Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Date: Tuesday, May 6, 2025
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 4h 44m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iDlhzQlVmE
Official School Board page (FCPS): https://www.fcps.edu/about-fcps/leadership/school-board

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 2026-10-30. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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

[00:05:41] All right, everybody, in order to comply with section 2.2-3712D of the Code of Virginia, it's necessary for the board to certify that since the Fairfax County School Board convened a closed meeting on May 6, 2025, to the best of each member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from opening meeting requirements and only such public business matters as were identified in the motion convened at the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered by the board during the closed meeting.

[00:06:11] Do I have a motion? Ms. Lady, do I have a second? Mr. Moon, all those in favor? Dr. Anderson, Mr. McElveen, Ms. Marin, Mr. McDaniel, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Lady, Ms. Dixit, Mr. Dunn, Mr. Moon, and myself. That's unanimous for board members at the table. I will turn this over to Ms. Lady and Ms. Dixit for the meeting management.

[00:06:30] Thank you, Chairman Frisch. And I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Presidio and his team for a presentation. All right. Well, it's almost good afternoon. It's 12.01, it looks like. So I know you had a very busy day with a lot of items on the agenda.

[00:06:47] So I'm going to try to go through the content here relatively quickly. And I know, oh, thank you. We've got it up on the screen now. So I know that there's probably going to be a number of questions and discussion that we need to have. So I'll do my best to kind of breeze through here as quickly as I can.

[00:07:03] But we're very excited and happy to be here with you today to present the recommendations from the Secondary Grading Committee. The committee, as you know, has been working really hard on this work for a number of months, so our goal today or the objectives are to share the committee's recommendation, tell you a little bit about the rationale that supports those recommendations, including the data and the information that we collected in our interviews and focus groups that we conducted, and then, obviously, what we're asking for -- thank you, thank you -- what we're asking for from the board today, if we could get it, is consensus on moving forward with the recommendations.

[00:07:40] If we're not able to do that, that's fine. But if we are, that will allow us to move forward with implementing some professional learning that would occur during the summer to get everyone prepared to implement the updated regulation requirements as quickly as possible.

[00:07:56] So before we jump in, I just want to introduce for our community, I'm joined by Noel Clemenco, our Assistant Superintendent of Instructional Services, and Michael Gillespie, our Senior Manager in the Curriculum Office. Michael's done a tremendous amount of work supporting the committee for two years now in this process, so we really appreciate everything that he's done.

[00:08:14] If it's possible to get the presentation on this screen, it would be great, if not, it's okay. So while we're waiting for the slides, I'm gonna keep going. Just as a reminder to the community, we have been doing a lot of work around grading as a school division, the board in particular has been doing a tremendous amount of work.

[00:08:35] Beginning back in July of 2024, the board convened a discussion about their intentions to update policy 2418 to be more clear, provide more guidance to our schools, and to make sure that we're consistent in our practices across the division.

[00:08:56] That work was followed by a work session in August where we shared committee updates and recommendations from school year 23-24 and then governance had six meetings on grading from the late summer through October followed by another work session in November and then ultimately the adoption of the updated policy in December so a lot of work has gone into this from the board following that work in December we were able to reconvene the secondary grading committee in January and we had most of the members continue from the previous year from 23

[00:09:30] And the committee was provided a charge by Dr. Reed to look at developing language for a regulation to accompany the policy that would provide the necessary guidance to schools to implement our practices consistently from school to school. So those areas that we looked at included consistency in gradebook type, gradebook weighting, reassessment practices, the number of minimum assignments that are required to be graded every quarter, and then looking at homework as a separate category of a student's grade.

[00:10:04] Additionally, the committee looked at the follow-on motions that the board approved in December of 2024, looking at alternative ways to enhance the reporting of student work habits that would be separate from a student's grade, and also looking at ways to increase effectiveness and efficiency in the technical systems that we're using for grade reporting.

[00:10:26] So just real briefly, again, I do want to acknowledge the work of the grading committee. We had 35 individuals who served on this committee, most of them for two years. They did a tremendous amount of work each year. This year, they met six times from January to March, did a tremendous amount of work looking at data, looking at stakeholder feedback, and really, I think, being very, very thoughtful about how to take all of the input across different groups whether it's the perspectives of teachers administrators students or parents and they did a tremendous job with that so we really appreciate

[00:11:04] it and the committee of course was made up of administrators teachers students and parents and we're grateful for all of their contributions as i mentioned the committee was provided that that formal charge from dr reed and worked very diligently to develop recommendations in each of those areas, which I'll share with you in just a second.

[00:11:24] But another thing that they did, which I really appreciated, was gave a lot of time and attention and thought about how we could successfully implement any of these new practices. So they provided some recommendations around professional learning that would be required as well. And as I mentioned, they did a great job trying to balance competing viewpoints sometimes across different groups.

[00:11:45] So the data that we collected was significant, and it really started with a look at comparing grade data from school year 23-24 to school year 24-25 where we had implemented some of the changes. Now, given the timing of when the committee met, we could only look at quarter one and quarter two data, so there's that one limitation there.

[00:12:07] We also looked at significant survey data, and one of the things that we did a little bit differently with this survey, instead of just offering a broad survey across different groups where, you know, sometimes you get a low response rate and you don't really know who's represented in the sample.

[00:12:24] We worked instead to come up with a random sampling methodology working with our Office of Research and Strategic Improvement, and that random sampling methodology allowed us to actually create a representative sample for the survey. So we were able to sample when we think about students by grade level, what particular grade were they in, 9th, 10th, 11th, or 12th.

[00:12:46] We were able to sample if they had any special learning characteristics, multilingual, students with disabilities, and then for teachers, we were able to create a representative population sample by content area, and we think that that really allowed us to create certainly more generalizable results when we look at the survey results than often what we have in the past.

[00:13:07] We also held 17 different focus groups with a variety of members, again, in our community from different viewpoints and perspectives to really round out the quantitative data that we had collected from the survey, and then we also collected direct feedback from our principal associations.

[00:13:26] So overall, there's a lot of information, I would say, in the report itself from the survey and from the focus groups, but overall, just for our purposes this morning, when we look at the grade data, we saw very little change from school year '23 to '24-'25.

[00:13:46] So for example, when we look at A's and F's, the grade distribution was relatively stable. We saw slight increases in As of less than 1% and slight decreases in Fs of less than 1%. Both of those things are positive trends, but that's a really small number of course.

[00:14:04] The other thing that we looked at was to see if that general trend held true across different groups of students. The general population, how did that compare to multilingual learner students in terms of grade outcomes? How did that compare to students with disabilities? Again, very, very little variability there.

[00:14:22] We didn't see anything when we looked at A's and F's and that quarter two data that was more than half a percentage point really. And then finally, the survey results though, as I've already mentioned, we do see different results based on the different groups that an individual might be in.

[00:14:40] And I think the biggest one that I really want to call out and illustrate on this slide is that when we looked at our reassessment policy, for example, 74% of our students and 64% of our parents and families viewed the reassessment to 100% as a positive, but 56% of our staff viewed it negatively.

[00:15:00] So again, depending on the group that you're a member of, oftentimes the survey results were quite different. So the committee had to balance all of that along with the research and along with the information that we collected in focus groups to develop their recommendations.

[00:15:16] So, very briefly, just a high-level view of the research again, similar to what we talked about last year when we presented, we did review all the relevant research on grading that was available to us, and historically, though, as we've shared before, the research on secondary grading really does show a high degree of variability across schools, across classrooms, across teacher practice, and division practice.

[00:15:45] So it's very difficult, I think, in the research base to draw a lot of valid conclusions about an evidence base on the particular areas that we're interested in. So when we think about, for example, reassessment practice, when we think about the number of minimum assignments, when we think about gradebook type or gradebook weighting, there's not a lot of research on those topics.

[00:16:06] There was one recent study on reassessment that I do want to point out and we'll talk about that when we get to the reassessment recommendation. Other than that, we do not have as much relevant research available to us as we would like. Let's jump into the committee recommendations.

[00:16:24] The first area that we looked at was grade book type. The updated policy 2418 requires us to use a consistent grade book type across our schools. You can see here that the recommendation from the committee was to move to the rolling gradebook, but not until school year 26-27.

[00:16:46] The committee recommended that we use school year 25-26 to make sure that everybody is trained sufficiently and has the support and resources and time that they need to make the shift to the rolling gradebook. And I think that's a really wise recommendation because we know previously when sometimes we've seen some of our school communities make more sudden changes to grading practice practices has been quite disruptive to the community and caused confusion for some students, parents, and staff.

[00:17:15] So in terms of the rationale for this particular recommendation, the folks that looked at the current use of rolling grade book in terms of who's currently using it and pointing out benefits from that group, the rolling grade book really does allow for more flexibility both in reassessment practices as well as course design.

[00:17:38] So rolling grade book again differs from traditional grade book in that the grade book is open from the first day of school until the last day of school. A traditional quarterly grade book closes each quarter and then a student's grade is average from quarter to quarter over the course of the semester or over the course of the full year.

[00:17:55] And most of our secondary courses are full year courses. But with a rolling grade book, students can go back and demonstrate mastery on a particular learning standard or skill that maybe they started in the first quarter, but they didn't quite master it yet but by the third quarter they've mastered it and they can get credit for that continuation of working towards mastery so it provides more flexibility more support for student learning additionally when the committee looked at this you can see that most of our schools are using the rolling gradebook 66% of our high schools use the rolling gradebook exclusively as of today and when we include middle schools in that 63% of

[00:18:34] our middle schools and high schools use the rolling grade book in at least some capacity. That means there might be a school where some teachers use rolling grade book in that school and others use the quarterly grade book. So again, because of the flexibility and because of the high use of current use of the rolling grade book, the committee is recommending implementation for 26-27.

[00:18:57] Next area that we looked at was grade weighting. So 24-18, policy 24-18 does require consistent weighting with a balanced and fair approach between formative and summative categories. So again, for folks in the community, when we're talking about summative tasks, we're talking about those assignments, those tasks that might be at the end of a learning unit, at the end of a quarter, at the end of a school year, for example, as opposed to formative tasks where students have the opportunity to continue to practice their learning and to get feedback from their teachers.

[00:19:30] So the summatives are kind of the culminating activity, and the formatives are process-oriented and practice-oriented. So the committee here recommended maintaining the current district gradebook weighting of 70% summative and 30% formative.

[00:19:45] And again, you can see the committee percentages at the bottom of each of these slides. So this was 93% concurrence on this. And in terms of the rationale, we have seen that the consistency of parents and students reporting that they understand their students' grades has increased significantly.

[00:20:05] In fact, when we surveyed the different groups, only 9% of our students, 12% of parents, and 19% of staff reported that our current weighting of 70 summative, 30 formative is not working well for them. Again, the vast majority are reporting that 70, 30 is working well for them right now.

[00:20:25] We did look on this particular recommendation to see if there was any interest with our department chairs and administrators in differentiating the category weighting by content area. So for example, maybe you have 70/30 in the core content areas.

[00:20:40] Maybe you have 80/20 in the elective areas or the fine arts or CTE areas. However, in discussion with our department chairs and administrators, we were not able to reach any consensus on what a standardization might look like in different content areas. There was a lot of disagreement about what that might look like and given the fact that the policy calls for fair and balanced and consistent weighting, the committee ultimately recommended that all teachers use the 70-30 weighting.

[00:21:08] Okay, so the next recommendation was around homework, and policy 24-18 was updated of course to really promote the importance of consistent use of homework as regular opportunities for student practice, and the committee looked at this and did recommend maintaining our current homework practices, which currently allow teachers to use the formative category that 30 percent of a student's weight to provide homework grades.

[00:21:37] The considerations really around this was looking at the data about current use around homework. You can see at the supporting evidence there that when we look at our use survey results, almost 92 percent of our secondary students report having daily homework, and you can see the amount ranges all the way up to daily homework of over half of our students at the eighth grade saying they spend more than an hour a day on homework to two-thirds of our students at the twelfth grade saying they spend more than an hour a day on homework.

[00:22:09] When we process this through with our staff and focus groups and at the committee there was a lot of disagreement about creating a separate category for waiting homework. I think the main reason or one of the main reasons for that was the concern about having to grade homework and the workload that would be associated with that.

[00:22:30] So, again, committee recommended maintaining our current practices. Now, I want to point out, though, that the committee, again, has been fantastic in terms of their dedication to this work. But some members of senior leadership, of course, have had other conversations with community members outside of the committee process and have had conversations really through the entire process of the board's development of policy 2418.

[00:22:59] And when we looked at the homework recommendation from the committee, our senior leadership team felt that we really needed to establish a set category for homework weighting. And that we thought that the best way to do that would be to establish homework weighting category at 10% of a student's grade.

[00:23:17] And the reason for that is while students are reporting consistent homework right now, we're not at 100% of those experiences. And I shared that data just a minute ago, how it varies kind of from 50% to two-thirds over grade eight through grade 12 that have consistently reporting homework.

[00:23:36] So with the belief around our increased focus on academic rigor in all the areas of our strategic plan, the research around consistent homework and practice supporting student learning, our senior leadership team felt strongly that we should weight it at 10% of a student's grade.

[00:23:53] If we do that, and if the board accepts that alternative recommendation, that obviously is going to impact the category weighting. Because currently homework is part of that 30% formative grade. So if we take homework, make it a separate 10%, that's going to impact our summative percentage and our formative percentage.

[00:24:10] So the second alternative recommendation that you see here would be to change the category weighting to 60% summative, 30% formative, and 10% homework. And when we look at the board's guidance in policy 2418 that creates an expectation for a fair and balanced approach between the formative and summative categories, 60-40 basically is getting us, I think, better balance than 70-30.

[00:24:36] So that's how our senior leadership team developed that recommendation as an alternative to the committee. Okay, the next area is around reassessment. So policy 2418 also requires consistent reassessment practices that would provide students one opportunity to reassess for each summative assessment that they take and you can see that the committee's recommendation here is to maintain the current practice which allows students to earn up to a hundred percent credit on those reassessments that they complete now just as a reminder before a student completes a reassessment we do have requirements that they take action

[00:25:16] to ensure that they have done additional work before a teacher provides them with a reassessment opportunity, so that might look like test corrections, additional homework assignments that need to be completed to prepare for that reassessment.

[00:25:31] So when we look at the feedback on this particular recommendation, though, again, what you'll notice is that there was obviously a difference of opinion on this particular recommendation across the different groups in our school system. So for example, our students and family members were very clear that the change to 100% this year was a very positive change that lowered stress levels for them, increased their motivation both on the original assessments and on reassessments. So we see that very clearly in the survey data as well as the focus groups that we ran. However, I also want to be very clear that

[00:26:08] we heard loudly and strongly from our teachers that they did not view the change to 100% reassessment positively, and largely that was due to increased workload. So 51% of our teachers said that they had a significant increase in workload with reassessment to 100 percent.

[00:26:28] Ultimately, well, I should point out there is the bullet point about the study that I mentioned earlier around reassessment, and this is a relatively new study. So this particular study looked at math performance at the secondary level and studied the impact of a reassessment policy allowing up to 100 percent and found that student learning growth was increased between 36% to 45% when students were allowed to reassess to 100% in those math classes.

[00:27:00] So ultimately, taking all of this into consideration, the committee felt like our current practice was manageable, recognizing the teacher workload issues. They felt it was manageable if we provided very clear guidance and support to our teachers about practices for reassessment that could address workload, and I want to share a few of those ideas with you next.

[00:27:22] So really to that end around reducing teacher workload, the committee recommended professional learning on specific practices to alleviate those concerns like the ones that you see here. So, for example, focusing reassessments on the specific standards or skills that students had not mastered.

[00:27:41] So instead of, let's just pretend you gave a 50 question test, instead of reassessing another 50 questions, maybe students only were struggling with 10 of the questions. You could create a smaller reassessment of 10 questions on those topics that students hadn't mastered, saving time in the grading process.

[00:28:02] Obviously, there's still workload associated with reassessment, but that starts to mitigate that somewhat. Additionally, when we hear from teachers that sometimes students want to reassess where they had like a 95 and they want to get that 100, well, there might only be one or two questions that a student would need to retake, and you might actually be able to do that in a conversation with the student, or you might be able to do that in a simple test correction.

[00:28:26] Maybe a student made a calculation error on a math exam, but giving that student an opportunity to redo that one item certainly would be a lot less work than asking them to retest on every one of the concepts from the original test and have to grade that again.

[00:28:45] We know that it's difficult to find time to do the reassessment, but when we use that learning seminar time built into the schedule and when we work to really try to utilize time in class for reassessments, that can reduce some of the workload issues as well. So the committee felt very strongly, again, that if we continue with the 100 percent reassessment policy, we certainly want to make resources and training available to staff on some strategies to address workload concerns.

[00:29:13] All right. couple more here. The number of assignments was the next area that we looked at. I think this one is pretty straightforward. There was very positive feedback on the move to a minimum number of assignments that would be graded each quarter from nine to seven. We implemented that change last year, so the committee is recommending maintaining that. It's seven assignments this year, and we had 100% consensus from the committee on that recommendation. And then, as I mentioned, the committee had really, I think, thoughtful feedback on the need for quality professional development.

