Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, Performance Monitoring Committee Meeting, Tuesday, August 4, 2026

Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2026
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 53m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/1215605703?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.

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

[00:00:00] all right good evening everyone i would like to call the august 4th 2026 meeting of the performance monitoring committee to order my name is amy ricardi and i'm the chair of the committee and i'm joined by ms chandler and ms chernoff and we appreciate your presence here today our first order of business i'm assuming we don't have any public comment we do not there we go so we will move on to 3.0 approval of minutes may i have a motion to approve the meeting minutes from June 2nd so moved second it has been properly moved and seconded if there are

[00:00:38] no objections we'll do a vote any of all those in favor aye aye it has been moved three to zero and it's been did you I know yeah I know passes I was gonna do the names but I think we're good sorry guys this is number three today and the first back in August what can I say it's one of those days all right so we're

[00:01:11] going to move on to item 4.0 4.01 the Department of academics and digital innovation data dashboard update I'm not sure who's going to be doing that I'll just give a brief introduction and then turn it over to mr. Smith and dr. Blake Locke we just have a brief update we've been hard at work this summer our teams building out the data dashboard and wanted to make sure that you were aware of all that's happened so I'll turn it over to I think Dr. Blake Locke's going first thank you Dr. Ellis as you can see the dashboards are live very excited

[00:01:51] about that tonight we're going to just walk through current data elements show you the dashboard home screen and then talk about some some other considerations before we go further I do want to acknowledge a few people because this was very much a team effort I want to acknowledge Caitlin Madden our lead web developer Kate Reiser our data science supervisor and Mark Ziminski the research specialists who all work together to get the dashboard to where it is today.

[00:02:14] The icon that you see below there is actually now on the homepage of the website, just below the picture. It is very prominently displayed so that we are actually able to improve the user experience. It takes you directly to the dashboard as opposed to the four or five clicks it took on the dashboard. What we have here is the items in black were basically what was on the previous dashboard and that was our first iteration of it it went live on June 26 to replicate the previous dashboard we then added the two new two new data elements with it being the map scores and the

[00:02:51] advanced course pathways being high school honors AP dual enrollment and IB enrollment and that went live on Friday July 31st the way we have it set up is that we have filters so if you click it in one place it will apply to every other place you click on the dashboard there is a little bit of limitation to that where you see like if you have are in an elementary school and you go to the advanced course pathways page you're just not going to see any data there the user experience is just a little bit better though to not have to hit the filter every time you navigate from place to place so if we could go to the next slide and this is the the home screen so once

[00:03:28] you click the button I showed you before you come right here previously we talked about four buckets which are at the top the students staff family and community and operations and finance everything with students has a lovely construction themed icon on it that shows you that it's coming soon or it's under construction but what we have there in the left hand pane are the different data elements we have there and we can continue to add to those and build those out. The design is fairly easy to use and walk through when you go onto one the filter pops up on the left as well and you can navigate it accordingly. So if you can go to the next slide and finally I want to kind of revisit

[00:04:04] the buckets because that's part of our considerations. Previously I talked through these three of these buckets. The ones that I wanted to bring your attention to is going to be number two, which is the built but not public facing. We did run into a little bit of a challenge with that where we have different developers developing different apps. So my analogy would be if you've ever had a contractor at your house do something and then another contract come behind him or her and stare at it with a puzzled look on his face, that's kind of what this experience was like, was having to reverse engineer what other people had done to incorporate it into a universal design. But we able to accomplish that the other one that i want to speak to is the number four is that data needs

[00:04:41] to be in the data warehouse in order to be on the dashboard so we do have data we collect that is not in the data warehouse specifically probably the best example of that is going to be survey data because that comes into our survey platform i'll be working with our data science supervisor on doing that but in previous conversations mr smith made reference to snowflake for our data modern organization and once that comes online that might be an easier way to incorporate it into it but as Snowflake comes in line we will need to make modifications inside of Qlik as well to point the data in the right place so it's just something that we need to keep in mind as the project moves forward is where we are with our current warehouse as well as far as moving to

[00:05:18] Snowflake and with that I'll ask if there's any question unless Mr. Smith has anything to add I just wanted to add that we are well on our way with our Snowflake project and we have our first use case that we will be delivering we are going we chose some student screen time as the first one where we're hopefully developing both an internal facing dashboard for schools to see and then something front-facing that we're able to share the nice thing about snowflake is it has a an API pre-built API connector for light speed so we don't have to reinvent the wheel to bring that in so once we have our environment up and running we're able to much more seamlessly connect that data and have regular data feeds that then we can manipulate inside of click to

