? That may be a board or an admin kind of cross-reference. And that gets into the role-based pieces that Mr. Smith was just talking about a few minutes ago, that Snowflake does a lot better than our current architecture. Yeah, that'll be great.

[00:47:21] I mean, ultimately, that's the level of data that we're trying to get to, I think, even in here. And I know we're not going to get there with this, and I'm not pushing. I mean, we'll get there whenever we get there on the timeline. But I think that's the kind of stuff that's going to be really interesting.

[00:47:37] And I think even parents, at some point in time, when they realize they have access to this information, they may find some of that interesting, too. but I get that there's going to be permissions-based issues with all that stuff. This is a great update. Thank you guys so much for this. Anything else on this topic?

[00:47:53] We're good? 5.0, new business. The only other new business item I just wanted to mention and I just want to open up the dialogue for is, so we're ending 18 months of work on the committee, and it's been pretty clear that we get a lot of data to come in, and it's a lot of kind of very specific targeted pieces of data and information.

[00:48:18] And one of the things I think starting in August I'd really like to do is as we're pulling together the agenda, start thinking about cross-referencing some of the data reports that we're getting ready to get in August and the out months. And how do we want to see that data in relationship to other pieces of data?

[00:48:36] So, for example, we talked about this just a minute ago, right? I would love to see from an HR perspective the turnover rates, the voluntary and involuntary turnover rates, for the last, like the trend line for the last, you know, four or five years, whatever we've got, and then also take a look at student achievement rates and numbers, and I'm not sure exactly which data points we want to look at specifically for that, but I'm really, so that would hopefully, well, maybe correlate or maybe not correlate, you know, turnover at certain schools or certain

[00:49:12] places and student achievement, and is there any correlation between there or not. I'm really trying to get it at root causes of things and so I'm not really sure which and want to really think through kind of which data points would make sense to test to see if there is any correlation between certain things but that's really what I'm what I'm trying to get out here is instead of just getting one piece of data and getting reports from one program or one outcome for whatever survey or student data achievement data etc that we're really starting to cross reference it between others to see if we can get to some root causes in this case around student performance so some of the topics we're considering are

[00:49:50] really connecting as you said the root causes there may be a relationship between staff turnover and student achievement outcomes what we're looking for with that would be what are the experiences or behaviors that lead to low staff turnover that are actionable so sometimes you can see a great relationship but there may not be an action step to say well what can I do to reduce it. So looking at some of the correlations between staff being involved in decisions that are being made, for example, situations where we do see staff where they feel like they have sufficient time for planning, if that correlates with lower staff turnover, that helps us get at mitigating

[00:50:29] against some of the student achievement challenges. So some of what we're looking for are looking at tying root causes that are actionable to those relationships. What are some of the teacher interactions in the instructional framework that really correlate with a strong climate that leads to student achievement outcomes that principals can act on.

[00:50:51] For example, with net promoter score, what are the principal behaviors that correlate with having a really strong net promoter score that principals can really kind of pivot and act on for the next school year to increase it? So it gets at what you said before. It's the root cause that is an actual behavior that people can actually influence the sentiment there.

[00:51:14] Because sometimes, knowing that there's a correlation, you may not know how to actually reduce staff turnover. So those are some of the topics we're considering for the summer with a lot of factors like the instructional framework teacher actions that really impact outcomes. The interventions that really correlate with strong outcomes for students.

[00:51:34] What are the factors, Dr. Glicklock working on, what are the factors that lead to success in AP courses that are actionable, if that helps to kind of get at the root causes? Yeah, and it's both ways, right? It's like to fix problems, but it's also to say these are the root causes.

[00:51:50] This is what is driving really positive changes in our schools or with student performance or with teacher retention or bus driver retention or whatever it is we're looking at. And so we have the body of knowledge to say, look, these are the things that are working really well, or these are the things that we need to really focus on to kind of flip the narrative on whatever's happening.

[00:52:09] So I think that's exactly what I'm trying to get at now is kind of the next level of the data delivery piece, which is the one-off pieces of reporting is fantastic, but how does it correlate to other pieces of data that we've got?

[00:52:25] Does that make sense? It's late in the day. We're going to go ahead. I really want to say, Dr. Tyler, your point really resonates with me, and I think it's exceedingly important for us to have the information that we need to take that action that leads us to continuous improvement, and that's ultimately what we're looking for.

[00:52:50] So I'm definitely open to the conversation. I mean, you have my full support on this. I think that we are at that point now where we've kind of seen and heard all the major key data points. And I appreciate your leadership and kind of driving this in the new phase as we head into the new year.

[00:53:06] And now we're going to have layers of things. And another thing that I'd add, and I think, I mean, I've heard you speak to this at other times, but is, you know, looking at some of the major budget initiatives, whether driven from staff and through the SEON or from the school board lens, like, are we now seeing those results?

[00:53:22] I mean, one thing for me as a marker, for sure, is EL and co-teaching and some of those things. So kind of circling back to where we have put in actual monetary investment, is that paying off and is that something that we want to, you know, continue to add on so that we're making informed decisions about, you know, processes going forward?