[00:29:45] And to that end, you can see that we've already started to work on development of professional learning that could start to take place at the end of this school year during the summer and next school year in all of these different areas. Now the one thing that I want to mention on this slide that's that last bullet point in red that's very important is with these recommendations as we move forward with implementation, we are suggesting, senior leadership team is suggesting that we delay middle school implementation any changes so middle schools would not be working on these changes in school

[00:30:22] year 25 26 and our middle schools as you all know are involved in a lot of new initiatives right now you can think about the work in the strategic plan around middle school algebra that they're doing the work that they're continuing to do around the Virginia Literacy Act they're going to be implementing new social studies curriculum and materials there's just a lot of things that are happening in our middle schools right now that we believe it would be better to pause implementation at the middle school level for next school year.

[00:30:52] Okay, very quickly, I just want to share a few updates on those follow-on motions that the board approved in December. The first was to look at our technology systems to see if we could create more effective and efficient ways to communicate grades to our students, to our families, and to save time for our teachers. So we have already begun work in instructional services, working with the IT team, I think there were some folks from IT here with us earlier, and we're working on some short-term and long-term solutions that you see on this slide.

[00:31:22] A couple examples would be really trying to standardize some of the gradebook settings so teachers don't need to spend a lot of time setting up their gradebook, as well as looking at ways to share information more effectively from our student information system in Schoology, our learning management system, because we know people sometimes are looking for information in different systems, and having that coherence we think would support a lot of the understanding of grades that has created some confusion previously.

[00:31:49] I apologize I didn't advance that slide earlier for you. So those are the technical changes that we're looking at. The second area that there was a follow-on motion for was around reporting work habits, and the request was to make sure that we could look at a different way to provide quality comments on the report card around students' work habits.

[00:32:10] So we're in the process right now of working to revise our current report card comments to align more closely with portrait of a graduate. That was one of the things that the governance committee asked us to do. And to be more descriptive and have more frequency information in the comments so that a parent or a family member could really understand to what extent a student is exhibiting or not exhibiting those work habits.

[00:32:34] So we're going to continue to work on this, but I wanted to share just a few examples of what that might look like. So for example, here you can see at the top of the slide some of our current report card comments. You might see a needs to be prepared for class that a teacher might give a student or shows inconsistent effort.

[00:32:53] I think to some extent this is a little vague and open to interpretation, certainly not aligned to portrait of a graduate. So you can see when we think about our portrait of a graduate attribute and goal around being goal-directed and resilient, we might revise some of these comments as you see on the slide here.

[00:33:10] They manage their time and resources to accomplish their academic goals, or they're still developing their time management skills. So you can see we're attempting to align some of these work habits to Portrait of a Graduate and be more developmental in nature.

[00:33:26] There's a few other examples here that really look at kind of the frequency that a student might demonstrate one of their work habits. So you can see here we're talking about, are they demonstrating work habits necessary to maximize their learning? So you can see we would be able to, for example, to report that a student is consistently doing that, usually doing that, occasionally doing that, or seldomly doing that.

[00:33:49] And I think that would give parents and family members more information about how their students are currently doing. All right. And then the final follow-on motion was around updates to our transcripts and school profiles. So for our transcript, the board asked us to make sure that we had the online campus noted on a student's transcript, as well as academies noted on their transcript.

[00:34:13] And then at the profile, making sure that our school profiles for all of our schools include information about how students can enroll in online campus and academy classes. And we think that's going to make it much clearer for colleges and universities that are trying to evaluate student transcripts across our 26 high schools.

[00:34:33] So we're in the process of making those edits with IT, and those will be in place and updated for school year 25-26. So just in terms of proposed next steps, after we get direction from the board, we'll continue to build out the specific regulation language that will help with the implementation of each of the policies that we've discussed here today, and we'll continue to work on developing those professional learning experiences to start in early June and continue throughout the year.

[00:35:06] last slide that's in your slide deck just provides a summary chart of all of the different recommendations that we looked at it provides the committee recommendation as well as the alternative staff recommendation so with that Miss lady I'll turn it back over to you for board discussion thank you and when we get started I think we're gonna three minutes and if we have go backs we're gonna drop that to two hopefully we can be concise and articulate and I will start with Ms. Sizemore-Hyser. Thank you and thank you to all your hard work and the hard work of the committee and the hard work of the gradient of the Governance Committee on the grading

[00:35:43] policy before that so I appreciate all of that I know this has been a long journey so I appreciate that a couple things on some of the recommendations you know I think some of this work is good a consistent grade book we always said we didn't care which one necessarily which grade book as long as there's consistency I am a little concerned about not doing it at the middle school level but the two things i really wanted to focus on was one on the reassessments i appreciate the alternate recommendation of the 60 30 10 while the governance committee didn't prescribe any numbers because we didn't want to get into operations it was pretty clear from the conversations we had that 70 30 was

[00:36:22] we'd heard a lot of concerns about it one of the things i'm surprised in reassessments that we didn't really talk about across content areas because in the policy we did say consistency across content areas and something I heard significantly about was 70% you know summative might work in a math class but it's maybe hard to do in a ceramics class right and what I've anecdotally heard is in some of our music and arts classes it's actually getting kids to drop out of those classes because there's such a heavy focus on assessments and not as much on playing and performance which is a higher part of those classes so I am surprised a little bit the lack of content I can support the 60 30 10 I know I could also

[00:37:00] support a 60/40 if we have a statement saying that consistent and regular homework will be you know part of the formative assessments you know no less than 5% up to 10% I could support that but I think it should be also for all students unless contraindicated by a 504 an IEP plan because there is I would love to have seen some data on homework across class types because I think that's where the breakdown necessarily is so a lot of good points I may be working backwards a little bit and I was rushing through the slides so we did think about homework and differentiation for homework quite a bit and we've

[00:37:39] started to prepare some guidance and examples for for schools around that the first thing that I would say is and I want to be really clear because I think staff had concerns about the workload associated with grading we think that there are ways to assign homework where the grading is going to be relatively minimal. So for example, some of the content areas you just shared, perhaps in a music class, students might submit a practice log and provide evidence that they had been practicing. Well, the teacher's going to know if they've been practicing or not just by listening to them play, right? So that's pretty easy to grade. It's kind of a yes or no. Similarly, even in a math class

[00:38:17] where students might be doing daily, well, we would hope that students would be doing daily math problems for practice, teachers wouldn't have to grade those. They could just check to see if students are actually completing them so we're working on ways to minimize homework we're also working on ways to make sure and this is part of the professional learning that I skimmed over quickly as well to really make sure that teachers are thinking about supports and accommodations for our special populations in ways that they can modify assessments as well as homework assignments to support students with differentiated learning needs so that will be part of what we would focus on as well and then you were

[00:38:54] asking about differentiation across the content areas for grade okay with all due respect dr presidio i think maybe i wasn't clear in what i said i wasn't talking about homework in terms of grading homework or the workload of homework i was talking about the 70 focus on assess on summative and the issues that has across content areas and on the inch on the on and on making sure that homework is assigned across different classes not necessarily differentiation in that obviously all those are important but those were not the points i was trying to make yeah i apologize i was working backwards and i was trying to get to the 70 30 one so if we go back in the slides

[00:39:31] maybe noel can take us back there was one bullet point on there and again i mentioned it briefly we did have discussion as part of the committee about differentiating uh grade weighting across content areas we absolutely did that we found a lot of different thoughts and opinions about what those weights should be and we did not have agreement even within particular content areas areas like a CTE or an arts area.

[00:39:54] So that doesn't mean that we couldn't do it. We could certainly differentiate across content areas, but the work of the committee, we did not come to any consensus even within those departments of what that grade weighting should look like. So unfortunately, that's kind of where we ended up with that.

[00:40:10] We were afraid it was just going to add more inconsistency from student experience to student experience. I mean, I appreciate that. I kind of wish a lot of your examples that you use were math-based examples around the the grading or I mean I kept doing math and math you can do reassessments and only these questions you might have gotten wrong and I would have loved more conversation about how does that apply in English how does it apply in a music class how does that apply in ceramics I think math is the easiest way to break it down so I just this is a comment I don't need a response back yet but I'm going to make another comment in terms of the homework I think we have to specify consistent and regular and a specific percentage whether it's part of

[00:40:48] the formative or a separate number I think that's super important the reassessments I wanted to get to really quickly for my time is up when you say up to a hundred percent you're saying reassessment when the score is anything less than a hundred percent they can reassess because that is a concern that I've heard from a lot and the question is is it better to do a reassessment at like 85% that takes some of the workload concern off while still allowing the students to demonstrate mastery a B is still above average so that's something I want to throw out there's that I'm not sure a hundred percent makes a lot of sense I know my time so yeah so you characterize the current policy correctly A STUDENT CAN REASSESS IF THEY EARN LESS THAN 100% AND RECEIVE UP TO 100% CREDIT.

[00:41:27] THE COMMITTEE, AS I MENTIONED, SPENT A LOT OF TIME ON THIS ONE BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE WE HAD THE MOST VARIANCE ACROSS DIFFERENT GROUPS IN TERMS OF OPINIONS ABOUT WHAT TO DO. YOU KNOW, WE LOOKED AT A NUMBER OF DIFFERENT THINGS, INCLUDING THE GUIDING PRINCIPALS AND POLICY 24-18 THAT REALLY SPEAK TO, YOU KNOW, SUPPORTING STUDENTS THROUGHOUT THEIR LEARNING JOURNEY TO CONTINUE THEIR LEARNING, PROVIDING MAXIMUM SUPPORT FOR THEM TO MAXIMIZE their learning and we looked at different you know examples like you just mentioned 90% 80% ultimately I think you know looking at percentages like that just seemed arbitrary to the to the committee because you're telling a

[00:42:06] student at that point that if you earned less than 90% for example you can't continue your learning and everything else we're telling our students is we want them to continue their learning and we want to award them credit for the learning that they've done. So we definitely understand the workload issues associated with the 100% and that's why we were trying to offer suggestions and supports that we would develop.

[00:42:27] But this is a really difficult one because, again, people have really strong opinions depending on their perspective and their role in the organization. Thank you. Ms. Mayor. Yes, so I am seeing this through many lenses.

[00:42:43] One is governance, one is school board member, one is parent of a high school student. So what I'm wondering is, what's the big picture here, Dr. Reed? Because we've talked about homework is important, and I think the board as a whole has generally been supportive of it, and I support it.

[00:42:59] But how is separating 10% from the summative the way to go? How is that adding to the effort to get students to mastery and not just completion and checking off that box that the whole grading policy was trying to get us away from? So I think homework is critically important, and I would bet if we drill down on the actual students doing homework, the percentage from the youth survey, those students would generally be in a more rigorous track, and so we want to embed those skills younger.

[00:43:30] I don't know that 10% is a magic percentage, but I do think that we need to send a clearer message that homework is part of the disciplined approach to learning. It could be practiced at home. It doesn't need to be graded.

[00:43:45] I think Dr. Presidio and the team are looking at a lot of options to delineate how, you know, if I'm in a chamber orchestra, just practicing would be sufficient. Do I turn in a practice log, right, which is what professional musicians do.

[00:44:01] They practice. They don't just show up to class and play if you're in theater. I mean, across the board, there is something that happens outside of that face-to-face instructional time. I think the purpose of sort of -- I'd be happy to set it into the formative setting.

[00:44:21] It's not really summative, right? It is formative because you're developing and getting feedback on a regular basis. So I don't think you could put it into the summative weight. So that would require you to add some percentage to the formative. Maybe it's not 10, maybe it's 65, 35, but I just think we need to send that clear message.

[00:44:41] An apology if I mixed up formative summative, but I guess, you know, if we're giving students homework, but it's not graded, but then 10% of their grade is homework. So how can you not grade it if it's 10% of their grade? So I fully agree that the students need to do homework. And I can picture my sixth grader with his trumpet log, you know, and so he turns that in. And, you know, I've heard the gamut of things that students who want to do the homework will do it. Some students and maybe the parents will help them, you know, check the boxes, and that's not going to help them with instruction.

[00:45:10] i'm aware of some practices we're in high schools now some of the staff are already using that 10 that's part of that 70 30 split and does that reach the mark um i'm just again i'm wondering does this 10 get us to what again we were trying to get away from completion like yes i've done the thing i've done the log versus oh i'm actually a better player or i've done and i'm not i'm not so convinced and when i see that the committee didn't support that by and large it really gives me a lot of pause so um but i think too um in a combined way you know the tying this all together to how

[00:45:47] students are instructed and i don't believe my clock is running if someone wants to put that on thanks um i apologize for my voice the um timing of the implementation and the professional development like what i think the vision is is to really focus on the instruction being the driver and so like the grades and the homework are the you know the byproduct of learning learning well and so um you know when it comes to algebra it seems like a good time to make sure that our teachers are learning how to do the grading for algebra i'm not saying it needs to be fully implemented but i actually think that this seems like a good time i think overall my big things

[00:46:26] are this there's a lot of stuff coming at our teachers i'm okay to have it be implemented in 26 27 it's not clear in this presentation if you're suggesting everything happened in 26 27 there is some mention of middle school being held off and some of 26 so that could be clarified please but um overall and i again experience this the grades the parents are getting the grade book i get an email every week that tells me how my student is doing and i will tell you it sends my family into a whirlwind every time because the grades fluctuate and because some teachers are putting things in at one date and some have ultimately what are the grades as a

[00:47:06] communicator to the students and the families and the training that in the communication that's going to go to families I think putting the the portrait of a graduate skills and the report card is great I like that a lot that was a big component of our governance committee conversation but I guess I'm not I'd like to know more about the technology pieces and how because if students are still getting trapped in well this teacher says I can retake and this one says I can't and if we're going to wait for another year how do we keep our students from this constant confusion and having to check all the different ways that teachers do this and where students really stand in

[00:47:43] their learning I'll stop there because my voice sounds terrible I'm sorry and certainly welcome dr. Reed on any of this as well but just to your last points you know the idea with the technical systems is to make them easier to navigate and easier to use so that parents and students know where to find the information and get the best information and that we reduce any workload on teachers so for example if we standardize the gradebook setup those aren't for teachers they don't need to do that work which oftentimes can

[00:48:13] be tedious however if a teacher doesn't input the information in a timely manner then a student and a parent won't know the up-to-date information about their students progress in the class so what's the number of days that we currently have in regulation for teachers to update their grade book? Seven. So right now, the current policy is the teachers have seven days to input the grades into the grade book. I'm sure that doesn't happen all the time, but that's not a policy issue problem because we already have that. That's an implementation issue problem that we need to work

[00:48:52] with our staff and our principals and our region teams on. So, you know, I think the other issue that you raised, which is similarly as an implementation issue problem, is around reassessment, the current policy is students can have one reassessment attempt for every summative assessment.

[00:49:10] That's the policy this year. That was the policy in the past. So if that's not happening again in a particular school or classroom, it's not a policy issue. It's an implementation issue that we would need to work on a little bit differently. Thanks. I'll just say I would love to see grading approach like we approached chronic absenteeism where it was very specific and we knew what the the work was to get those kids back in school there were very specific communications they were specific people charged with the rollout there were metrics and to my knowledge our teachers have not been

[00:49:47] thoroughly trained in schoology in using it and then teaching kids that's just such a huge missing component because i'll tell you my lovely daughter will tell me the teacher didn't upload that grade And here I am, six days after the test, really? We're not helping parents be learners, but it just needs more like strategic doing.

[00:50:10] - Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And I think we can do better with that. This slide is kind of the first attempt to show some of the things just on the technical systems that we want to standardize and improve that I think will help. And obviously there's training that needs to be associated with all of these things, right? So reinforcing the expectations around the practices we've just discussed reinforcing the expectation around how often you need to how many days you have before you need to grade the assignment and enter the information into the system so all of those things would be part of that work that we're doing and you can see from some of these technical enhancements we think working with the vendor we could get better reports about what's happening

[00:50:48] at a school so for example how long has it been since assignments were in the gradebook before they were graded can we get individual and aggregate information on that. And if there are schools that are outliers that it's taking them much longer, then we need to support those schools with strategies to expedite their assessments.

[00:51:04] So that is part of what we're trying to do in this technical section. Thank you. Dr. Anderson. Thank you. I'm going to just start with the number of assignments, which are at seven.

[00:51:22] Is that inclusive of summatives, formatives? Yes. Seven graded assignments, a minimum, not a maximum, a minimum of seven graded assignments per quarter. essentially sit outside of the homework bucket if that were to be a separate category yes our current policy is seven right so we changed that last year to take effect for 24 25 previously it had been nine so we've always had a minimum number of assignments for decades all right I'd like to talk about homework and kind of give my feedback there I am a huge I know I've talked to you about

[00:51:59] this ad nauseam dr reid i i do believe that having homework is preparation because we do have to do things outside of the instructional setting whether or not it lives in the formative or its own category i think i'm fairly ambivalent about but i am i did have the question why wasn't that part of the formative so i think when you think about what homework is it's practice so it It is a formative type of task that a student would complete, and again, as Dr. Reed said, we're happy to move the 10% into the 30% and make it 60-40 or 65-35.