[00:05:55] display whether we want to you know however we want to organize it the same as this data so that's really going to be our first use case and we're excited to bring that we'll probably have just from a timeline perspective we're doing implementation now we're looking at maybe january to have api online and then something to the board in the spring which will also align with usage metrics throughout the year so we'll be able to have a much more robust screen time conversation based off of that data putting that abi connector in a snowflake great thank you guys so much i am so excited i never thought that raising these questions back in

[00:06:32] January it would have been that you know eight months in where we've got all this up yeah this is really exciting work thank you guys so much for all the work you've done on this and I'm really excited to see the rest of these get populated as over time so thank you guys for this um I know I've got some questions but I'm gonna let you guys go first so I know we're poking we're all poking around in it now looking at it going this is cool yeah did you want to anybody have questions yeah I echo mr. Carty sentiments it's very exciting and it's for me seeing some of this is just so good because I remember using click and it's it's really

[00:07:11] reminiscent of that time my question is about sort of the background knowledge I know we've talked a little bit about I know you've said some things like overlay and in tech world is there a way for us to be able and maybe this is part of the snowflake piece I'm not sure to explain to the public what this is I mean I see that it says like data updated annually after spring map window but I don't see the context am I missing that are we adding that so I think those are things that can be added that's part of an iterative delivery is where we'll figure out where we need to explain

[00:07:48] some things more and what makes sense and what doesn't the other thing that I would add is the team put a lot of effort into making sure that this was fully ADA compliant so our previous dashboard was not and we had some limitations there so there was a pretty heavy lift around making sure that things like screen readers um anything for um the web the new web accessibility standards were met with this dashboard so that was a pretty heavy lift from the team yeah and then i'll let uh dr playlock add on to that so thank you for that question and that is something that we have been keeping in mind the goal was to get it up and functional uh in working with the web designer we do have a designated space where we would put some kind of link or button that says

[00:08:25] about this data or something along that and we just need to work through generating the content that would pop up when somebody were to click that button awesome that sounds great um i appreciate that because i know i mean obviously we a lot of us know what these things mean but i think you know for parents i know it's always been a thing with parent view too is even when you can see your own child's data sometimes it just doesn't make sense because you don't understand the context particularly we've talked about this with map and understanding that the lower percentages 50 60 actually for growth are good and sometimes that can be perceived as bad so i think adding some of that context but i i know it's been a huge lift and a huge challenge with the ada so if we

[00:09:03] could link that at some point i think that that would be helpful but it's beautiful it's way faster than i thought it was going to be so well done to the team and thank you for your work thank you miss chandler do you have any questions good you're good i just you know so i'm i'm all this is awesome so now it's like so what's next what's what's the next so tell me a bit more about the kind of the timeline for what's happening over the next six months we talked a little bit about um your stuff but tell me a little bit more about what what's next in this project so we're we're able to port things that we already had data sets built around so a lot of the items that were here and a few of the other ones that were the lowest hanging fruit in order to get

[00:09:41] something to deliver iteratively the next step is really building out what data we're feeding into snowflake and then how we're going to feed that in to be able to build the visualizations based off of that data so I know one of the areas you're probably thinking about are like financial and some of the areas that we'll begin getting that data we're in implementation phase now for our fusion financial side so we'll begin having snowflake conversations probably in February 2027 that system goes live July of 2027 and so from a timeline perspective that system would be live to feed data as of that time now what does that look like and where we're going to kind of be I

[00:10:19] know that's like 11 months from now but that would be when those things would be available to then build visualizations off of them if that helps the overall timeline. Yeah and is that also I'm not as familiar with Snowflake so is that also what information is is in the Snowflake? So the nice thing about Snowflake is it's like a data platform that enables us to quickly have role-based access on data with permissions and there's already pre-built API connectors so there's already an Oracle Fusion API connector built for Snowflake so once we're in that environment we basically enable the API, have the data flows come through, and then we can begin to utilize that data to build visualizations off of.

[00:10:57] So if a budget dashboard or a finance dashboard where we can't do those things now because we don't have that data in the data warehouse, once we have those APIs integrated, we don't have the manual data syncs, we don't have the manual data validations, all of that stuff is built in.

[00:11:13] And so then we're just able to kind of focus on next steps of what questions do we want answered? And I think that's really what the next step is. What questions do we want answered in the finance area of the dashboard? That's great. This is really exciting. I'm excited about the reporting pieces of this as well.