[00:53:40] Those correlations are sometimes hard to draw. So I would, you know, make sure that we do that within boundaries and with care. But I do think some of those conversations are relevant now. I guess I would ask, do you think that how would you, I mean, are there, if there's topics or things that we are interested in and looking at should we relay those to staff and then that would be part of like a roadmap conversation in August for the upcoming year how would you envision that I guess that's more a chair question yeah well I mean that's a great and we could definitely do that I don't want to throw some more work on you guys but somebody's got to be the repository of that those pieces I think also laying out what the content roadmap is for the

[00:54:20] next six months and then as we're thinking and reflecting about what's coming up what would be the logical cross references and product data points that we might want to see with those and if there's any other topics that we want to throw into the mix I think we should so yeah I think some major themes probably would emerge based off of what we've already talked about so I I think that would be good so one thing I want to share that's a project that's currently going on dr. single I are doing with the data science supervisor is really meeting with each department and getting an understanding of their data needs and what they don't have access to and how we can bring it all together which will facilitate what

[00:54:59] you're looking for is being able to make the connections we're looking to make those connections internally by breaking down data silos which is ultimately what we have to do and once we are able to do that we will be able to make those connections much more easily than what we're doing right now where you're getting you know different data points here and there but without being able to see the connection particularly from things that are you know hr versus academic achievement those sorts of things that is a project that is in progress right now and just to add on to what dr. Blake left shared part part of that project is identifying and mapping out a calendar of data conversations at the senior staff

[00:55:36] level so when when is senior staff talking about each of these pieces from from all of our offices not just academic data and overlaying that with a roadmap for PMC for the school board when you receive you know updates through whether it's committees or or work sessions or other items so just aligning all those conversations the one thing I'll say about I absolutely a hundred percent see your point and what you're what you're asking for starting to make those connections it could start to feel like we

[00:56:16] are hunting for problems um so i just want to proceed very thoughtfully about like what what is the ask what are we really looking for when we're asking to overlay to data sets does that does that make sense yeah and i think also too i want to look at like what's working really well right yeah like we just in this whole last data you know this whole last presentation right there's in the survey there's lots of really great information in there so yeah what is contributing to, you know, the different things. And then on the flip side of that, if we pick even just the bottom like key issue for any one of those groups, what are some things that we can do that to really

[00:56:56] help move the needle? Obviously there's been some needle moving in some of those, right? So what's happened, but then how can we magnify that? And what are some of the other data points we can look at to say, oh, well, it could be this, or it could be that. It's kind of like being a doctor and trying to figure out the symptoms to a problem or on the flip side hey this is going really well and what's at what's contributing to the success definitely yeah and being able to share that out I think being really specific about the questions that we're seeking to answer will be helpful I totally hear you it's funny that you said that cuz I was actually thinking the opposite about when we would bring the schools in because the schools are really great

[00:57:34] about highlighting how they're already doing that work and then sharing that with us which really humanizes a lot of what we talk about in PMC so I don't know if that's something I know we've kind of wandered away from that a little bit but maybe we could get back to because I think we can definitely learn from that and a lot of the example I was thinking of was Freedom High School who did all of that work with math intervention and then we were able to share that across other schools and replicate that so I was actually thinking of it in the reverse so I'm glad you mentioned that because that was not my point of thinking and certainly searching for problem areas is not my goal or any of this but I think bringing them in and then something we've moved towards in special programs and centers is having some

[00:58:14] guiding questions across all the programs that we like check in on monitor you know as we work through the year so i don't know if i'm sure there's some guiding questions you're asking as you're going department to department but maybe we could tweak those and make those sort of our foundational questions about how we can continue so we have consistency of what we're bringing to the table what you're going to be asking us and then what our end goal is in terms of which i think for all of us is continuous improvement. I love that so much, especially the concept of consistent guiding questions. Yeah. It's serving us well in SPC because we just sort of needed to like level set on how we could look at everything big picture. It really was for me because I was

[00:58:51] lost, but maybe it will help. No, I think that's really helpful. And I just want to be clear. Like if there's a problem, I want to solve it. Yeah. We just, there's too much to do to go down all the rabbit holes thank you it's interesting in the conversation I do really like the idea of being able to identify patterns and processes that are really working and then being able to share them out so that you can have those things work for other schools too when it comes to the financial conversation I always come back to the part that often we have to make

[00:59:28] investments in big things that don't necessarily quickly show a return in investment. And so I wouldn't want to get lost in that conversation. And I think it's very important that we have a values-based conversation about what's working, what's not working, how we can leverage things in a meaningful way to continuously improve. But I do feel a little hesitancy about just tying it to a number because it's more if there's more to it than that great

[01:00:05] well there's a great conversation um anything else we want to add are we good all right um any other new business i'm assuming no on that good there we go all right then we are adjourned and we will see everybody back in august thank you guys so much

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