[00:52:38] We could do whatever the board has consensus around. The reason we started with the 60-30-10 was to illustrate that if we're going to require homework to be part of the student's grade, we wanted to make sure that that was really clear and people could see that, but again, the way that it's currently recommended by staff if you can go to the staff recommendation slide 60 summative 30 formative 10 homework it basically is 60 summative 40 formative and again that's not a hill for me to die on at all I'm just happy we've moved away from

[00:53:11] the 90/10 that some of us seems to be harder to utilize because quarterly you provide a grade you close it you move on a rolling grade book is actually more work because you do have to go back and have that replacement grade and it's a If that's what's chosen, if that's what's provided, it is the perfect partner to the

[00:53:51] reassessment up to 100% because they do go together. Because if you have a rolling gradebook and this child, let's say September, did not do well in that assessment and has no opportunity to make it up, they continue to carry that burden throughout the entire year and everything else could be stellar.

[00:54:09] And so I want to make sure that that's shared. also I want to say this you know the reassessment I know there's been a lot of concerns that it's unfair you know somebody's going to you know leapfrog me I had a 95 they reassessed they went to 100 we are all in unique situations and we could think of a number of different instances even dr. Reed where we have sent you back to do new work we did not say we're going to minus 10 because it's new work we just accepted it for what it was at that time and we have to apply the same approach to our kids because that's how it works in the real world

[00:54:44] it's not you turn in a subpar report and that's it you go and you make it better and you bring it back and that's what counts and I'd like for us to begin to apply the same thing to our students the was my other question oh work habits I am very very very excited about this section I'm very excited about it because I think it just gives more information to parents because we need to know how to better support our kids.

[00:55:20] When you get that little report card and it says that one three sentence thing, it's, I mean, three word thing or nothing at all. And the grade may not be satisfactory or maybe it is. Either way, you do not know how to better support your child.

[00:55:36] So unpacking that a little bit, what guidance will there be around the usage of the work guidance statements that you're working on? - It's a great question. We haven't reached a conclusion on that point yet. So we're gonna be working with a group of teachers and administrators over the summer to develop that guidance.

[00:55:56] That would be part of the regulation. But if we're gonna go to all the trouble of changing all of the work habits, we're gonna need to use those, and have an expectation that they're used to some extent, but we haven't reached a conclusion on that yet. - All right, thank you, I'll take a go back.

[00:56:11] - Thank you, Ms. Anderson. - Hi there. Okay, so I'm not gonna rehash all the things that I've already talked to you guys about, but I also am a little surprised that we ended up at the rolling grade book.

[00:56:32] Can I ask, when we're talking standards-based grading, which I recognize many of these things are aligned with, did standards-based grading start in the college classroom? - No, I really don't think so.

[00:56:49] What I'll say is there's more variability in college grading than there is in secondary grading. - You don't have to tell me that. I fully and completely understand. I guess the reason I'm asking is, This is set up more on a semester system where you actually are giving a semester-long grade where you can reassess things that happened at the beginning because it makes sense that the student would be working through.

[00:57:10] I have, for the same reasons as Dr. Anderson brought up, I have significant concerns that we have a kiddo that particularly as they're getting to like seventh grade and when they're first in this as a new thing, they can get a significantly lower grade than maybe they've earned the rest of the year and they get locked in.

[00:57:26] Because, so unless we are doing a significant amount retraining of our staff members I think we are going to continue to be in this realm where you either have kids that are gaming the system so that they aren't doing much work the last quarter or they get locked into very low grades that follow them throughout the entire year and so I am concerned about this I also will say that I think we're doing this the wrong way I think that the piloting and the in the trying something out new has to happen in the middle school where we don't have as high stakes for our students because trying things out with high schoolers has a significant impact on their grade point averages which has

[00:58:05] a very real-world application that is coming very soon for many of them and so I am extremely concerned as being one of those students that actually had the rug pulled out from underneath me when we added the plus minus system when I was in high school that significantly changed the grade point average when the rest of the world hadn't caught up with us yet and so I am concerned I actually think that testing this out in middle school as a way to retrain and actually get people on track makes far more sense than moving it into high school where the stakes are higher.

[00:58:35] So that's the first thing that I wanted to say. The other thing is I strongly believe that any formative assignment that is due the next class period is homework and the student has to figure out when to get that assignment completed. And so I do not think that we necessarily need to, I agree with the 60-40 split, but But I don't necessarily think that we need to set a specific percentage.

[00:58:56] And based on the feedback that we received from the high school principals, they're also saying the same thing. The percentage could be hard to reach. It could be, you know, we're still going to have to assign some grade. It's likely going to be a participation grade based on quizzes at the start of class or whatever it is to determine whether or not reading was done in an English class or things like that.

[00:59:15] And so I would very much like to see us kind of move away from a prescriptive approach in that place. I think that this is also a place that staff can gain back some autonomy in what they're doing as well. So, giving a student a formative assignment that is due the next class period is homework, and we just have to give them the opportunity to utilize those executive functioning skills.

[00:59:36] Okay. Thank you. Mr. Dunn? Mr. Presidio, can you clarify whether there's actually ever been an analysis of the grading within FCPS to determine whether there is grade inflation or no grade inflation?

[01:00:02] Well, I mean, we've done different things. I think the comment was raised here about grade inflation was within the context of looking at the comparison between 2324 and 2425, quarter one and quarter two grades, to see how grades may have increased or decreased in 2425 as compared to 2324, and we saw little to no variability.

[01:00:29] So, I don't know that I would term that as grade inflation, it's comparing the grading, the impact of the policy changes from 23-24 on students' grades. We have run analysis to look at, across schools, the percentage of students that might be earning a particular GPA or particular grades to compare across schools to see if there's variability and there is variability, but we've never done, like, a formal grade inflation study before. Those are the two major things that I would probably say are as close to that as we've done.

[01:01:05] Because I've read in news reports that something like 90% of students at Harvard get A's, right? And it's not that all students should get A's at every educational institution. Normally, I mean, I grew up with a bell curve, right? So a number of A's, or a number of C's, or a number of F's. And so I would be interested just in seeing that study you mentioned about the variability of GPAs across schools, and that may affect college prospects, right, if there is inconsistency.

[01:01:38] So has there been any effort to standardize kind of the bell curve across schools? Well, we really have moved away, not just in Fairfax, but in education in general, the idea that a grade should be used to sort students in a particular class or school, as opposed to maximizing every student's opportunity to really fully optimize their learning, right?

[01:02:02] So I would say certainly we can look at trying to, and are with these recommendations, trying to standardize consistent practices from school to school. So for example, when you think about reassessment, before the grading committee formed, we had some schools or some teachers in the school that would allow a student to reassess up to 100%.

[01:02:24] We had others that would cap it at 80%. Well, that's an inconsistency that impacts a student's GPA, that impacts their college prospects, that impacts a lot of other things, right? So in terms of trying to flatten the variability curve, it's really these recommendations that we're looking at in terms of the grade weights, the reassessment policies, the homework components, and trying to standardize the individual practices within a teacher's approach to grading.

[01:02:53] Can you talk about the rolling grade book and how that works in practice? Yeah, so the big concept with a rolling gradebook, again, and what differentiates it from a traditional gradebook, is the grades are not locked at the end of a quarter.

[01:03:10] So in a traditional gradebook, at the end of first quarter, at the end of nine weeks, your grade is locked, you've got a B first quarter. Second quarter, you've got a C. If it was a semester class, you added those together and you've got a B. A rolling gradebook, the gradebook is open from the first day until the last day, And the current information that a student or a parent might look at, let's say in quarter two, tells them their current status in terms of performance in that class.

[01:03:38] So let's say, for example, a student at quarter two has a C in a class, and they haven't taken advantage of reassessment opportunities yet. They have an opportunity to demonstrate information from quarter one, because it's not locked in the gradebook. They could go back and reassess something from quarter one if they didn't already do that in quarter one.

[01:03:58] And that could raise their grade. More importantly, teachers that operate on a rowing gradebook traditionally think about kind of the ways that you scaffold in information and the way that you scaffold in student skill development in terms of the content mastery and the skills in a particular class.

[01:04:16] So, for example, if a student isn't performing well on a particular standard at quarter two, by the time you get to quarter four, they might be performing higher at that standard and their grade can be raised. But on a traditional gradebook, their grade is just going to be averaged altogether. So it's open as opposed to being closed at each quarter is one of the main differences.

[01:04:38] In general, I'll just say in my family's experience and those of my constituents, that rolling gradebook has been much hated in my community. It was much hated by my children. I think it resulted in them getting worse grades overall despite increased effort.

[01:04:55] And it seemed to almost penalize students because you could never get past a bad grade you got early in the year. You carried that forward with you throughout the year rather than being able to get a fresh start each quarter. That was our experience.

[01:05:11] That's certainly the experience of many parents I speak with. But I also wanted to ask about whether the reassessment and the rolling grade book creates more work. Because you mentioned that you can demonstrate mastery in a subsequent quarter, right?

[01:05:29] If you get a bad grade in quarter one and then you're quarter four and you got a C earlier and now you want to get an A, that requires the teacher to create basically a new test or some new assignment for that student. Isn't that right? Yeah, so that's what I was trying to speak a little bit as I was racing through the slides is that definitely reassessment is a workload issue, right?

[01:05:52] So when the committee was developing their recommendations, and I think this is true just in general about work in the education administrative field is that we're always trying to balance teacher workload issues and be very sensitive to those along with the best practices that are going to optimize student learning.

[01:06:10] So reassessment, we know, benefits student learning. We see that in our data from students, from parents. We see the research study that just came out quantifying the impact and the effect of that. But we also know that reassessment, we're hearing from our staff, causes more workload.

[01:06:26] So our goal would be is to provide examples, resources, and training to help minimize that workload. So again, instead of having to complete an entire reassessment, design an entire new test for a student, if a student mastered 80% of that test, you're just going to reassess them on the 20% that they didn't already master.

[01:06:48] And that reduces the amount of time it takes to create a new assessment. It reduces the amount of time it takes to grade that assessment. It might be, when we hear about these examples where a student just missed one or two problems, it could be something that, again, a teacher in a quick conversation might be able to do a check for understanding.

[01:07:05] Or a student maybe made a calculation error. They could just do a test correction instead of having to do a whole new reassignment or reassessment. So I know that that doesn't completely solve the problem because reassessment is more work, but it starts to mitigate the impact of the workload with reassessment, and that's what we really want to focus on.

[01:07:25] No matter what the percentage is, whether it's 100% or 90%, we still want to do that work anyway. So the reassessment and the rolling gradebook are inextricably intertwined, essentially, is that right? No. I think even on the traditional gradebook, teachers currently are required to provide a reassessment opportunity to a student, one reassessment opportunity per summative assignment.

[01:07:47] However, in a rolling gradebook, you have more flexibility to reassess something from a previous quarter if the student wanted to do that and do the work to demonstrate that they've mastered that content now. Whereas on a traditional gradebook, you can only do it within a quarter. Okay.

[01:08:04] So if it was not a rolling gradebook, then the reassessment would be limited to the same quarter in which the test was taken. That's correct. Okay. So I do not support a rolling gradebook. I also do not support reassessments up to 100.

[01:08:24] If someone gets a 99, an A+, the one-point difference may help them get the valedictorian, but it simply imposes more work on the teacher. And so I strongly believe we need to be teacher-centered in our approach, because teachers are already overburdened.

[01:08:41] And so I would prefer to set the reassessment level at 70, because a C is still a passing grade, and kids need to learn, you know, you get a C, you have an assessment within the quarter, and not force teachers to go back six months and figure out how they can do a reassessment.

[01:08:58] That is punitive to teachers and causes teachers to leave our system. - Mr. Moon.

[01:09:14] - With all due respect to Mr. Dunn, I just stated about reassessment of 70%. I don't believe in a reassessment and bringing in 100% to a student's grade.

[01:09:32] I mean, because I don't want to incentivize students not taking the first assessment seriously. Every assessment needs to be really considered as important as any other. However, at the same time, I believe in the reason behind the reassessment is giving students an opportunity, might have had a bad day, and a second chance to prove that he or she has really learned the stuff, or even improved upon what he or

[01:10:11] she might not have mastered enough. So 100% I don't believe in giving reassessment as a tool to learn more, yes. Whether I will go for somewhere like 93, why 93? Because that's the beginning point of someone able to get an A, you know, give that incentive. With a rolling grade book, let me let me ask you this question first on the rolling grade book so in in the rolling

[01:10:49] grade book situation is it possible for a student who might have gotten for example ccc first through three quarters first three quarters and then in the fourth quarter done really hard worked really hard remastered the work you know master you know work that was supposed to be done first quarter through third quarter be able to put an A because the student has really demonstrated having learned all that was required to be learned at the A

[01:11:26] level. So technically that is possible. I would say it's probably pretty rare that a student would go three-quarters at the C level and then be able to do all the work in the final quarter to raise that to an A level but it is technically possible and in that hypothetical what that does is it rewards the effort that that student put in to mastering that content.

[01:11:49] And you cannot reward the student for their work in a similar fashion in a traditional grade book. - With that in mind, I will support the rolling grade book with homework, homework, you know, homework, not every homework has to be checked for everything by teachers.

[01:12:09] It could be whether somebody completed work or not, or it could be a spot check. If there were like 10 questions, teacher could check number seven out of those 10 and see whether the student's done it right. There was a formative assessment can be given and I will support to the extent of giving 10% as a separate category to make a point to our students and the public that we are gonna consider this an important aspect of a student's growth in learning.

[01:12:42] - Thank you. - Mr. Frisch. - Thanks. Let's start with just a general question from like the 50,000 foot level. Are there any significant changes with the recommendations that we're receiving today as a result of the policy that the board adopted last year?

[01:13:04] - Well, all of the recommendations that the committee developed were in response to the updated policy. So I tried to enumerate that on each of the recommendation slides. So yeah, so we looked at not just the policy requirement, but also the guiding principles in the policy to really try to understand the board's thinking.

[01:13:23] So like one of the guiding principles the promotion of continuous engagement and student learning so all of these recommendations are developed from the board's updates to the policy and were these recommendations the things that were going to be recommended before we engaged in the policy work no remember we had the recommendations from 2324 we brought those forward last year and I think the first conversation that the board had there was some disagreement across board members about for example the grade weighting category, the grade book type, the reassessment policy.

[01:14:00] So the board did the work to update the policy to provide clarity of expectation. But within each of these areas that you see on this chart, the board did not say, for example, the grade book type needs to be rolling or traditional. It said it needs to be consistent and asked the committee to go back, think about it more deeply for an additional year and with additional stakeholder engagement, with additional data analysis consider the recommendations and that's the committee worked really hard to do that now I'm not right but I don't see much of a change from the

[01:14:34] changes that were implemented last year right or any change um that's it yeah the grade book type is as miss Clemenco's pointing out it's the major one yeah and that was before the board had changed its policy no that was after the board had changed the policy I believe the board picked up the work of the policy based on what we what many people saw as changes that were preceding the policy work so that's I think you're correct but just in terms of the timeline again remember so the board updated the policy started that work in

[01:15:09] July of 2024 finished that work in December of 2024 throughout that entire period of time the grading committee was suspended and right didn't pick up the work again until January 2025 right but there were changes communicated to schools for this school year 100 and that's what i'm getting at is that there's no significant difference between that and where we've ended up here well again the the biggest the two biggest ones are grade book type because we did not require a grade book type to be consistent from classroom to classroom so this recommendation in response to the updated policy language that says

[01:15:47] we have to have a consistent grade book type would be to do the rolling grade book and then homework we didn't have as part of the grading committee's work last year that was new work this year But the other ones are essentially the same as what the committee recommended for 23-24. All right.

[01:16:03] It was commented that the work that is done for each class in or out of school could be considered homework since, you know, students are taking it and figuring out a path of getting it done. How do we ensure that that type of expectation is consistent for all students, including the ones that typically don't get that type of work?

[01:16:23] Well, I think that was why our senior leadership team, looking at the committee recommendations recommended actually having a set category weight for homework. Because we do know right now from the data that I shared that students are reporting daily homework, but it's not 100% that are reporting that, and there's variability across the grade bands. So to get consistency, the first place that we need to start is clarity of policy expectations. So that was why senior leadership team was recommending that separate homework weighting category.

[01:16:57] Generally speaking, I'd be supportive of something that indicates some commitment to homework. I'd be open to interpretations of what the word homework means. I just want consistent application, and I want every student to have an opportunity to meet those expectations.

[01:17:17] Another thing I would say is that I would be in favor of limiting retakes, perhaps to one, and setting a threshold at 85%. I know that some board members have been talking about those two things, and I'd be supportive of that if there's a consensus being taken today.

[01:17:35] Generally speaking, I really appreciate the work of my colleagues on the policy, of the committee and staff for working on this. And I'm hopeful that we can get to a point where we're not changing this in a year or two years or three years, and that we sit with what has been determined for a while so that we're not constantly moving the football for people.