[00:11:32] So thank you for this. This is really great. Any other questions on this one? We're good. Okay. Our next item is 4.02, Department of Academic, Student Behavior, and School Climate Discussion, presented by Dr. Ellis and the team.

[00:11:51] So I, again, will do a brief introduction and turn it over to all of my friends sitting with me to get into the details of the presentation. So at our last performance monitoring committee, we had a great conversation about connected to the data dashboards, but also just looking at the overwhelming amount of data that you all have looked at and wanting to start to make connections between different data sets.

[00:12:23] not necessarily like cause and effect but just looking at the relationship of different elements so after meeting with Miss Riccardi and talking with the team we landed on two sets of data that we do have available from this past year that we know you and the public are interested in and having a conversation about some of the connections between those two so student behavior and school climate and then we also really think it's important to talk about the work that we do in schools and in central office to support the schools in these

[00:12:59] in in student behavior in school climate so we again have all of us here at the table to share a little piece of this puzzle share some data and have a discussion about the work underway in schools so I believe I'm turning it over to Ms. Mitchell. Is that correct? Good evening. So this slide shows all violations for the past

[00:13:30] four school years. So essentially we had 10,000 students that were involved in 21,000 incidences which resulted in 26,000 violations. Please note that the data for the 2025-26 school year is still being reviewed and verified so this is not final data. One thing to note with behaviors of safety concern has a new field which is on the second line which is bus which was new last year

[00:14:04] and that enabled transportation supervisors to enter bus referrals into Phoenix. Another thing to note is that behaviors that are unsafe that are persistently dangerous those incidences are down which is primarily due to the recoding of marijuana and THC distribution which was previously a persistently dangerous violation and is now considered behaviors that endanger self and

[00:14:35] others. So this slide looks almost identical to the last slide with the exception is the previous one was violations. This one is violations that results in suspensions. So again data for the last four school years and this one essentially is 839 students that were involved in 1,000 incidences which resulted in 18,000 suspension violations

[00:15:10] so you can have the same students that are involved in multiple incidences that can lead to a suspension so you have a fewer number of students but they and they may be suspended more than once. Suspension levels at the middle and high school overall are down despite the increase in violations. And one assumption is that the violations are down with previously related to cell phone violations. They are no longer suspendable offenses. So that is

[00:15:48] one assumption that we've drawn between some of the decrease. Before I turn it over to Dr. Blake I just want to add that in board Docs you have two separate attachments that include what Miss Mitchell just described Broken out by elementary middle and high school so those are the two additional attachments and then I'm going to turn it over to dr. B to talk about school climate data trends and Just a note that this will also be the topic of a work session for our August 11th meeting so we'll go into greater detail and

[00:16:25] You all have a preview. Thank you. Dr. Ellis if we go forward one slide thank you um so what we have here is our climate data typically climate is measured through surveys and specifically what we're looking at is the student behavior section of the staff survey so it is basically school staff members perception of how student behavior is managed inside of the building we look at active agreements with people who are actually saying actively saying this is happening or actively agreeing that these things are happening so the one thing I would note is that we see some strong growth on the second one there

[00:17:02] where students know there are consequences for breaking school rules for this per the code of conduct but beyond that we see about eight out of ten nine out of ten for the most part with growth year over year as we've administered this survey over the last three years we go to the next slide in looking at this slide what we have here is this past year broken down by school level just show that the difference in school level and some of the perceptions of some of these discipline how behavior is being approached you can see here that elementary school has the highest middle school is in the middle and high school has you know the lowest level of agreement this is pretty

[00:17:42] typical of what you would see in climate surveys pretty much across the country where we see that basically the consistency and knowing the rules in high school are really our biggest area for improvement when we look at these data right here so if you go to the next slide and we're going to make the connection here in our scatter plot so what we have here is a scatter plot on the vertical axis we have staff perception of student behavior which is amalgamation of all the items we just looked at and then across the horizontal axis we have percent of students of violation and each of

[00:18:18] the dot represents a school and where they fall on that what we see here is what we see a correlation of negative 0.26 which is a small to moderate correlation that shows as you know as those as that perception increases percentage of students with violations decreases or vice versa I do want to point out that ultimately that this is a relationship we can't derive any kind of causation out of this but it does show that there is a connection here one of the reasons potentially for the size of the magnitude of the correlation itself is we do see a lot of clustering of data

[00:18:56] points up in that upper left-hand quadrant so because we don't see as much variance that's impacting what the magnitude of the of the correlation could be so basically like I said we could see this from either direction with one being you know the antecedent and the other being the result and vice versa but to point out the fact that there is a relationship between these two things and it is an inverse relationship which is what we would hope it to be. I'll now turn it to Dr. LaPala to talk through some PBIS. Thank you. In addition to talking about PBIS I wanted to just

[00:19:33] start my part of this with just sharing some of the stuff that lives behind the scenes in terms of the responsive supports that are provided from the division to our schools and our schools to our students. One of the ones that we lead with and that I'm going to be able to speak to because it is within MTSS is PBIS, and that is one of our foundational practices. If you think about a core behavioral curriculum that all of our students' K-12 experience, that's the closest that we're going to get in terms of setting and teaching, modeling, and reinforcing expectations. So again,

[00:20:07] same thing that's been shared is what we'll talk about is that PBIS is not a direct causation, but it's correlational and works in tandem with a lot of other supports. So some of the other things I wanted to highlight were just the direct and sort of intentional approaches that we've put in place to help support our teachers not just in special education but moving down the continuum to help provide prevention and intervention efforts for managing challenging behavior part of that direct response which I spoke to the committee about a couple months ago was the introduction of the behavior resource teachers and we had 13 of them this year supporting

[00:20:47] 26 elementary schools we also implement restorative practices across all three tiers from restorative circles all the way up to conferencing to help manage those behaviors we have the support from our unified mental health team social emotional learning the supports that are provided through morning meeting and advisory and a huge win for a lot of our schools in terms of anchoring this work to have it be lived experiences within the school has been embedding this climate within as a climate goal within their plans for school improvement.

[00:21:21] So this slide is, I'm sure you can put together what the intent was, but it's to really show just a relationship here between providing foundational PBIS supports, what the division aims to do in terms of our responsibility in leadership roles.

[00:21:38] We do have a division-wide commitment to this work. It's been sort of a mandate, a requirement since 2013 that all of our schools would implement, PBIS K-12. We are also doing work moving forward, extending that down into our ECSC programs for the upcoming year.

[00:21:56] Also, just aligning those systems, supports and building capacity at the school level through PBIS leads, supporting teachers and teams. I'm equally as excited about the data conversations because we use data all the time to help drive the decisions and help provide data points for those plans for continuous improvement.

[00:22:14] And then the partnership for families and community. Behavior doesn't just happen within school, and so it's really important for us to continue to provide that bridge so families also know some of the language that we're using to help support that in the home environment and vice versa. Getting to the school level, what you'll see there, those are the effective components of PBIS implementation.

[00:22:34] I won't read them to you. And the end goal would be that we're hoping to, at the end of the day, this is for kids, so we really wanna improve those positive student outcomes, whether that's increases in belonging, student climate, attendance, and then decreases in things such as office discipline referrals and suspensions.

[00:22:56] Took a little bit of an interesting journey here because sometimes we hear PBIS explained in ways that aren't exactly right. And so I thought I would take you through the next couple of slides in terms of anchoring us to the bottom left-hand corner.

[00:23:13] You're gonna notice these are the goals based in literature of implementing PBIS effectively. So the first one is to decrease those office referrals and suspensions. So the game of you may have heard that PBIS is just rewarding kids for doing what they're supposed to do, but when we actually survey our staff and talk to them and do focus groups and walkthroughs, they actually tell us that we notice an increase in positive demonstrations of behavior, which has led to reductions in office referrals.

[00:23:43] So again, that creating those opportunities for students not to always get things, but to know that they belong, that they're noticed, that demonstrating the appropriate behavior has been noticed. The next slide focuses on, we really need to know what the rules are.

[00:24:03] Anywhere we go in life, there's rules of engagement. Sometimes they're pretty clear, and sometimes we have to figure them out if people don't tell us what they are. Sometimes we might learn them correctly, and then sometimes we might not, and we have to correct our behavior. So it's incumbent upon us as adults to provide that level of support to kids so they know what's expected of them so that we can help them correct those behaviors if needed.

[00:24:27] So you may have heard that PBIS is just ignoring behavior and only focusing on the positive. And what you'll see an LCPS staff member said is we actually teach these behaviors and then we reteach them if we have to.

[00:24:43] And what's not reflected here is that PBIS also is part of positive discipline. So if those expectations are not followed, there is a plan in place for what those appropriate consequences will be. The next one is focusing and final one is focusing on strengthening relationships.