[01:17:59] and that's my only sports reference for the year thank you well it was apt and appreciated by our schools I can tell you that because they would like consistency of expectations so it sticks it so I just like to emphasize on reassessment we I mean personally I do not believe we should go up to 100% we can for preparing the students for college is the intention high education

[01:18:34] and they do not get that reassessment for and I think that flexibility is we're doing the service to the students I'm okay with up to 80% as which is which is still good but it's not giving them the chance of like keep working and working and getting the grade up and it's hard for teachers to for doing the reassessments so I'm gonna strongly advocate for doing the reassess was only

[01:19:06] up to 80% at the max in you know 90 but not 100 percent. Ms. St. John-Cunning. So in terms of the reassessments and I don't know if you can gather this data of this data exists of what grade are kids on or what and then what like what is the number that they're at and what are they trying to get do you know like like is it this is my concern that that there are students that are high performers and

[01:19:45] then maybe through you know peer pressure their pressure parents pressure they're just trying to go for the higher grade not necessarily because they need it because there's that pressure and I know that working with kids in schools that mental health issue which sometimes is self-imposed is something that concerns me that that reach to perfection and so I don't know if we have the data is that a kid that has gotten a grade that is 50% and is trying to get up to you know hopefully 80 or whatever is it a kid that is at 80% and

[01:20:22] wants to get the hundred percent and like I think if we saw that we could figure out it would be easier for us to figure out and my concern and I've always said a kid is not an SOL number or a grade I think that we get lost in all of that and so my concern is some of the mental health impacts of these kids striving for perfection? Yeah, I think that's a great question. Unfortunately, we can't centrally really collect that information, and it's going to vary probably classroom to classroom in terms of what students are asking to do. I would just say from my own perspective, though, I wouldn't want to minimize the student who's maybe at an 80 percent wanting to get to 100 percent, because

[01:21:01] a student who's doing that probably is doing that for a lot of different reasons, some to maximize their learning and make sure that they really do know the content so that they can carry on to the next course in the sequence of their studies but when you think about the competitiveness of college admissions right now the difference between a B in a class and an A in a class on a transcript makes a difference for students that are applying to selective colleges and many of our students in Fairfax County are applying to selective colleges so I just think we need to keep that in mind when we think about the reasons and motivations that students have for trying to achieve certain standards it's going to depend on the

[01:21:40] student and what their individual situation is and what their post secondary goals are and I don't want to minimize that but I also don't want to minimize the other aspect of course not I appreciate it thank you I'm seeing no other placards I'm gonna take a turn and then we're gonna break for lunch and do go backs because foods here so I'm gonna be as quick as possible I'm gonna start by saying I cannot agree with reassessment up to 100% Loudoun County Public Schools is currently at 80 and when the student reassesses they can only earn up to an 80 that is exactly the same policy they have in Arlington

[01:22:19] County I'm still hoping to get a text back about Prince William and Manassas but I've checked with people that's what they have in Loudoun County's school board just rewrote the policy and it's gonna drop to a 70 next year I don't great inflation when you show me on page whatever page is it page 35 of the report that 51.5% of the grades issued at the high school level this year at first quarter were A's and sixty two point seven percent at the middle school level were A's we got grade inflation okay I don't want a bell curve I want all students to succeed all right that's huge that's important to me but I need to be clear we can't be doing reassessment because the workload when

[01:22:59] you go back to slide eight I believe it's 56 percent of staff viewed the reassessment policy negatively and then when you look at the report I think it was 52% significant increase in workload and for 23% a slight increase so 75% of our teachers saw an increase in workload because of reassessment it's a problem homework I like 60/40 I would like it to be up to 10% but I would like to be required to be assigned okay we need to be habit forming and it needs to start in younger years the other thing I want to talk about is there are lots of

[01:23:38] studies for example published in the journal of educational assessment brookhart et al 2022 found that grading reforms often result in inflated grades that do not correspond to actual student learning when schools eliminate zeros or allow unlimited retakes without structured interventions students may earn passing grades without mastering essential content effects on student motivation in a 2023 report by the thomas f fordham institute researchers concluded that policies minimizing consequences for missed assignments or poor performance inadvertently reduce student motivation motivation the study found that students districts with strict late work policies and minimum grading thresholds demonstrated greater responsibility and time

[01:24:15] management skills over time while some students benefit from additional chances too much leniency can remove the urgency to succeed i can go on with more studies i appreciate in your report that all of your studies lean the other direction but there is a lot of research that also says that reassessing up to 100 is not best practice um so you know and and i'm going to share this i've shared this with other people because i don't need a response i did talk to 11 board members and i heard from mr moon this morning he doesn't agree with 100 up to 100 either and so we're going to have to come to a consensus of what that number might look like but quickly what i'm going to

[01:24:51] share is an idea i did talk with several of you about that i still like personally but i don't think we're ready for it and that is if you're in a standard course that's unweighted i'm happy for you to reassess up to 100 that's why we created some of these practices is we wanted kids to want to learn if you're in an honors course or something that gets a 0.5 weight you can reassess up to 90 because you get a 0.5 bump in your gpa and if you're in an ap iv or dual enroll class you can reassess up to 80 because you get a 1.0 point in your gpa the workload is the number of

[01:25:25] our advanced learners who are retaking when they have a 92 a 94 95 or an 88 and trying to get a better a higher a and it's not properly preparing our kids for college so i'll stop there i'm out of time we'll do a recess hopefully we can eat pretty quickly and come back and do go backs and

[01:25:41] then we've got to get to say cip so thank you i mean i'd like to say 25 uh if we can do it it's a

[01:59:44] time and we have a lot to get to with cip i'm going to try and do a little bit of consensus um gathering and then there are a few items i don't think we're going to get to consensus on so we will send out a google doc but i feel like um i didn't hear a lot of conversation around number of assignments so can i get consensus with the raise of hand are people comfortable what with what the committee has proposed with the minimum number of assignments okay that's unanimous for those in the room great book waiting we did have conversation um because that's also tied to

[02:00:18] homework and so I you know I can I see three options that'll be in a Google Doc so listen so hopefully you understand them the first one is I'm gonna create a Google Doc it's not okay we we can try we're not gonna get into discussion so we can't get there we're gonna go what I heard from most people I think was 60 30

[02:00:50] 10 or 60 40 with homework being up up to 10% in the 40 so who would like a 60 30 10 you just give me your sense mr. moon that's a 60 30 10 okay 60 30 10 I think I saw three a 60 well let me qualify my 60 40 up to 10 they still need to be signing homework it consistent for all students right we need to be assigning homework so within that isn't it needs to be written in the regulation that you

[02:01:26] will assign homework it can be assessed up to ten percent so let's go back 60 I'm sorry 70 30 60 60 30 10 same hands 360 40 up to 10 percent with the homework assigned okay that looks like consensus so it looks like we're at 60 40 up to 10 percent homework has to be assigned okay so that takes care of that the two of those gradebook type because it would be delayed well first of all gradebook type even though it's still gonna be a delayed implementation for gradebook type do we have consistent consensus on rolling gradebook who's comfortable with the

[02:02:05] rolling gradebook a year from now with training this year at high schools only okay i mean it looks like consensus um but maybe people need to have more discussion on that so uh let's do that again if you're comfortable with what i just say rolling gradebook training this year implementation the following year raise your hand so one two three four yeah it's the same thing i just reworded

[02:02:39] it so it's so i see four miss leismer heiser raise your hand down okay and so those people who prefer more discussion around gray book before we pick all right so that's inconsistent so we're gonna have to have to come back to that yeah more discussion um and then finally reassessment um i heard consensus that nobody can nobody can work with up to 100 um i've heard as low as 70 as high is 90 so well that's gonna be part two okay part one of reassessment is do we

[02:03:18] have consensus around a number and I think that what I heard the most was 85 or 90 so I'm gonna start with 85 who's comfortable with up to 85% okay start with up to 90 okay okay start with up to 90 93 up to 93 okay I see I see two

[02:03:53] hands up to an 85 up to a 90 one tooth you voted twice so now you're down a little bit I got you one two three four okay up to an 85 that's one two three four five six seven eight up to an 80 all right I think we're at an 85 that was where the consensus was the next question is and I think this one is a little tougher again articulating what Loudon and Arlington do is they are up

[02:04:30] to an 80 and when you take the reassessment you can only earn up to an 80 no we said you can reassess up to an 85 we didn't see what you could get to that's the second part 85 or below you can reassess we're now talking we're now talking about what you can earn in that reassessment again Loudon and Arlington you can only get up to that threshold which is 80 I see three options I've heard three options for people you can reassess and you can get up to a hundred

[02:05:07] You can reassess take the average of the reassessment and the first test But it can't go below your original score or you can only reassess up to the 85 which is the threshold, right?

[02:05:22] So my first question is how many people support the reassessment allowing the student to earn up to a hundred percent? okay, I see for how many people are comfortable with an average of The second score and the first score, but it cannot go below the original score Lady we're adding new things that we never discussed and this makes me really uncomfortable because it's really arbitrary We had all of this work done by the committee then senior leadership looked at it I am very uncomfortable with the new things that were not up for discussion or greater understanding

[02:06:01] Well, we're gonna get stuck on this. So I don't know what to do because we're out of time. So I'm just saying that I was gonna share the three things that people have shared with me and see where the consensus was Yes, we have not discussed this part of it. I agree with you And what people have shared it have shared with you, but we have people who are actually Educators who have done this work. I can go out and come up with all kinds of things on a lot of different things But if I'm not an expert in that field, I think it warrants a little bit of conversation a little bit of feedback from staff I'm just really concerned that we're doing this so let me ask this

[02:06:40] Okay, I hear that because I hear your frustration of You're firm in what you want to have happen is what I'm hearing And so I'm just gonna finish the consensus gathering. I'm just curious to know how many people would want that reassessment Only to be up to the threshold of 85% Okay, that's four and then who would want the average of the two not to allow it to go below it the original score I could live with that too. So that's four. Okay. We're not gonna we're not gonna what maybe five We're not gonna get to consensus. I just don't know when we're gonna talk about it. So

[02:07:18] we'll table this for now because we have to get to CIP because we don't have time for everybody to speak to it like let me just hang on a second are people comfortable if we send this particular discussion back to dr. Reed to then come back to us and we can also do a next steps doc related to this okay miss

[02:07:56] Marin yeah I think I just think we need another discussion about this and you know the gradebook type to dr. Anderson's point we never sussed out a 60 40 10 the options presented to us with 60 30 10 or 70 30 so this is way too important to feel like I'm at an auction you know making decisions so I think it needs to have a very I think to the challenged dr. Reed is yours you've presented us with two recommendations or i am not the educational expert that's you

[02:08:34] so you know i i find we're in this space a lot where you give us these options but so i think it needs to be tightened up and very clear what you want our input on and what is not up for discussion and what is actually going to be implemented next year and the year after so I do think this happens from time to time where a committee is going to come in and make recommendations that senior leadership will adjust, because those are recommendations.

[02:09:07] And those committees are told they're not making policy, they're not drafting regulation. But we wanted you to see what the recommendation the committee came to, but I was providing you one recommendation that's the far right. So, and that's what Dr. Presidio provided.

[02:09:24] I think the clear message is that there's not a comfort with 100% for the retakes. And we can take that back and I can provide, I'll meet with staff and we'll come back with a proposal for you or a recommendation that is not to 100%.

[02:09:41] And then we can have a discussion on that piece moving forward. Thank you. And then we're going to adjourn, but I'm going to say one thing. We have canceled every evening work session. This is the second time I've been a meeting manager and I have gotten the short end of the stick on the amount of time needed for the discussion I'm gonna leave it at that because I need to honor and get to see IP because we're half an hour late. Thank you

[02:14:25] So school board members if you can come back to the table Carl's missing cows missing, but we have we have Kevin we have quorum, okay Well, I'm I'm really excited to get started here today and are we recording we got all that okay I'm really excited to get started here today this is the culmination of almost a year and a half of work by facilities

[02:15:01] and outside consultants and fpac and there's a lot of content here today we have three subjects that we'll be discussing today so just to make it simplest we'll be having slides about the first part then discussion slides about the second part then discussion and slides about the third part then discussion because we were kind of chunking this because they're three very different subjects because we have a lot of content to get through we'll be doing our initial questions two minutes to start with one minute go backs I did

[02:15:38] provide by email and there are hard copies have been provided to you one pagers for the first two subjects that we'll be discussing today what unites these three subjects is that it's all about building cheaper and building faster because we've all been through the CIP work session a few months ago where we have great facility needs that vastly exceed the amount of our financial resources our limited school bond funding which is two hundred thirty million dollars every year so we need to look for alternative ways to be more efficient with our dollars to be fiscally responsible and to make better

[02:16:15] use of our facilities and also to reduce our construction timeframes because we have a 42 year renovation cycle that we need to get down to the recommended 20 to 25 years so really excited to talk about this the initial two subjects will be looking for informal school board consensus and the third one as well for this first subject specifically what we're looking for in terms of outcomes systems is to obtain school board consensus to proceed with the revision of policy 8240, which is currently pending before the governance, to allow the use of design, build, and construction

[02:16:54] management at risk to new procurement methodologies, new to FCPS, not new to the world, and also to obtain school board consensus to incorporate design, build, and construction management at risk as options and future RFPs where appropriate.

[02:17:10] So I'll circle back to those at the end of the discussion. So with that, I'll turn over to Dr. Reed to introduce staff. - Thank you, Mr. Dunn. And this afternoon we have, as Mr. Dunn mentioned, several very meaty topics. So I think we should just get started. I'm pleased to have Ms. Szymanski here to introduce her team and introduce the work.

[02:17:31] So thank you, Ms. Szymanski. - Thank you, Dr. Reed, and good afternoon to the board, and thank you for having me here today. As Dr. Reed mentioned, my name's Janice Szymanski, chief of facility services and capital programs. And with me today, I have Jessica Gillis and Scott Eschbach, leaders on the facilities team.

[02:17:48] Today, we're gonna cover a summary presentation on three capital improvement program related topics, starting with some background information, followed by alternative project delivery methods, swing spaces, and then public-private partnerships. So before we dive in, I do wanna share some background information on our facility funding.

[02:18:07] This slide was presented in this year's CIP, and it shows an overview of facility funding and their sources. Funding sources for capital projects shown at the top of the chart are the general obligation bonds, as voted on by residents in the biannual school board referendum. The annual limit for general obligation funding has increased over time.

[02:18:26] The increased annual allocation to 230 million per year in FY25 and beyond is seen here. And it should be noted that referendum for schools is biannual, so we're in the odd years at FCPS. As a result of escalation in the construction industry, we continue to monitor these costs as they relate to capital projects.

[02:18:46] And also on this slide, you can see the additional funding that impacts the CIP includes FCPS operating funds, funds from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors for Infrastructure Management, the capital sinking fund, and proffers. So you can see we spend approximately 40 million annually on facility projects that are not using bond funds.

[02:19:06] And please note, this is 40 million for facility-related projects, and that does not include work such as maintenance that's also coming out of separate operating funds. Also previously shared with the board, I wanna remind everyone that FCPS faces capital project funding constraints.

[02:19:23] This chart illustrates FY24 capital construction funding per square foot compared to other school divisions limited to the DMV, where the regional cost of construction is most comparable to our market conditions. Comparing funding per square foot helps us understand the size of facility portfolio at a minimum obligated for renovations against capital funding.

[02:19:44] This graphic includes divisions approximately one-third the size of FCPS or greater as most comparable to our design and construction program. So as you can see of the eight public schools listed above, FCPS ranks last with a funding per square foot of $8.54.

[02:20:01] The average funding per square foot of the school division shown here is $21.80. You know, because we're such a large school system, even increasing funding by an additional $3.58 to bring us up to the second lowest ranked school. That means an annual bond amount or alternative funding would need to increase by $97.5 million annually or 195 per two year referendum.

[02:20:27] And so this funding disparity has been really the catalyst for identifying ways that we can optimize the facility program. So the three topics today we'll be discussing are in response to the growing need for facility capital. So, with that framework in mind, we're first going to discuss alternative project delivery methods.

[02:20:48] I'm first going to walk through what the methods are, how procurement influences them, and the implications for different approaches for our capital improvement projects. So, when we talk about project delivery methods, we're referring to the full process by which a project is planned, designed, contracted, and built.

[02:21:07] It lays out who does what, how the owner, design team, and contractors interact. These methods do not exist in a vacuum. They're rooted in procurement strategies. How we choose the project delivery method influences everything from the contract type to when team members are brought on board.

[02:21:24] FCPS has historically preferred to deliver its major capital projects following the design, bid, build process. And so we're seeking ways to expand beyond just this delivery method and explore other options. Please note our current policy, 8240, describes that our capital improvement project should be awarded by competitive sealed bidding process to the lowest responsible bidder, provided that sufficient funding is available.

[02:21:51] And so while our current policy follows this traditional design, bid, build, project delivery method, with a revision to the policy, alternative delivery methods may be explored. There are two methods widely used in education construction. That's construction management at risk and design and build, which we'll be discussing today.