[00:25:02] You may have heard that it's just giving prizes and rewards to bribe kids. One thing that we do try to not say in our schools is we actually don't like to use the word reward because that does have a negative connotation associated with it so we like to treat behavior the same way we treat academics we want to recognize praise effort and focus on the process and so this was nice to hear high school students in particular say they recognize my effort and it made me feel seen and so something interesting that dr blakelach said that just resonating with me right now in this moment is as you looked at those climate scores and you noticed and he

[00:25:42] mentioned across the country these look pretty similar from elementary middle and high school I want you all to know that that high school continues to be an area of emphasis for us the kids tell us they want it and so we are continuing to work in terms of shaping adult behavior and a greater understanding of what PBIS is versus what it is not so this slide is going to give you because I figured you needed some data because it had been a couple slides of not seeing any graphs so this slide is actually going to take it back to some implementation data and at a very

[00:26:18] high level this is connected back to the climate survey data and what we see is that the schools that have higher implementation of PBIS so they're teaching expectations they're reinforcing them they're recognizing kids they're being consistent and they're applying positive and equitable consequences. They have higher climate ratings as reported by the staff responses to those items that you saw on the previous slide. And so those are things like students know the school rules, they know the consequences, they reinforce their behavior, teachers and staff across the board

[00:26:54] consistently provide those rules and enforce them in consequences, and that staff feel that there are supports to help students develop their behavior. So there definitely is a correlation between the implementation and the outcome. So shifting just with two slides to a little bit of additional impact that I can give you.

[00:27:18] We have year one under our belts now with the behavior resource teachers and what a successful first year that has been. All of them have returned for a second year. So 100% retention, we're very excited about that.

[00:27:34] And we actually hired another one. And so we will be able to support 28 elementary schools for the upcoming year what this slide is showing is sort of a direct overlay on top of the work with PBIS so in the role of a behavior resource teacher they really support three main buckets they're serving as the PBIS lead in their elementary school so they're supporting school wide they're directly providing support to classroom teachers for coaching around classroom management practices at tier one and then they are providing responsive or and or intervention

[00:28:08] services to students who may be in need of that level of support. So this slide breaks down kindergarten through fifth grade. The first bar is the number of adults in the building who submitted what we call a request for support, which means I have a concern potentially about a student in my classroom. Can you come and talk to me about that? Sort of like a consultation, like a ticket if you would for to pick it up for service sometimes those requests for supports

[00:28:42] end up being after conversation not kid related and more environmental and so then in that case the brt the behavior resource teacher sorry would provide direct support to the classroom teacher while supporting the students in the classroom so it wouldn't be students specific the second bar shows you the number of students that received ongoing responsive supports from behavior resource teachers. So that could be checking in. How was your weekend? It could be doing a small behavior

[00:29:16] plan with them in the classroom. And then the third bar is the number of students who received behavioral support. So those numbers don't always match up because the request could lead to different needs. It could be end up being a teacher need and a student need. So that's why you're not going to see a one-for-one correlation with all of those numbers. My final slide just takes that grade level breakdown. I probably should have put these in the opposite order upon reflection. But this just pulls all of that data up from the grade level and pulls it together

[00:29:51] in the aggregate for you across those three areas. So again a really successful first year. We appreciate your support behind this initiative look forward to continuing to grow this as one of our behavioral supports within our schools thanks dr.

[00:30:13] LaPaula so that was a lot of information and I'm sure you have questions and so we I'll turn it back to you miss Riccardi and we are available to answer your questions okay well thank you so much so all right thank you so much for the presentation um I will say coming back from recess is hard so I hope that all make sense but also um it was exciting to sort of dig into this today and and to see I mean there's a lot of very useful and information here for the community um I wanted to just sort of start at

[00:30:52] the beginning um in terms of the um charts with the data trends I think it would be useful where the school year is referenced to include the enrollment numbers just for comparative analysis just gives you really a sense of the number the percentage number of discipline issues relatively it's it just feels like a strong relative number for me in terms of the types

[00:31:26] of incidents by category for someone who's not doing this work every day could you give us some examples so that the community and parents can understand um what type of behavior would fall into behaviors related to school operations what are some examples of what's to what I mean really for each category please sure um so behaviors related to school operations some examples are refusal to comply with request of staff in a way that interferes with the operation of school

[00:32:01] um dress code violation okay um unauthorized use of school electronics or other equipment um relationship behaviors a couple of examples are bullying with no physical injury or cyber bullying and i can give this to you so you don't have to write it all down it's all coming from our SBAR. Behaviors of a safety concern, which are your BSC, those are your alcohol, drugs, tobacco

[00:32:37] behaviors, and that's where the bus entry is, where some of those examples that a transportation supervisor can use are distracting the bus driver, endangering the safety of others on the bus, And then the behaviors that endanger self, assaults, fighting, some of our scheduled one and two controlled substance violations.

[00:33:05] And then those persistently dangerous ones are assaults with a firearm or a weapon, malicious wounding with a weapon, illegal possession of a weapon. Thank you. That's really helpful.

[00:33:21] And I will, of course, pull out my S-bar so I can dig in a little bit more. um okay and then um could we go through a little bit more the incidents that are down because of recoding we just want to make sure i have clarification on that yes so that was just um one example where the looking at um some of the violations and where the decrease was

[00:33:53] is that primarily due to the recoding of marijuana and THC distribution used to be that PD, which was that persistently dangerous, and now it is behavior that endangers self or others. So that was one of the primary reasons for that category, persistently dangerous, decreasing. Gotcha. Thank you. And then with the climate survey again, I believe

[00:34:26] students and teachers participate at a higher rate than families but i did also find myself wanting to know what the participation rates were for the results that were met or included in the report so i can speak to that sure it's a it's around 40 to 45 percent over the last three years for the staff member participation that's great thank you that's a pretty good solid amount right i'll take it and then um i loved your comments about high school and um students seeming to want

[00:35:03] more and asking for feedback and so my first question was what does pbs look like in high school is it a shout out like that that was kind of the implication on the um in the um presentation and then what are high school students expressing that they want in terms of positive reinforcement I love those questions. So what does it look like? Exactly the same as elementary and middle school, like in terms of like the things you're supposed to do, like you're supposed to have expectations, you're supposed to teach them, you're supposed to provide recognition.

[00:35:40] What we do at the secondary level is we just make it more secondary appropriate. So for some kids, it's not always a shout out. In fact, the tickets and things that we tend to see a lot of at the elementary level, they're more for the grownups. And as a way for us to capture the data, we really try to stress that the biggest thing to shape behavior is providing behavior-specific praise.

[00:36:06] so I good job for picking that trash up not just saying good job so if that's partnered or paired with a shout out that's public or a ticket that's fine but the main point is that schools have a have a way for recognizing students great thank you I mean that that really resonates for me as a parent and a former educator myself I really do think logical consequences are the best way and really of course our goal in all of this is to offer children learning experiences and to give them a chance to learn from their mistakes right and and to get better outcomes so thank you

[00:36:45] for that and then I will say in Algonquian district as I've been in all of our schools I am always hearing positive positive positive feedback around the behavior resource teachers and this has been a wonderful experience in terms of the implementation I think that people would probably like to have access to more that's something that's on us I guess but I will say you know I really appreciated sort of hearing all of the different ways that they've been engaging with the school community and

[00:37:20] what their responsibilities are but I do think it's made a big impact and I find my final question really in in looking at some of the all violation trends by school level I wanted to just test like a small theory so I notice in 23-24 the highest number of incidents really is in the middle school but by the time you get to 25-26 it's at the high school is that reflective of the fact that like cohorts are growing and progressing up in grades is it is

[00:37:56] any way to tell of course if you were in middle school in 23 24 right you're going to be in high school in 25 26 and so then that would be an area where i'd be curious if we could see if if improvements were student specific and and you're seeing a change in behavior challenge accepted thank you thank you chair riccardi up to piggyback off of that i was actually gonna i thought you were gonna draw the same correlation i was miss chandler i was looking at relationship

[00:38:35] behaviors and thinking about COVID not to bring it up but thinking about that way that kids interface and sort of now as we're getting further along like are we gaining those skills back potentially just an interesting thought as I look at that social data I have several questions so you need to interject or cut me off so I would I want to start for sure with the positive I agree with Ms. Chandler when I'm out in the schools in the elementary schools this addition you know coming out of Dr. Spence's you know first that was sort of the first charge was to

[00:39:14] address behavior and this was one of the first tangible things we did as a school board alongside of him to support that work and obviously it's paying off I love seeing the correlation between the climate data and the behavior support I think that that's the kind of data that we are looking for at least I'm looking for in this committee to say if something's working let's keep it working my question around some of the data with that is when you say I think it's on slide 14 is that out of the 20 is this to only include the 26 schools that have access to that support