[02:22:12] The first is our current method. Design, bid, build, it's our current process, and expanding on this a bit more here provides us the foundation for better understanding how it compares to others. The traditional design, bid, build method follows a very linear approach. The owner, us in this case, FCPS, has a contract with the design team, usually an architect and engineers, and they create a complete set of project plans and specifications.

[02:22:39] Once that design is fully finalized and permits are secured, the project then goes out to bid. We have pre-qualified general contractors who submit competitive bids based on those documents. The owner, or us in this case, has a contract with that general contractor. And again, it's usually the lowest responsible bidder to construct the project according to the plans.

[02:22:59] The general contractor then completes the building and turns it back over to us based on the bid price with change orders submitted throughout construction. So the construction price for this method can fluctuate due to change order process. This process also does not allow for any fast tracking, nor does it consider the general contractor's insight during design.

[02:23:19] So with that, we're going to go into our first alternative method, and that's construction manager at risk. It's a project delivery method where the construction manager, or also known as a CM, is involved early on in the project, and typically we hire them during the design phase, and they provide input on cost estimation, scheduling, and constructability.

[02:23:40] There are still two separate contracts with the owner, so we would have one with our design team and a separate one for that construction manager. In this model, the construction manager assumes the risk of delivering the project within a guaranteed maximum price, or commonly known as a GMP, meaning they're responsible for completing the project on budget, even if the actual costs exceed that set maximum price.

[02:24:03] The CM, or construction manager, typically oversees the entire construction process, ensuring the project stays on schedule and within that budget. CM at Risk allows for more collaboration through constant communication between FCPS, the design team, and the contractor, leading to potential better cost control and reduced project delays.

[02:24:23] It also opens up to the possibility for the construction manager to order materials early and start construction early, even before the full documents are complete. All right. And then the other method is Design Build. So design-build is a project delivery method where there's a single entity or team that's responsible for both the design and the construction of a project.

[02:24:46] In this approach, us at SFCPS, we would hire one firm. It's typically a contractor who has an architect underneath them to handle both the design and construction phases instead of hiring two separate teams for each phase. So like construction manager at risk, this method also uses a guaranteed maximum price.

[02:25:04] so they're still responsible for completing the project on budget even if actual costs succeed. And because it's one contract the general contractor is part of that project team from day one of design all the way through construction. So I'd say key features of the design build method include one single point of responsibility, faster project completion and cost control, and the highest ability for collaboration. In this method the design builder assumes that also assumes the greatest amount of risk on behalf of the project and this method also has the potential for ordering the materials and starting that construction early so in recap this slide here

[02:25:44] looks at all three methods side by side so you can see design build our current practice see them at risk offering that more collaborative practice while still having the separate contract and design build being the more integrated method and you can see each method does have its advantages and features and i would say ultimately the choice between these methods really depends on the specific needs of the project including its complexity its budget its timeline and that level of collaboration you're seeking so why we're doing this i mean exploring other delivery methods

[02:26:23] kind of stems from that idea that one size doesn't fit all when it comes to managing construction projects yeah fcps capital improvement projects are all slightly different with unique sites existing buildings and varying needs and alternative project delivery methods like design build or CM at risk allow for better risk sharing between parties which can lead to fewer disputes and change orders they also promote early collaboration between fcps the design team and the contractor which i think can lead to better improving constructability cost estimates and that overall efficiency our projects are very complex so this could really be an added benefit

[02:27:00] for fcps these methods can also allow for the opportunity to shorten the construction time and provide cost control which i think is very good for that predictability of budget and better opportunities for getting good value during the design especially when the design contractor is brought on during that design phase so i know i'm moving along here these are the staff next steps so on our side we're going to continue exploring the delivery methods for our capital improvement projects. As mentioned, we've redlined policy 8240. And currently, staff, we're developing the

[02:27:38] architect engineer RFP for our next renovation project in the queue. That's Cub Run Elementary School per the CIP. And so our draft that we're building now states that this project may be a construction manager at risk delivery method, and the design team will be expected to work with the construction manager team as an option. That's assuming the policy does get approved. So for the board next steps, you know, we have the recommended actions here. So policy 8240 has been redlined to incorporate construction manager at risk and design build as approved. The school board would

[02:28:15] then need to approve the updated policy to enact these delivery options. And again, I want to reiterate this does not eliminate or lock ourselves into a delivery method moving forward, but it really just gives us the option if we so choose to use a new method. Looking ahead, if we do approve it and do move forward any future use of construction manager at risk or design but build will require school board approval for their respective contracts so it would be required before an RFP is issued and then again at the GMP if that dollar threshold is exceeded and so our office you know we're committed to

[02:28:53] working closely with the superintendent and the school board to implement these delivery methods and in search of optimizing our program thank you before get started with questions i just wanted to clarify uh in response to a question on the one pager we list um design bid build which is the default required under virginia law with design build and construction management risk the idea is right now we have only one tool in our toolbox which is design bid build and fpac has said that's more appropriate for simple one trade projects

[02:29:28] and we're looking to add more tools to our toolbox where appropriate and be able to include an RFPs so with that miss lady thank you mr. Dunn thank you staff for this presentation and all the work you do tirelessly behind the scenes when it comes to facilities I'll be brief I 100% support what mr. Dunn just said I don't see any reason why we wouldn't want to have all of the options in our toolbox and so in relation to swing spaces and procurement I'm 100% in

[02:30:06] support of the additional columns or suggestions that were made related to both of those. Thanks. Thank you. Mr. Moon. I wish I could be as brief as my colleague Miss Lady, but I cannot. So let me ask you, let me ask you a few questions. Since a CMAR is new to us, you know, obviously I need to be educated a little further on this one. And let me start with this one. I'm looking at slide

[02:30:42] number eight if that can be posted so we are issuing two RFPs one for design team one for a CM and then CM RFP will stipulate a construction budget is that something we are stipulating or is that CM is responding to our RFP and stipulating maximum contract price it would be the first so we in the RFP would stipulate what that budget is so we would you know internally decide what

[02:31:19] our budget is, we would use that CIP, the estimate we put together, and put that in the RFP when we're hiring the CM. And then as they go through the design, they're going to be keeping that cost control and that review of the design. So when we get to actually negotiating the GMP, it should be that budgeted amount that we had originally in the RFP. If a CM is going to be working as a general contractor, how much of a control do we have on actual cost, actual expenditure, you know, At the end of the day, I think we're actually going to have greater control because we're going to, one, stipulate what that budget is.

[02:31:58] We're not crossing our fingers at bid day. We're going to say, hey, the price, the guaranteed price needs to be under $40 million, say. And we're going to put that in the RFP before we even sign up with a contractor. But then we're going to be working very closely with them.

[02:32:14] they're also going to be advising with the design team to make sure that that cost control is being done in a collaborative way with fcps so when it comes time we feel like there's enough assurity in the documents we can actually negotiate that contract so if you're going to have a design team who's going to be doing the design i'm assuming designing the design and in our normal process based upon design, the contractor, general contractors with a bit based upon our design.

[02:32:45] That's our normal process right now. And how would CM be able to stipulate to the maximum price without knowing what the design is going to be? Well, I think that's why we bring them on as a collaborative partner. So I think one, it's just being transparent when we hire them on, saying you're going to need to work with this design team and with us to make sure it stays under 40 million dollars and then they do have a seat at the table working with the architect to say hey you know what you've designed is overly complicated we think this will be more expensive to build and so there is just more control of the design from a cost perspective

[02:33:25] throughout because they have a voice at the table so so cm is going to stipulate to the maximum amount even without knowing the design and then make a recommendation for design team on the design and then if a design team does not agree with the recommendations then run we're going to have to work through like a value engineering process or work with them but ideally because they are on earlier through the beginning of the design they're making the right big moves you know right moves through as the design process goes through you know to make sure that when it comes time to do

[02:34:03] that guaranteed maximum price contract it's it's meeting that mark and you're right sometimes the designs not fully flushed out they are taking on that risk they're agreeing to do it for 40 million without every line being drawn again that's some of the risk we put on the construction manager we do pay them fees and the fees will be negotiated when we bring them on on board as part of the rfp and we're cm if they are general contractor the other ones and they may be hiring subcontractors

[02:34:38] but i mean i'm assuming that they will go through their issue their own rfps to hire subcontractors and do we have a control over that we will be reviewing them and yes it'll all be open books so we're going to be able to see what sort of pricing they're negotiating with their subcontractors and in fact it because it's a guaranteed maximum price say they we were to agree to 40 million dollars they start awarding contracts and lo and behold it comes in at 38 we see all that and we actually get the two million dollars back we only pay them the 38 for the actual awarded contracts.

[02:35:16] If it goes over 40, we don't pay any higher. I know that I only have 13 seconds left. If you could tell us how we can save money, how we can save time using this method. Right. One, I think you have greater speed because you can actually, they're on board.

[02:35:35] They can already start ordering long lead materials before you finish the design. So there's some efficiency in the timeline, which equates to money. I think the other one is budget predictability. We're going to put in the RFP it's 40, and then we're going to have all the right players in the room working together to make sure it stays at 40.

[02:35:54] And so your likelihood of change orders throughout construction goes way down. So I think it offers more predictability to that budget. Okay, I probably need to go back for one minute later, but since I have four seconds, let me ask you, could you tell me what school districts, large school districts are utilizing this?

[02:36:11] - Yeah, many school districts in the DMV are utilizing this. I got sample contracts from Loudoun County. I know Prince William County's using it. PG County was doing design build through their P3 program. DC did a combination of CM at risk and design build.

[02:36:28] So Montgomery County's using it. It's widely known in education work because it is complex work. You do want that perspective early on. - The mic doesn't seem to be, Oh, it's still working. Mr. Don, I'd like one minute to go back later.

[02:36:48] Dr. Anderson. Thank you. Just to follow up a little bit with Mr. Moon's questioning, is your position or would your position be that had we employed the CMAR, let's say for the false church construction, they would not have allowed the design team to put that cube or that glass walkway because it would have been difficult to build and expensive to build, And then that's a design that would not have gone to the community and not create the consternation that it created?

[02:37:20] Yeah, that's a good hypothetical. Without being in a time machine, that's exactly what a construction manager or design builder would do. They would take a look at the design drawings as they go along and say, hey, actually, this is not a great ROI. It's very complicated. You made it overly complicated. It's difficult to construct.

[02:37:37] Maybe either take it out or build it this more simplistic way that you get the same effect and it's less expensive because it's easier to do and that's where you would have that dialogue between the construction manager and the designer to come up with a good solution so under this approach the value engineering is built in rather than added after the fact right and it's truly finding value through the design too it's it's getting good value it's making sure things can actually be constructed it's a quality thing too like you're when the details are being vetted by people that actually

[02:38:11] install them the likelihood that it's going to be done in a good quality way goes up too so then how are we then going to merge this with the fcps approach of having a design team that includes community i think it would be almost identical because we're going to have a design team on board they're going to be going through all the different phases that doesn't change it's just another partner at the table so we can actually bring them to the community meetings as well i think if anything you're going to get a more robust perspective when we go out and talk talk to folks

[02:38:44] okay um can you speak to the differences between cmar and db whether or not one each approach lends themselves to particular projects yeah that's a good question they both have their pros and cons when you have two contracts you actually get to control the architect a little bit more so if you want more control over what the design team is doing you might lend yourself to construction manager at risk if you want more of a one-stop shop and more of that risk you know one benefit of design build is if the architects say made a mistake well it's part of their team so they'd be

[02:39:20] responsible for the performance of them a little bit more so it's a matter of preference not size and scope of a project no i think you would want to take a look at each project and say hey if this project carries more risk it's more complicated has a shorter time frame maybe the expediency of using one company would be good but if you had something that was a little bit longer and you wanted to interplay with the architect a little bit more directly you might do construction manager at risk i think both of them have their merits um this chart thank you for putting that up the owner control over design under design build it is not checked off what does that mean well it

[02:39:59] means the architect technically works for the contractor directly so then we don't have input into the design we will and we need to make we have strong ed specs to make sure that no matter what the design build team is bringing forth to the table it meets our standards and we can give feedback but they might actually come up with some ideas and the builder might think they're a little risky so they might not even ever be shown to us you know there's there might be a little bit more interplay between that builder and the architect before it comes to us there will be definitely collaboration and we'll make sure it's a design that works but it's already been vetted and sometimes you don't get to see everything so again the community

[02:40:37] part oops the community part um who are engaged in the design of or who are engaging the design team they will see uh they'll have a slightly smaller window into what's possible because it's already been organized to only provide what they feel is doable rather than oh you know wide wide open kind of opportunities which if you think about could be a good thing because we can ensure that it's constructible that it actually meets the budget so anything that we are seeing we have assurance that it's going to be viable sure one of the things and maybe this is a better question

[02:41:15] for the next section but you can tell me when i worked in loudon because they opened new schools just about every other year the year that i opened in elementary school there was a high school in the middle school and typically they would use that one design and just i don't know how that work with the construction company but they would just use the same design over and over and over again so you'll have elementary schools that look the same just with different colors would this lend us to that kind of um work because it was a lot cheaper yeah i think you could do that methodology under any of these i think the bigger constraints is actually going to be existing sites

[02:41:55] here at FCPS thank you miss Dixit thank you Janice for the presentation and I'm a big believer in the fixed firm price contracts where we not keep adding more and more funds as a work orders and change of orders so definitely this is a much better approach to things going to design build or construction management CMR. I did want to ask, give a certain example, if you could just

[02:42:32] go over a cost savings, you know, for like for any future project is in line that how much savings can we do by switching over? Yeah, I think that might even be better done in a follow-up because we had started to do that with Swing Space. We kind of equated it to number of dollars saved per month so i think if you could say we could get ahead by a few months using this methodology we could kind of equate hey that's fifty thousand dollars less a month that i have to pay the general contractor to be out there it's a little bit more streamlined with you know having the

[02:43:07] construction trades out there longer so i think i'd want to actually put something together for you in that regard but i guess what i will just keep reiterating is it provides just more budget confirmation up front and less variance from that because when you agree and we do our internal estimates and put out an estimate for a certain specific price when bidders the construction manager at risk or the design bidder build on it then they're obligated to keep that price thank you for the response um and i do understand things can change and we talked about that before

[02:43:42] that there might be something unexpected happening and it could be all you know something we had to address the maintenance log and and obviously we have a huge cycle if we switch to this broad the new approaches how much difference can it make in terms of our 45 years of maintenance cycle we have we call how much can we reduce that well I think the benefits will be if you get work done quicker you can move on to the next project I do think having trades that are actually building the

[02:44:17] work involved in the design lead to better designs personally. I think that's a very strong voice that you need at the table. So I'm hopeful that even just using these alternative methods, we might have longer lasting work. And maybe more sustainable buildings, which are our commitment to net zero.

[02:44:38] Yeah, I agree. There's a lot of construction managers and design builders that have experience building net zero and you can design a theoretical design but you gotta having that experience actually building that zero work is very valuable so I'm definitely very much in support of this pro and would like to go forward with the board support and thank you for this and thank you miss mr. Dunn miss Merrin for bringing this to the board miss Anderson I also would like to thank

[02:45:15] my colleagues and I 100% agree with Mr. Dunn that having more tools in the toolbox is always a good idea I guess my question was from is this harder or either or any of these harder to attract contractors to work with I would say in this geographic area no in fact there's many larger companies that have started to only do construction manager at risk or design build it's a more collaborative approach so I think there's actually a lot of companies out there that prefer it because you're in a partnership role and not an adversarial role only looking at the bottom price as a way to make profit and these other

[02:45:54] models you're actually negotiating the fees upfront so you have that all settled and then it's a truly more of a partnership process so this wouldn't limit the number of contractors that were available to us I would estimate no okay excellent how would this work in amongst the bond so understanding that oftentimes we get bond money that's for a few years like several years out for when we vote on the bond. Can you just speak to any of that? Yeah, we tried to make sure that in this CIP and moving forward with our cash flow, we were cognizant and wanted to future-proof ourselves. When we talked about the potential for bringing someone on earlier, we made sure that the

[02:46:31] design year had enough money to bring on pre-construction services from these builders, so that should be built in. And you know, if we don't use it and we go with the traditional method, then that money would just roll into construction once it starts, so I feel like it'll work either way for us the other thing we did was during that permitting year we usually just limit to design and permitting we actually front-loaded some of the construction funding in that cash flow in the event you want to buy that long lead mechanical or electrical equipment up front get started on it so i think our cip cash flow should support these models excellent thank you

[02:47:06] to you and your team for the work that you've done on this miss marron yay the day is finally here we've been talking about this for a while thank you miss manske and your wonderful team i think it's just you know i'm glad to be learning about these options and i love the way of phrasing it as it's a tool in our toolbox and um especially because we know that we have to be so stringent with our budget dollars and knowing that in this past year alone we spent 20 million of our instructional budget on urgent capital facility needs we just have to figure out other ways to do the facilities work better so i do hope that the public and certainly uh the board of supervisors

[02:47:45] see that we are doing everything we can to be as um as frugal of a steward as we can of every single dollar because no student or staff deserves to be in a building that is 45 years old so um i just wanted to say that um it's really imperative that the board approve the policy that makes all this stuff happen we have to give that authority over to the superintendent And so the governance committee is reviewing that and that will come before the board.