[00:39:47] yeah so that makes yes okay she's nodding yes that makes me wonder how many calls for help there are out there for the other half and that worries me and it feels really inequitable in my opinion I'm sure that those schools are selected carefully but I believe that everyone deserves to have that help and that support so I would be curious to now see the climate data for the schools that didn't have that support and if it's impacting them if you know or we can look it up

[00:40:20] later I don't have the answer to that but I will say for the schools that do not have the 0.5 right because they're sharing two schools are sharing um they are still getting like pbis behavioral support they're still having push-in support they're still having opportunities for classroom pd save having that 0.5 fte um we run the data i we run the data for all the schools but this one i just isolated just to show because we know that there's a behavior resource teacher at those schools we do have other schools that use the request for supports we could pull behavior

[00:40:58] plans for all the other schools um but yeah that that this slide was isolated to that just because that's our hands on that data yeah that with you of course and and that makes perfect sense and you know it's good to see that how much is happening and you know i've i have the pleasure of knowing a couple of them and you know they have been in high demand uh so it's definitely something i think for the school board to think about and consider it's definitely something on my mind because i think it's not only just behavior that impacts climate it impacts i think staff turnover i think if teachers feel supported they want to stay and so i'm you know as we kind of are

[00:41:36] overlaying this data that's it's definitely seems to be a high leverage support that we've added over one year and we're seeing the dividends so that's really exciting and i thank you for that work because i think it is wonderful i think the hardest part for me about behavior is it is there are so many systems and layers that are in place to make sure that kids are having a positive experience and that they're learning from their behaviors in a positive way there's also a lot of transitions especially for our little guys in the handoff and the different things that are happening so their little stressors can be manifest in so many different ways and so

[00:42:14] I think having this in elementary is just really really supportive my and I know the work around PBS I know all the myths and I know that that's really really important work that's happening I am especially excited to see hear you talk about ECSE that is great news because one of the things I've been concerned about is just we're hearing a lot about the behaviors in kindergarten the extreme behaviors that we're seeing especially kids that may not have access to preschool which is another thing we're also tackling yay again a layer so for me hearing you talk about that being

[00:42:53] implemented down to the preschool level is huge and I applaud it and whatever we can do to support that I think is that baton handoff in particular is seems to be really challenging for our kindergarten teachers so that was my thoughts on that and then I think the one thing that just keeps jumping out to me as you do look at these layers there's one glaring statistic that I just concerns me and I do hear about particularly at the high school level and it is that statistic about teachers or other adults at the school consistently enforcing rules and student behavior

[00:43:28] and I think that I hear it mostly about transitional spaces sometimes extracurriculars things where that is all also getting tied in so I'm also wondering and I know this really wasn't the conversation today but do we have data on where these different things are happening are they happening in the hallways are they happening in the restrooms are they happening in mostly in classrooms are they happening during extracurricular I think at the high school level what concerns me about the numbers is to me this feels like the severity because of their age and

[00:44:08] their maturity could be worse and so to see that number and I know it's gone up over the years I think what can we do about making sure there's fidelity of enforcement and implementation and we heard it with the dress code over and over again you can't enforce this so why do it um and to me that's not a reason to not have a policy I mean I think you should have high expectations and policies so for me that's my lingering question from this is what can we do from a staffing standpoint a training standpoint to a support standpoint do we need more people

[00:44:44] um to get consistently enforced rules and I love what you said like it's the adult's responsibility to make sure that kids understand that there are rules and that they need to follow but it's also the adult's responsibility to follow through and so we got to get there because that that is the missing piece I think in terms of why we're seeing some of these increased numbers so it's not really a question it's more of a pondering great thank you so much um you guys know I love the data so it's always really interesting so I have a couple of questions for you guys I think

[00:45:20] um and Ms. Chandler alluded to this with the population size of our students and our enrollment numbers moving it'd be really interesting to see some of these numbers by 1,000 students so that we can compare the numbers year to year regardless of the shift in this thought the population size of the students so that would be you know for each of these would be real interesting to see see that by you know without per thousand students I did note that the behavior related to school operations number especially in high school went up and so I really appreciate the

[00:46:00] clarification on the definition of that and what what's included in that and what's not. So I appreciate that. Is that, how is that, how are those determinations made about what's, you know, how the categories are getting shifted? Is that, I don't know if that's a state level thing. I don't know how that all gets sorted out. It's a combination of things. Sometimes when there are changes to Virginia code. Recently this past year, we looked at our discipline data and the violations. And when they were extremely high, why were they so high? What are some things that