[02:48:13] And so we do hope the goal is if the board can approve this before this school year is out, we can start using this right away. So if you do have questions about that policy, please seek the answers out in advance, but it should be pretty straightforward. Again, this has been at our disposal.

[02:48:29] We just haven't done this traditionally, but now is a very different time than it ever was. So let's get to using these other tools. Thank you. - Thank you, I just wanted to echo my praise for Ms. Szymanski and her team and for Dr. Reed for championing this, exploring these new options for procurement of school construction and renovation projects.

[02:48:54] I just wanted to confirm your exploration of this involved review of by legal counsel, division counsel? - That's correct, we worked in collaboration with division counsel on this work and with the revisions to policy 8240.

[02:49:10] - And Dr. Reed, is it your recommendation to add these tools to our toolbox? - I think the more varied our approaches are, I think, yes, the answer would be that, yes, sir. - So are the sources of cost savings from design build and CMAR, does it come from essentially doing things in parallel rather than sequentially, and also through that collaboration, reducing the number of change orders that might be required later on?

[02:49:40] Yeah, those two are absolutely correct. You put out the fires before they ever even start in design. And then again, these are the two methods that have the ability to fast track work. I believe that either FPAC or facilities, I can't remember which, had estimated that design build and or CMAR would save six to nine months on a typical project.

[02:50:03] Is that a rough ballpark of what you think could be achieved? You know, I think that's what we had talked more about in the context of swing space, because that's probably going to be your more limiting factor when it comes to timeline. I think there's definitely efficiencies gained in this, but I think that'll be part of the discussion in the next round.

[02:50:24] Do you think from using design build and CMAR, does it help to accelerate the permitting zoning 2232 process at all, or are there any positive impacts in that respect? It could, having not gone through it here in Fairfax County, we're going to have to go through this together.

[02:50:42] I do know in my last division, we were actually able to break out permits and get them fast-tracked. So the architect may have been able to build a quick demo package and lay out the foundations while they then moved on to the rest of the building.

[02:50:58] In the meantime, we could submit those to the county for permitting, and then the contractor could even order some of those materials early, get started on that work early while we finished up the rest of the design. Again, knowing that we are always kind of keeping that stable budget. So it allowed for, in partnership with our local jurisdictions and regulatory agencies to do that.

[02:51:20] - And can you clarify the question asked by my colleague, it's in use by other school districts in the DMV. I understand from what you said that some large construction companies don't do design, bid, build anymore for large school projects. So does that mean we're going to be accessing new companies or new contractors that may have not bid on our projects in the past?

[02:51:42] - Yes, there's the potential for that. - And do you see, that's all of my questions. And Ms. Sizemore-Hyser.

[02:51:58] - Thank you. And I also echo my colleagues. I appreciate all the hard work of your staff. I appreciate the hard work of my colleagues on CBDC and FPAC to bring this work forward. A couple questions, it's okay. I always thought that was, no, no, sorry.

[02:52:13] I was like, no, no, we're too good. And it says under Virginia Loan Policy 8240 design-build is the default method. I'm assuming that means it's not the only method allowed, right? And I'm not saying I'm opposed to amending the policy to be more clear, but have these other methods been allowed already?

[02:52:30] That's correct. So VPPA stipulates that design-bid-build is a preferred method because it's all cost-driven. However, it does also allow for alternatives like construction manager at risk and design-build, and that'll be part of the revisions to policy 8240 that talk about that process because per vppa there still needs to be local governing authority that signs off on those methods i asked that question so i'm wondering have we used some of these other methods because they weren't not allowed it was just not listed as a preferred method and if so did if we have what were the cost savings because i understand the dbb method is lowest cost bid which isn't always the cheapest

[02:53:08] option in the long run right because you have like you said this you know two-step process and you might have changes because so have we seen or maybe other school systems seen a savings using those other methods so we have not done that here at fcps so while vppa has the preferred and allows the alternatives our school board policy right now only allows for design bid build so we actually haven't piloted any of these here do you know if other school systems have i'm just kind of curious it sounds like of course that there'd be a lot of savings and time savings as well which is also money savings i'm just curious what the what that's done in other school systems yeah i don't

[02:53:44] want to speak out of turn but i feel like just anecdotally more often than not um other nearby school districts are using these alternative methods as they're preferred for large complex projects that's really good to know um i'm wondering you know this is more of a regulation than policy but are we gonna are there times when one would be preferred over the other from a you know facilities standpoint and if so are we going to put those in regulations as to terms of these are the criteria are there going to be criteria developed because i understand we'll the board will vote on it but it'd be nice for us to know why one method is better than the other what type

[02:54:19] of construction whether school size or footprint i don't know yeah i think that'll be part of future cip planning so our step one was making sure the cost cash flow works but should policy 8240 be approved we would then on a school-by-school basis as projects enter the cip evaluate them because i do think it really depends on the complexity and the goals of the project and so then when we bring forth approval for an rfp to be construction manager or design build we would share our analysis yeah it would just be helpful maybe and again maybe not necessarily to this but as the discussion

[02:54:55] about policy 82 40 is is thoughts of what kind of criteria you'd be looking for for when these would apply just to get a better understanding of why these would be important and i think on second second part i think it'd be really helpful if we had some communications once we may pass this policy about and we talked about this with the boundary work these are all the things we're trying to do to be more effective and efficient with our resources i think that'd be good to have that conversation as well around this piece of it and i really appreciate again all the hard work of staff and our our school board members in shepherding this mr frisch

[02:55:31] thanks very much uh and thank you to our meeting managers and all the staff that worked really hard on all of this um i'm curious if we have and i'm not looking for specific projects, but do we have any projects in the distant pipeline that would benefit from the board aggressively moving forward with adopting revisions to 8240? And if I'm not mistaken, secondarily, it's not that 8240 requires the bid to build. It's that we don't specifically allow for other things to be considered. Yeah, that's correct. Right now, it only allows for the design

[02:56:11] bid build to answer your first question i would recommend starting with our large renovation projects that's where you have complexity that you could really get value from having the construction manager one and we'll get into it at our next session but right now we are doing phased occupied work and that has you know a lot of input on making sure you can work on a part of the building while the other part's safe and a lot of that is the means and methods of the contractor implementing that so having that particular insight will be very beneficial so to me it's the major cip

[02:56:46] work where it's complex so we have several projects in the pipeline that would benefit from this approach i i would agree and and like i mentioned in the staff next steps we're actually future proofing our design rfps to say hey architect you may be expected to work under the low bid condition or you may be expected to work with the construction manager and the fees that we negotiate should cover either method. And this is probably a question that you don't have an easy answer to, but take one bond. We have a bond coming up. About what percentage of that could we realize

[02:57:24] in savings if we took this approach to having more flexibility? That's really difficult to project because it just varies so much. I guess what I will say is we will be very thoughtful on the cost estimates in the CIP and I would expect less variance of, you know, going over and having to value engineer at the last minute or going over and having to take from another project. So I think what it ultimately offers is stability. Which has been very difficult given all of the post-pandemic cost overruns and everything else. All right. Thanks very much.

[02:58:07] Okay, I'd like to start go backs Unless I'm missing anyone So mr. Moon, I just a one quick question just to recap from my perspective if our curve approach is Characterized described as hey, we want this kind of building How much is that gonna cost versus we have this budget could you build? Yes, that's a great summary. Okay. Thank you

[02:58:42] Ms. Anderson. Ms. Sizemore-Hyser. Thank you. That was actually one of my questions that Mr. Moon just mentioned, or my statements, to try to understand it. Two comments. Again, I'm very much supportive of having more tools in our toolbox. I just want to understand a little bit. It looks to me, from the descriptions I'm reading, that design-build has the potential of having less FCPS control over the process. He talks about resolving their own disputes and things like that which of course takes some pressure off our staff I imagine and some cost savings there but then does that give us some control over

[02:59:20] how the project may look as things go along and I bring that up so in certain school renovations you know in parts as we've gone along the process we've heard from certain communities but they're concerned about certain fields or this or that and I'm wondering if there's still space for that the way I'm reading the CMR, CIR process versus the DBV process, FCPS is involved a little bit more.

[02:59:43] So can you talk to that a little bit? Yeah, and I want to assure, even in design build, FCPS still has a seat at the table and provides design input. I think maybe sometimes we might see some dead ends cleaned up before it ever comes to us, you know, between the contractor and architect.

[03:00:00] But if we come and there's a design and we have particular feedback, we don't like something or we want to see something done differently, work with them and actually again it's a collaborative approach where maybe we want something a little bit more upgraded or fancy or whatever it might be but then we work with them on where we can offset that you know and where they might recommend okay here's some other options so there's there's definitely still space for FCPS to work with this team on a design great and then just last question since the first that we use the DBB looks like a low bid contract right lowest bid contract I just finish and then thank you I think I really do

[03:00:37] think Dr. Reed to be really important for the community to understand that we're not just moving away from low bid and going that could lead to a higher cost that the purpose is to actually have an overall lower cost because I think it could be spun as FCPS is trying to get away from the lowest bid to something that's more expensive without some information about well actually when you look at all of these other things this has the potential of being cheaper or more effective or faster which is cheaper I think that's a really important piece to help our community understand yes ma'am and I think I come

[03:01:11] from an area where we've used multiple of these what I can say is we also want I think the particularly the addition of design build helps us be sometimes the lowest bid has the most expensive change orders and it actually ends up potentially being far more expensive than the design upfront being vetted by those who need to build it so i really think i see this as a another methodology to really get the best product for the money right best value for the money and i i think that uh miss samansky and

[03:01:50] her team have really uh worked to look at some of the repetitive change order um contracts and um that that's a concern as well so low bid doesn't always mean at the end of the deal a low project cost thank you and I'll take a go back unless there any others so in in March 12 2024 F pack memo to the school board they stated as one of their three recommendations that our current default design bid build may continue to be an

[03:02:27] appropriate method of hiring contractors for clear single phased projects with a a simple scope such as re-roofs, replacing chillers, etc. Do you share that view, Ms. Zemanski? Yeah, again, I think to your point, it's another tool in our tool belt and it allows us to be strategic and look at each project and fit the right method for the right project. And I do agree with that concept that if you don't really need a CM input on something very straightforward, then you actually might get a better price when you can do the design very easily. It's limited

[03:03:02] trades limited complexity thank you um can you talk about uh that you know if the school board approved tomorrow the um the new revised uh policy 8240 what is the timeline for rolling out or incorporating these as options and rfps because i imagine uh this is going to be new for at least some of your staff it might require some training or other efforts do and and do you have a thought as to rolling out design build first or cmar first or kind of the sequencing there yeah so from an

[03:03:37] implementation standpoint i would say construction manager at risk is more of an evolutionary process it still has the two contracts that we're used to and right now we have in the cip starting in fy26 two renovation projects that's cubron elementary and franklin middle school and so we're starting to write those solicitations for the architect and should policy 8240 be approved then we could follow after that and do an rfp for a construction manager so i think that makes sense to start because then we don't lose time we can still move forward with the architect rfp no matter what

[03:04:15] and then again if the policy gets approved then we can follow right behind with a construction manager okay great um so before we move on to swing spaces uh let me just uh obtain uh see if i can obtain school board consensus on two uh suggestions i think from listening to my colleagues i just wanted to see if there's a consensus to support the revision of policy 8240 to allow the use of design build and construction management at risk which would allow fcbs to use them wherever appropriate mr dunn the board will adopt changes to the policy at a regular board meeting we don't

[03:04:55] i'm i'm not proposing that we change the policy right this minute but just to see if there's support for governance proceeding in that direction i believe governance is already working on the policy okay all right well uh i have heard uh then uh mr chair uh may i take consensus whether uh it would there would be support to include design building construction management risk options and future RFPs are appropriate. Okay so I'd like to just confirm that there's consensus to support facilities incorporating design build and

[03:05:31] construction management at risk as options and future RFPs were appropriate if you support. Let's see, we have Dr. Anderson, Mr. McAveen, Mr. McDaniel, Ms. Anderson, Ms. Leidy, Ms. Marin, myself, Ms. Dixit, Mr. Fish, Mr. Moon, Ms. St. John Cunning.

[03:05:51] looks like unanimous thank you all right so now we will move on to the second phase of our presentation which is on swing spaces and alternatives to our current approach to renovating schools while students are still in the building thank you so moving on to swing spaces one of our biggest challenges in school construction especially renovations is how to keep students and staff safe and productive while work is happening on site the currently used phased-occupied construction as one approach, but it often comes with its challenges. An alternative method to phased-occupied construction is using

[03:06:30] swing space. This approach relocates building occupants to a temporary facility, allowing construction to happen all at once in an unoccupied building. Let's take a closer look at how swing space works and how it compares to our current method. A little background here. So swing space refers to the temporary facilities or locations used to relocate students and staff while permanent school building undergoes renovation or new construction it allows work to proceed faster and more efficiently since the construction site is unoccupied by contrast phased occupied construction means the renovation happens while the school is still in use completed in carefully

[03:07:08] planned phases to minimize disruption while this avoids the need for relocation it often extends the timeline and increases complexity due to the need for enhanced safety noise control and logistical consideration fcps we've been doing phased occupy construction for decades and is well versed in handling this type of process and it uses the existing facility along with temporary trailers on site the trailers are owned and maintained by fcps minimizing the additional cost to the project in that regard but this and this model also has a minimal impact on school drop-off and pickup allowing families to continue to retain their routines to the greatest extent possible

[03:07:48] Additionally, this type of approach allows a portion of the school's building, such as the cafeteria or gym, those big box spaces, to remain in use. While this method has been successful for years, there are alternative swing space options that are worth exploring moving forward.

[03:08:04] So we're going to go through a few different options. This is the first one. One type of swing space is to swing the entire school to temporary trailers on site. And that includes big box spaces I mentioned, such as the gym, cafeteria, and library.

[03:08:20] There are multiple possible solutions for those larger spaces, such as a tent or a bubble, or also known as an air-supported structure. And it's important to note that this type of swing space will require temporary bathroom trailers and other features for full occupant use.

[03:08:36] There is substantial investment to purchasing the trailers and thoughtful planning for their storage and use. If we were to do this, FCPS would likely own the trailers so they can be used for future school projects or repurpose them to other schools in need of trailers. This swing option also requires temporary plans for bus loops, kiss and rides, and pedestrian routes.

[03:08:56] We'd in short be building a whole campus on the same site. Another consideration is the temporary trailer campus could occupy field space, which may impact current program use. And the trailers would still be operating next to a construction site, similar to phased occupied situation, which can be noisy and busy.

[03:09:15] So just things to consider with this approach. Another type of swing space, the second of three we're gonna discuss today, is to build a new school on the same site and move students after the construction is complete and then demolish the existing building for new field space.

[03:09:34] This way, students can stay in their current building until the new one is online, minimizing the administrative coordination of moving an entire school at the beginning or during construction. And this swing space approach could also occupy field space which may impact program use like the option previously described.

[03:09:52] A new school swing space approach will undergo a lengthier site review permitting process and may involve other agency coordination, but it's all really subject to the actual site itself. Before moving on, I will also add the end result is a brand new building.

[03:10:10] So more of the construction costs are going into the physical building itself. So instead of renovating, you're left with a complete new build. Okay, so moving on to the third and final, and that's basically swinging off site. And so, that's where a school goes completely off-site to another location.

[03:10:31] The main benefits of swinging off-site is removing students and staff from the exposure of construction and allowing contractors full access to the entirety of the site for maximum construction efficiency, reducing construction timeline and associated costs. Another benefit to using off-site is the potential for the building to be reused for another swing school site maximizing that initial investment which can be expensive there will be considerable upfront coordination and costs associated with this approach though the initial investment will really vary though depending on the site chosen and the need but really may involve a similar

[03:11:07] effort to like a refresh of a school significant administration coordination is going to be needed and you would want to align that to the academic year so that needs to be considered along with transportation needs and community outreach and more coordination with this approach in addition to the direct costs there's other considerations such as the potential need for traffic demand studies and other agency coordination to ensure this all meets zoning and site requirements you know we'll need to make sure that there's considerations for parking drop-off pickup security and stormwater needs off-site swing spaces

[03:11:45] This will have to be catered for the specific type of school building. And so a larger school, such as a middle or high school, might have a hard or impossible time finding the right off-site location large enough and specialized enough to support their program. So with this, we would likely recommend it be used more for elementary school.

[03:12:05] And so while all these types of swing spaces have their challenges, each option would need to really be analyzed from our capital improvement projects and really weigh those options accordingly. and so while there may be costs associated with building swing spaces that vary depending on the approach there is the potential for overall cost savings and reduction in construction costs the average elementary school renovation right now has been lingering around that 28 to 30 months and so without building occupants we think this could be reduced by approximately 6 to

[03:12:41] 12 months again depending on the conditions and so we expect the construction process savings due to efficiencies gained from the permitting process we're not doing breakouts of phase permits it'll be more streamlined for the contractors to mobilize they're not going out at four different times throughout construction and just the overall material ordering and whatnot it'll be much more streamlined and done once instead of multiple times and so right now staff is currently exploring different approaches to reviewing swing space on a site-by-site basis. I will say due to the size of the county and the

[03:13:18] locations of schools in the CIP on-site swing spaces are generally seen as the preferred option from our opinion and so moving forward what we want to do is during the concept of concept design phase when we hire an architect for a CIP project we want to have a feasibility study done for alternative swing space options compared to the phased occupied route as part of the design process up front. So again I kind of covered it but you know the next steps

[03:13:54] are to do just that. The next school scheduled for renovation in our CIP is Cub Run Elementary School. It starts design in fiscal year 26. So our staff right now we're finalizing the architect engineering RFP and we wrote specifically in that scope of work to include an expanded conceptual design phase this phase will explore both on-site swing space and phase occupied options it's something we already do during concept we usually ask the architect to share a few different options and then we pick one we get community feedback so it'll really just be a continuation on that where we say hey first will you do a little benefit analysis and look at the potential

[03:14:33] savings look at the potential sustainability factors how they might better fit the program one over the other and then we would kind of pick a path and they would develop the same multiple options so you wouldn't see too much of a difference in the concept design phase except it might be a little bit more robust and we might have them look at a couple extra options and so like i said it'll really depend on the project so each option will be evaluated and it will be evaluated based on cost estimates that sustainability considerations i mentioned and the construction schedule impacts and so we would use this analysis to determine the

[03:15:12] the most operationally beneficial path forward, and then we hope this could be a standard approach moving forward with the remaining projects in the CIP renovation queue. Thank you. So, similar to the last section, this is all about having more tools in the toolbox, not preferring one method versus the other.

[03:15:33] So with that, I'll ask Ms. Seizmoor-Heiser. Mr. Moon. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dunn. Just a few questions.

[03:15:48] to see us to be able to do you know be able to stay away from as much as possible phased occupied approach you know just my we have thousands of parents and families whose kids go through that used to be one of those and I really hated to see that kind of learning environment for any student to be in for a number of years at a time so thank you for you know putting in this for a board discussion and board consideration uh with that said uh you know one of the approaches

[03:16:24] which is you know unsigned new building would you say that that in general new building versus fully renovated building new building still has a longer life cycle i would say there is the potential for that just the potential yeah you are getting 100 of the materials brand new versus renovation where you might just replace be replacing part of the materials usually you keep the structure the foundations and all of that so if there's any ability to prolong that i do

[03:17:01] think it would extend would you ever be able to quantify that 10 20 30 percent i'd have to do some additional research okay thank you i i would appreciate that you know what if if the size of that extra space on site for a new building is not large enough for a building we want to be constructed is there a possibility for a maybe larger portion of a new building to be there first and and and tell down basically demolish the existing building and use part of that

[03:17:41] demolished space location to build maybe a smaller space needed for is that is that a possibility i think we would have to take a look at it it would depend on the site i have seen some projects where it's technically still a renovation but it's probably more 75 new build and we build maybe we can't fit an entire complex of trailers but we could build a larger complex of trailers which would allow for more new construction and starting to make it more ground up yeah so i think it's potential again again you know if it could as much as possible find a way to stay away from

[03:18:20] phased occupied to provide not just cost savings it's a learning environment for students and teaching environment for our staff members as well thank you uh thank you uh miss lady thank you and again thank you for all your hard work uh i'm going to sound like a broken record with my remarks the last time i don't know why we wouldn't want more tools in our toolkit so i'm fully in support of all of these being added as options for when we're doing a renovation thank

[03:18:53] I do have some questions in terms of similar to what I asked last time, do we have criteria on how each of these may get selected or are we going to be developing that criteria so we know which of the three or four options, the one we currently use, the phase occupied versus the other ones would be selected?

[03:19:19] Yeah. Again, our preference would be for the on-site swing, just given the geographic challenges of going off-site. And so our approach would to be doing almost a feasibility study per project as a project enters the CIP.

[03:19:34] And so that same architect we asked to design a building and create three different designs, a U-shape one, an L-shape one, we would also say, hey, also consider, you know, what it would look like if we built it brand new over on the field here. And then I do want, as part of that architect analysis, for them to work with a cost estimator.

[03:19:52] And then we can really make a decision that we could stand behind with real data. I ask that question because if we're asking them to do a feasibility study, I'm assuming that's just a new school, or is it a feasibility for any one of these four options? Outside the swing space, off-site, I get the -- so any of the three on-site options?

[03:20:10] Yeah, it would be for the on-site options. Okay. I ask that question because if -- what would be the additional cost of requiring a feasibility study for every project versus the savings that we may have in the costs on using some of these other options yeah you're really looking at design fees here and our strategy was to just embed it into the full project so say you are the architect that's selected to do cub run i mean this is going to be a multi-million dollar contract that has goes all the way through construction documents into construction so adding on this feasibility study i think we're going to be getting very good

[03:20:47] value for just getting the work done and it and it won't be I want complete designs done for each option too this is a conceptual process that we would go through absolutely I just wanted to I was thinking that through because if I'm an architect and I'm getting paid I don't know two million I made the two million dollars to do what we currently ask them do now and now we're adding this on top of it I might ask for more money right to do that so that's and I don't have a sense of how much work or how much extra that is that's what I'm trying to get a sense from you on that yeah because usually it's a fee based on the cost of construction budget and so we're just asking for a little additional

[03:21:22] scope when you know negotiating that fee it sounds good and you know I'm also curious how we're taking to other things into account in terms of picking these right like obviously new school on site would depend on whether the site was appropriate for that and then the difference between the cost of renovating which to your point not everything's brand new when you're renovating versus the cost of a brand new building right and then but the trailers on site you there's a little bit of concern about safety right I hear and I remember when Lake Braddock was renovated many years ago and there's a whole sea of trailers and there was a lot of concern then that was raised up in the community about safety but having that many kids in trailers and whether it would be

[03:21:58] feasible to have but you know the shared spaces like the gyms and things so I'm curious that's why I asked what the criteria like how is all that taken into account in terms of because there's obviously we want to save as much cost as we can but we also I think like previously want to have best value and And also best experience for our students at least least disruptive.

[03:22:18] So that's a question for you that I had. Yeah, and that's actually the criteria we're putting in these RFPs. We want an analysis and we want them to consider cost sustainability. We had other criteria such as safe logistics during construction. I don't want to sound like a broken record, but it really does depend on the site.

[03:22:35] I mean, you might even have enough acres, but if you don't have street access to have the contractor to have their own pathway safely to the construction, then you know you can't do it or it would be so financially infeasible you wouldn't want to do it and so you really do need to look at it on a case-by-case basis but to your point we're going to as part of the rfp establish that criteria of the things that bring the best to your point not just best price but the best value and best product that's all i would ask in terms of swing spaces off-site taking into account the transportation time and the community impact of having the kids at schools you know away the trailers and the safety i just that's why i keep

[03:23:13] ask about criteria because i want to get a better understanding of what we're looking at in picking of these things right if i could just finish my sentence i don't have a go back it's the same way that we've done the lowest bid didn't really get us maybe the lowest cost i want to take these into account so i just would love to hear more about that at some point not today thank you missing john cunning thank you and thank you for all the work you've done um i i think what piggyback on what miss uh sizemore heiser was saying i think having that criteria i think realistically it is going to be a site-by-site basis as someone that has lived through three renovations when i've

[03:23:52] worked in schools and my daughters lived through another um on-site renovations um i mean it's doable it's not the best option but kids are resilient and so are teachers um obviously having swing spaces would work better but i do see just knowing the schools that i worked at where some would be able to provide a swing space and some wouldn't and i guess i'm just the reason I'm mentioning this is to calibrate people that are listening to not have the expectation that that's going to be possible at every school and I can understand where in some schools it would be and in some schools that

[03:24:31] wouldn't be and I also want to say I've lived through three of them I'm here I survived the kids survived the schools look beautiful mr. McIdeen thanks I want to pick up where mr. moon left off and you know and And I want to echo everyone else for saying that this is a fantastic presentation.

[03:25:04] It's nice to see innovative thinking in this space, so I appreciate it. On the same site, new build concept, we have always been told by people in your position and others that from a sustainability perspective, it's really prohibitive to do that just because of the resource use because you're not repurposing you know other materials so can you give us your perspective on that and also just if you have a sense at this point how you would evaluate these different approaches from a

[03:25:43] sustainability perspective yeah I would probably need to have it's a good question I do think on one hand when you think about the embodied carbon of the act of construction this approach will likely exceed renovation because you have to tear it down and then you're building something brand new so that can be put into account what I think we need to weigh that though against is many of these schools undergoing renovations they're often our highest energy usage buildings so the ability to build something brand new we should consider that that gives us the opportunity to build something as energy efficient as

[03:26:22] possible and if these are long-term assets that are going to be in operation for another 40 plus years we should balance those two out so I wouldn't completely discount from a sustainability standpoint this option because you got to think about that as well and then just in terms of that option and the others how will you evaluate them in terms of sustainability how will you what kind of metrics will you be using do you know yeah I know looking at embodied carbon it's sort of a newer you know endeavor in the construction industry so I would probably have if we were using our alternative delivery method get that builder insight on the embodied carbon

[03:27:02] for major construction materials probably looking at your steel and concrete your big heavy hitters that would have an impact on the environment and see if they could do an analysis that could be considered in contrast with the architect and engineer they're doing an energy model and they're able to actually predict what the energy costs will be for operations for like the next four decades too.

[03:27:24] So it would probably be like bringing those two data points together, you know, using the architect and contractor teams. Ms. Dixit.

[03:27:43] Thank you. Thank you for another great presentation, Janice. I think it's really good to see those innovative ideas like my colleague said, but I did want to say after going through the Brookfield pre-constructions meeting and also attended the couple of FFAC retreat there too.

[03:28:04] It is, it's very difficult to be in the building while the construction's happening and it for staff members and then being all these trailers which are going to be constructed there. The community was already concerned about their safety of the students because they're having some break-ins in that school building and they were making sure that none of the construction crowd, the workers are away from the students to offer them safety perspective.

[03:28:36] So that really kind of worried me a little bit, thinking that this must be happening in all the schools we are going through constructions. I prefer the swing off-site space where so that then school is completely going in normal, they have their own class and space and doing the coursework and not getting interrupted by construction, the timeframe and the construction of the school will go much faster without any interruptions or phased construction.

[03:29:10] So I would just prefer that if FCPS can have like, they can rent like office buildings for temporarily and house the schools there for some time. And then I wanted to ask you about the new school on site.

[03:29:29] How is that an option? Wouldn't that be double the cost of renovation or not? - Yeah, we looked at that, and I think that's why you would wanna do a benefit analysis per site, because when you look at it purely in a vacuum side by side, the cost of new construction is a little bit more than the cost of renovation.

[03:29:49] That's not always the case, and I do think that cost could be offset by cutting down on that six to 12 months of construction, and then you're actually left with a 100% new building versus a renovated building. So I think the offset is in the speed.

[03:30:06] - But we are also having budget crisis. We don't have enough money and, you know, we don't have enough bond funding to do these new constructions if we have to do that. The swing offsite, would that be cheaper?

[03:30:23] That's my last question. - Yes, I do think that would be. the offset is constructing said offsite location. That would be the analysis you would need to do in that method. So you gotta say, hey, I gotta refurbish an office building or take one of our existing facilities and turn it into a school.

[03:30:43] So you would just wanna offset the savings of the faster construction. And then same with the building new, you would wanna say, hey, it might cost a little bit more for the material, you have to buy more materials 'cause you're not saving the foundations and walls, but you would offset that with the speed.

[03:30:59] And so you would never wanna pick something that would far exceed price with the swing option. Maybe in some cases it is appropriate to do the phased occupied. You just wanna be able to do that analysis. And we'll get into it in the next session, but we did actually look at building a new building onsite as part of the P3 scope.

[03:31:20] And what we did find in that study, and again, it's in a vacuum, it was a very specific set of schools. did find that the actual construction cost of the actual project cost overall was cheaper because of the time saved versus new build thank you dr. Anderson thank you I'm not sure if you're aware but Jessica maybe you can confirm when Glasgow middle school was rebuilt it was a school next to the school because they had enough space in order to do that yes so we do have some history of

[03:31:55] having done this and I think the benefits of the new materials pretty much across the board all of the things and bringing back what i raised earlier which is if we use this if it's a tool in the toolbox would could it lend itself to the possibility of reusing designs so that we don't have to pay that cost yes and that there is some precedent for that in fairfax county there was a prototype developed uh many years ago so sorry that's always a good rings home. So where it could support it, I definitely think that's an option that we could

[03:32:33] look at. Right. And I think, you know, it's hard to live through construction. You know, Mr. Frisch, as we know, the kids at Falls Church High School, those who are freshmen will live through the renovation throughout their entire career at Falls Church. You know, luckily, they'll have little parts, but they will always be faced with all of the things involved in the construction process.

[03:32:55] but we do know very clearly we have limited dollars I mean we share that all of the time so any place where we could maximize and stretch those dollars I would want to investigate because I think that's the bonus here not only do we save and you know the materials perhaps that we don't have to because we can replace everything and expediting the the timetable I think that's where the real savings are and at this point you haven't any dollars any numbers that we could perhaps work with? Yeah, I think the best place I can point you is part of the P3 cost-benefit

[03:33:30] analysis, because we did say, hey, when you're analyzing these set of schools, you can consider an on-site swing if it's possible. And they actually did a light feasibility study, and then they looked at renovating versus new build on-site when they put together their package options.

[03:33:49] And what they found, at least in these particular set of schools, that building the brand-new building on-site swing option was cheaper than the phased occupied right and and that's where i'm looking at and if we do the temporary trailer that you described with the bubbles for the gym i had a bubble on my college campus and that's where swimming happened so all kinds of things can occur then that is a set of materials we can move from location to location pending that the site has enough space that the you know the acreage etc um i would love for us to see this be something

[03:34:24] that we really um explore as an option because again looking to maximize the dollars that we have which we know are severely limited when it comes to construction miss anderson not not to speak against my colleague because i agree with most of of what was said i do have just a question there's a significant amount more waste when we're talking about tearing down our previous building correct okay so the other aspect that i would just put out into the ether here just a little bit is that as someone who grew up here and has watched our historic buildings get torn down

[03:35:01] over and over and over again i would hate to have it be that one of our schools could end up being in in that category i'm not suggesting that that is the most important thing but there is an aspect of that that i would hate for us to lose that if there's anything we can do to preserve the history of our county I think it's an important step to make and I do I would always ask us to make sure that we're doing things in line with Jekyll's and reducing waste and things like that so anything that we could do even if it was just part of a building that we could that we could keep and maybe move the kids to the other side of the building or anything like that I think that it would be worthwhile to at least consider as we as we move forward with these options but

[03:35:39] otherwise I I'm in favor of swing spaces I'm particularly in favor of some swing spaces where we might be able to renovate an existing building and use it for a number of schools around and then kind of switch switch kiddos in and out I think that there are some options there if we look at more regional renovation projects miss parents away from the table so I'll take a question miss Manske can you talk a little bit about the analysis that was done by the outside consultant I believe they looked at the next seven or eight schools in

[03:36:16] the renovation queue for potential swing space that's correct and we'll be diving more into it because it was part of the public-private partnership but in order for that team to do a true cost-benefit analysis you had to give them a very firm scope and swing space you know would greatly impact that scope so it was studied as part of that work and so what we did was we looked at the last six schools I believe in the CIP and had them briefly look at could you actually put a new building or could you do an on-site swing option and what

[03:36:54] was concluded was was swing space practical for most of those schools it wasn't some and not others yeah I believe it was three or four of the existing schools could support an on-site option I thought it was five elementary schools of the seven one is a new elementary school but not for Twain middle school which was yeah it will go into it further it was looking at the last six renovation schools in the CIP which includes five elementaries and one middle and then we also looked at one completely brand new building in the CIP

[03:37:29] silver line for the adopted CIP you mentioned that use of swing spaces might accelerate the elementary school renovation by 6 to 12 months did you perform a similar analysis for middle school and high school we did not we thought you know if we were to start doing this work just given the current CIP given the number of elementaries versus middle versus high this is where we would like to start that work and so when we met with cost estimators and other contractors we had them test out that model because it requires a lot less

[03:38:06] specialty spaces the goal is to try to keep the cost of the swing process itself as low as possible did the outside consultant identify about a dozen different FCPS assets that we own right now that could be used as off-site swing spaces they did they briefly just did a quick analysis of facilities that are owned by FCPS that are currently not being used as schools we also have all that data as well and those are geographically distributed around the county so they could serve as kind of regional centers for renovations yeah they did like a light mapping of where things are geographically and so if you

[03:38:44] invest in renovating one of those sites to serve as an off-site swing space that could be leveraged for multiple renovations essentially spreading the cost of that renovation of the swing space over multiple schools is that correct that's correct your your ROI will be better if you can use it for multiple schools f pack has recommended that that FCPS pursue a comprehensive plan amendment based on potential concerns on the part of the county with respect to Florida area ratio if you add trailers to an existing school site or

[03:39:22] you build a new school can you talk with about whether you support that recommendation to pursue a comprehensive plan amendment or whether it's necessary in light of the fact that Glasgow middle school pursued this new school construction approach well I think one it it will depend on the site some of this might be potentially done by right so as part of the architect RFP having them explore that they're gonna need to look at zoning and entitlements to make sure this is a viable path where I think we might be running up into some challenges I would recommend early you know collaboration with the county

[03:39:59] to make sure that it can still be a green light as we move forward wouldn't a comprehensive plan amendment though solve it kind of on the upfront for many projects rather than project by project that is certainly something we can consider I think the consultant pointed out a floor area ratio was likely our biggest risk so making sure that we by right can build enough facility to have that on-site swing happen concurrently if we were to work with the county on something like that it could be a big benefit make sure everything could move forward and if the school board achieves consensus to support one or more of

[03:40:37] these potential swing spaces can you describe kind of a timeline for rollout of these incorporating them into RFPs for the off-site swing we would need to first build a timeline for one procuring and agreeing upon a site if it is you know turnkey versus renovating an office versus it's an existing school that needs to be converted into a school I think that will depend that will change the timeline so I think one it's I could we could come up with a series of estimated timelines depending on the path and then you would need to ensure

[03:41:12] that that is then built before the construction of whatever project would be using it. So that's how we would approach that. And are there one particular swing space option that you prefer over others? Again, we think if we're serious about using this, I think the most straightforward way to doing this is first looking at on-site options.