[00:46:35] we could shift where if it's not required by law for example to be reported to law enforcement then why are we reporting it so it looked like we had a lot of incidences that were reported to law enforcement where they weren't required it was more of a practice so we did a lot of work with our school principals to get feedback looking at data for our discipline and making some shifts in that way okay so I get a little concerned when we start recategorizing because it makes it harder to compare things apples to apples and now we don't you know so that when you start recategorizing

[00:47:11] especially on these tables without the caveats of okay this shifted from here and that shifted to there so what is what does it look what are the numbers like normalized it gets harder to compare them apples to apples but I also understand that sometimes you need to do those recategorizations too so I'm trying to balance out I think some more clarity and fidelity about what moved from one category to another so it may look like a drop in numbers but really it wasn't it was just shifting numbers into a different category right or we for example like you said or taking some behaviors that by law don't have to be

[00:47:48] reported they're not reportable offenses so just clarifying some of those things and a lot of it was done as we revised policies that were due so I think now Now that we have, particularly OSA, has revised all of those policies and stabilized some things from the 25-26 moving forward is where things should either, the categories would be stable and then we can really look at the numbers and be comparing apples to apples.

[00:48:20] Yeah, and I also get nervous when we start just taking instances that we were measuring at one point and then they just fall out of being tracked. So that also is an interesting thing. I don't know if that's happened or not, but I've seen that happen in other similar kinds of situations.

[00:48:36] And it's like, wait a minute, we just went down 500 out of nowhere, and it's not being tracked anyplace else. So I don't know if we have any of that happening in this data pool, but that would be interesting to note as well. I'm also really curious about the bus.

[00:48:58] I'm really glad, by the way, that we're tracking bus incidences. I think that was a brilliant move. However, that came about, really happy that we're doing that. And you said I think the bus supervisors are the ones that are reporting that. Are they reporting it then to the school, or how is that reporting structure happening?

[00:49:17] So there are transportation supervisors that have the ability to do that. So typically before that, a bus driver, a transportation supervisor could write a referral, then it has to go to the school, and then the school is trying to put it in.

[00:49:34] Well, now they have direct access to put that in since they are the ones that are recording the incident. They have all of the data and the information. But then if it does warrant a consequence, our school administrators can then issue that based on the violation. And does it get tagged to the school that they're running the transportation for at the time?

[00:49:55] Say that. If you're a bus driver and you're running three routes and it's going to three different schools, is the incident tagged to the school that they're running and the route that they're running at the moment? Yes, because it all is based on a student and their student ID. Okay, perfect. So, yes. Okay. So I'm going to kind of go down this rabbit hole a bit.

[00:50:13] So I think something that would be really interesting to look at now that we're doing this with buses, and I want to do the same thing with teachers, I really am curious about the turnover question just in general. I know bus drivers, we're having a hard time.

[00:50:29] We've historically had trouble recruiting bus drivers, for example. So now that we've got, is it just now one year's worth of bus data? yes that is correct okay so it would be really interesting now to see kind of the turnover rate of bus drivers and bus incidences happening and if there's you know issues with routes or whatever I think being able to correlate that information or at least look at it to see if there are any correlations would be helpful and I want to be able to see this same exact data at the class you know at the school level too because if we have schools that have high incidences of behavior

[00:51:05] issues but also really high turnover that tells me a couple of could tell me a couple of different things we may need more resources to help support those teachers right or we may need to look at the programming and how we're handling stuff it also may be coaching issues with with instructors on how to handle this stuff it may be we need to handle students in some circumstances differently to help support teachers more I don't really know but there it just raises a lot of questions for me just about you know in our schools where we have higher incidences how are we differentiating

[00:51:42] the support to teachers to make sure that they're you know they have the support they need so that they can focus on teaching so I'd be really interested to kind of see how how this kind of plays into that these numbers play that or maybe they don't maybe there isn't a correlation and that would be interesting to know too but I think that support piece would be really helpful I think that's I mean I have some other questions but I think I'll probably email them after this you done a really great job with the data it's i know there's yeah and it just raises so many questions

[00:52:21] but i don't want to do that here in this meeting so this has been good any other questions on this one let me get back to my believe that is it for us isn't it for this agenda any i'm assuming there's no new business we're good like no we want to go out of here all right our next meeting will be next month and please make sure you check board docs for the schedule and if there's no further business. We are adjourned. Thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks you guys.

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