[03:41:36] You know, we're not beholden to finding new land or a new facility. It cuts down on the impact to families from a geographic and transportation sense. And so that's why we're interested in getting this RFP language for the architect's scope to be expanded and then really finding that analysis.

[03:41:54] And we might see themes, right? We might find that out of the next few schools, the building, a new building on site has the best return on investment. So it'll allow us to also collect that data. Are there any changes legally to policy or regulation that are required to pursue these swing space options?

[03:42:16] Not to our knowledge. No. Could we ask Mr. Foster? Yeah, I concur with Ms. Szymanski. I don't think that there are any immediate legal restrictions that come to mind, Mr.

[03:42:33] Dunn. Thank you. Seeing no gobacks. Oh, sorry. Ms. Marin. I apologize. Yeah.

[03:42:49] I think this is great. I mean, I didn't know about this option until you raised it, Ms. Szymanski, and I think Dr. Aronson had done it in her previous district in Loudoun so you know again I just think we have to keep trying to do new new things and so can you can you kind of walk through like is this something you could immediately start considering and apologies I just have to step out but you know how you could immediately start pursuing this or considering it and what's the board's role do we need to approve it if you could share that please sure and so our Our recommended next steps are to start, again, adding to the architect's scope, this analysis, since it is so site-by-site.

[03:43:28] Again, we think there's some benefit to first looking at on-site options while we contemplate a bigger strategy if we were to do off-site, because that's a bigger division-wide endeavor. And so we're actually already starting that. I mean, it's, again, a tool in our tool belt. You might as well get that analysis done by the architect.

[03:43:45] Hey, maybe they decide phase-occupied is the right move for that particular school. But we plan to start doing that with the next round of design projects in FY26. We've started to draft the language. We've done a very, very high-level look at those sites, and we think for the elementary school, the acreage, you know, pure acreage, it's a potential to build a new school or a trailer site on the existing fields there.

[03:44:10] So we think it has possibility to start doing next in the next round. Well, that's very cool. And I also, this dovetails with some feedback that I did wanna share about the communications process with the community with kicking off a project and knowing that the questions like, where will my child play?

[03:44:28] And does my child have to be outside? And so I think incorporating this into the dialogue and letting families know, but also tightening up that communications piece is gonna be really good, so thank you.

[03:44:45] - I'll take a go back just quickly. Could we use existing trailers that we already own around the county to provide the trailers for an onsite swing space? - Yes, I think that's a potential. - And if we do new school construction, could we, and potentially reusing parts of the school that exist, could we potentially use that opportunity to make our schools more secure?

[03:45:11] I'll just offer West Potomac has 28 exit doors, which is because it's so spread out. if we consolidated maybe maybe made it more vertical rather than horizontal maybe fewer exit doors and thus easier to secure the building yeah I do want to just caveat whether we do phase occupied or a new build you know we're always going to meet our and exceed our educational specifications so if a community can't to the feet if an occupied renovation is the way it has to be they're still going to have a great facility that can be modernized and renovated I do think with a new build there is the ability for more flexibility

[03:45:50] and more control over the design you're not beholden to the existing conditions thank you I don't see any more go backs so with that I'd like to just see if we can achieve consensus on a couple next steps first I'd like to ask if there is school board consensus to incorporate two swing space options trailers on site and new school construction on site as options and future RFPs where

[03:46:21] appropriate I see one two three four five six seven eight so great we have consensus on that I'd also like to see if we can achieve consensus to direct the superintendent to do an analysis to explore the use of existing FCPS assets as potential off-site swing spaces whether we can achieve consensus to direct the superintendent to explore the establishment of potential off-site

[03:47:00] swing spaces using existing FCPS assets okay okay so can we achieve consensus to express our consensus to -- that we would be interested in receiving an analysis of potential off-site swing spaces using existing FCPS assets.

[03:47:27] One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. And finally, I want to see if we can achieve -- if we can express consensus for FCPS to make a recommendation to the school board whether to pursue a comprehensive plan amendment as recommended by FPAC to adjust the floor-to-area ratio so that FCPS can potentially use trailers

[03:48:02] on-site and new school construction as swing space options. Sure. So because adding trailers and new school construction might have zoning issues, implications, FPAC recommended pursuing a comprehensive plan amendment so we discussed that a little bit today but the request is to see if we can express consensus to have a formal recommendation from FCPS and the superintendent whether FCPS should

[03:48:39] pursue a comprehensive plan amendment as recommended by FBAC. Mr. Chair do you have a preferred alternative phrasing? Okay okay then I will then I will move that to next steps okay next can we move the slides the next presentation so finally and something that I think is very exciting for FCPS public-private

[03:49:14] partnerships we are very close to Prince George's County which recently used a public-private partnership to build six schools in two years where they estimated it would take 12 years if they financed it completely themselves so with that I'll turn it over to, and this is another adding a tool to our toolbox discussion.

[03:49:33] Ms. Szymanski. Thank you. And so to round us all out, public-private partnerships. As construction needs grow and public funding remains limited, there are school systems and government entities that are exploring alternative delivery and financing models.

[03:49:49] One of these models is public-private partnerships, otherwise known as P3s. So, again, to address fiscal demands, FCPS may seek alternative financing mechanisms such as P3s. P3s are contractual arrangements that are formed between public and private sector partners, which typically involve a public owner, in this case it would be us, FCPS, contracting with private partners to finance, renovate, or construct, operate, and maintain, and/or manage a facility or system, or some sort of combination of those activities.

[03:50:24] As the cost of construction market continues to rise above the inflation rate, speed to market is essential because it not only alleviates capacity constraints and deferred maintenance costs, but it also locks in today's construction cost dollars. Overall, P3 projects are not necessarily less expensive.

[03:50:41] They are value drivers, such as speed to market, risk sharing, and the financing of projects that may otherwise not be able to be funded. There are no P3s that are the same. Each P3 is adapted to the individual institution and developed to achieve maximum value within their reality.

[03:50:57] In short, P3s are incredibly complex, but they are highly customizable. There are long-term engagements that allow financing opportunities for public entities similar to FCPS. So there are many reasons a public institution may pursue a P3 program.

[03:51:14] FCPS believes that their current facility planning and design and construction and facility management teams are skilled and capable of delivering high-quality projects and we're able to manage those facilities long-terms. These teams are extremely hindered though by the ability and available of capital funding to meet and exceed the scoreboards policies and division needs of all areas of facilities work and you know we are seeing that impact. The current FCPS capital improvement program is funded mainly by approving a bond referendum and then selling those bonds with the maximum cap. The funding FCPS receives does not consider the changing needs and priorities when establishing an annual budget

[03:51:53] and therefore this limits fcps ability to meet division needs appropriately so a p3 is a potential good solution for more financial flexibility p3s also offer the benefit of leveraging the strengths of each sector so on our hand the public sector we bring public interest focused regulatory power and project oversight and then the private sector brings innovation efficiency funding and technical expertise together they can create outcomes that neither could achieve as effectively as by

[03:52:26] themselves so the question really bears to ask how does this alternative method compare to our current practice for our capital improvement projects currently the building and renovation of major capital projects are not financed through the school systems operating funds we kind of saw that in the beginning but it's mainly through bonds a p3 approach to funding our renovation and construction of schools would be financed through a private developer these are different types of there are different types of packages for a p3 approach and that includes design build finance operate maintain or DBF OM and design build

[03:53:03] finance bridge or a DBF bridge those are the two popular models and this approach underscores the relevance of speed to market and that risk sharing I spoke to you know and those are things that really need to be considered given FCPS prolonged renovation cycles and the urgent need to address aging infrastructure. One potential benefit of P3 is the ability to concurrently implement facilities and have a greater impact to the number of schools at a quicker pace. FCPS is interested in ways that construction timelines can be reduced because schools can receive updated

[03:53:37] facilities quicker. We also in this presentation want to share some highlights of a cost-benefit analysis conducted in late 2024. So FCPS, we acknowledge the comprehensive and detailed analysis conducted by Brailsford and Dunleavy, or BND, a consultant we hired in evaluating public-private partnership options as potential solutions for addressing the challenges of school facility renovations and new construction.

[03:54:06] We found the report to be highly valuable in exploring the potential of P3s to address the facility needs, and the actual inclusion of real-world projects from the CIP, coupled with the site walks and detailed cost estimates that BND did, really lends credibility and practical relevance to that analysis by grounding the study in tangible scenarios bnd provided a clear understanding to us of the financial and logistic implications of this approach the level of specificity offers fcps a stronger foundation for those next steps and and i do want to say to do this you know fcps we created a framework for conducting the analysis that we

[03:54:45] had bnd evaluate so we purposely chose the last six schools in the current renovation queue and and then one new school construction per the adopted CIP really is the basis of this cost-benefit analysis. And then tying back to our swing space discussion, for those six existing schools, we had BND consider the viability of an onsite swing as that approach would really have an impact on that speed, complexity, and price that they were evaluating.

[03:55:15] It also kind of did that kill two birds with one stone because it's really valuable information as we just plan our capital projects, knowing the feasibility of on-site swing. So again, as part of this analysis, it included a breakdown of costs and benefits across multiple types of P3 packages.

[03:55:35] As I mentioned before, we had them look at design, build, finance, operate and maintain, and the design, build, finance bridge models. Design, build, finance includes the financing and the design, build team to design and construct the work.

[03:55:53] And then the design, build, finance, operate and maintain does the same thing, but it also includes capital asset replacements and maintenance services over the capital after the project's complete. And typically that's done for the length of the financing term. And in case of this cost-benefit analysis, we did 30 years.

[03:56:16] The cost-benefit analysis we also performed also described what a potential timeline could look like. The project definition is the first phase of four to ensure a successful P3 project. Because P3 projects are long-term, often 30 years or more, it's imperative that that groundwork be done prior to the partnership selection and negotiations.

[03:56:39] Before soliciting a private developer, FCPS, we recommend performing both a visioning and like that risk tolerance session to define the scope. And risk evaluation early in the process sets the foundation for a successful P3 development option that really supports our mission and vision.

[03:56:58] Through that discussion, the session would probably focus on the critical areas of project risk SCPS desires to transfer to a private equity firm in return for the associated financial trade-offs and other benefits. And so before we can move into phase two, we really need to finalize the package of schools and the type of financing that we, FCPS, might want to pursue, and it's imperative that we understand how the funding of the project may impact future projects, such as the potential for less funding available over the course of the deal, which may actually even impact the CIP cycle.

[03:57:35] So this is more just of a breakdown of the last slide, because within those four phases, these on the screen are some of the key milestones that may be considered and met in a P3 package. We begin with aligning all key stakeholders, public and private, on the project goals, roles, and overall schedule.

[03:57:53] Next we would compare the P3 model against our traditional delivery and look at the value for money, lifecycle savings, and potential for innovation. And as mentioned previously, that risk transfer session also helps evaluate which risks during the project should be transferred to the private sector.

[03:58:10] So from there, based on funding, risk allocation, and needs, we would refine and lock in that project scope. One key milestone would be community engagement that helps keep the public informed in alignment with current FCPS procedures. FCPS would then seek formal approval for the P3 model from the Board of Supervisors.

[03:58:28] And once approved, the RFQ would be drafted to attract qualified private partners. FCPS continues the process to select the qualified candidate for partnership of a P3. And from there, the contract is formalized to move forward. So together, these elements provide FCPS with kind of that foundation for that assessment and making sure it's viable and to really address those key challenges.

[03:58:55] So next steps. What are the next steps as we explore alternative financing options for our capital improvement projects. Well, to move forward, policy 8240 red lines do need to be approved by the school board to authorize P3s as an available tool for use. Another step would be for the school board to hold important discussions and work with the board of supervisors to discuss funding options for these projects.

[03:59:18] Collaboration between the county and FCPS is crucial to understand if a public-private partnership is feasible. And then last, a staff also recommend that visioning session for the work to start defining the goals, criteria, risk tolerance as described in phase one of the proposed timeline.

[03:59:35] You know, staff, we recommend using that framework that we built as part of that cost benefit analysis as a starting point for input from the board. And with that, that kind of wraps everything up from my end, and I'm happy to take questions.

[03:59:52] Mr. Moon. Thank you, Mr. Moon. Just a few questions. Thank you again for the presentation. say that if there are willing private partners right now, how many more schools do you think our school system is ready to start renovating and building on top of what's in CIP?

[04:00:19] Right. It's a great question because we're actually in the middle of that facility conditions assessment that we spoke about in the last CIP. So right now, we have eight more schools that we to finish in the current renovation queue and then we're developing that next pipeline so what we had recommended when we were doing our analysis is to say hey maybe the first couple of schools in the cip let them run their course they're already about to start but if we were serious about doing a p3 package one thing we can do is have the private developer take off our hands the last set of schools in that existing renovation queue because then we can start the new renovation queue

[04:00:59] much sooner again without knowing what that's about six schools then correct six schools how much money would be needed you think ballpark figure if one of you guys could pull up from the analysis because we we had it run under design build finance and we had it run under design build finance operations 300 million 400 million 500 million 200 million i believe my next question

[04:01:32] is you know doesn't matter what the amount is at this point for next question is you know normally we'll be using capital fund to pay for construction and renovation and et cetera if we enter into relationship with private partners they will finance private partners will finance we'll pay back we'll pay them back is that can that come out of capital funding with agreement from board of supervisors? Well, I think that's something we would want to explore further, that it could be an option, right? For example, Prince George's County,

[04:02:11] their phase one, they had six brand new schools built, and it cost approximately 1.1 billion dollars, but it was financed over 30 years, so they were really paying about 30 something million dollars a year. So where that 30 million dollars comes from, like one option is it could come off the top from cip funds and annually we would take that deduction to do this package or we could find other funding sources you know and that would be a discussion we would have with the board of supervisors with the 1.1 billion dollar project in prince george's county over 30 year period i have

[04:02:51] hard time believing monthly yearly payment being only 30 million 30 times 30 is only 900 million first of all. And are you putting in any interest? Because private partners, you know, they're not really there to make money. Yeah, I agree. I do think we'd have to go back and look at the study. They might have had some balloon payments in there or up front funding. And so that was one thing we talked about with the consultant. They said that could really change the game on how much you're paying annually, if you're willing to pay some money up front,

[04:03:27] or if you truly want to mortgage that over 30 years you don't have to have that large chunk of upfront capital as a barrier but then you are tasked with paying more annually okay so uh you know i guess critical question is whether we can use a capital funding to do it and capital funding to make yearly finance payment financing payment and secondly you know if if that's not legally possible or whether it would be a prepared to pay out of our operating

[04:04:02] fund. Okay thank you. Ms. Marin. Yeah my question is a little more looking towards the next step because I I'm eager to explore what a P3 partnership could or P3 could look like. You know today we really focused on how we could save money and be as fiscally frugal as we can and then there's this whole other bucket that's about raising revenue and that involves the bond and other fee structures and whatnot but what i really appreciate about this work session today is that it was a time for the board

[04:04:39] to listen together and learn about things that maybe some of us knew a little bit or not and when i think about that we are responsible for 8.7 billion dollars in assets we have to be more knowledgeable about this and so you know we've talked um as we developed the work with miss Szymanski about you know what comes next and can this be a quarterly thing that our board does can we dedicate time to talk about either the saving money part or the raising revenue part or just understand and even go out to some places and see what's happening and also to other places that are

[04:05:16] already like having net zero buildings and you know just see some of the disparities um and in the spirit of partnership certainly including and inviting our Board of Supervisors members so you know I really see this as a core it is a core piece of our work and I hope that as we you know get to the end of the school year and start planning for the next year of work that we can dedicate time to this regularly because there's a lot for us to know and right now when so much is uncertain I think we have to become better I don't want to say experts but but more fluent in these options so we can make better decisions.

[04:05:54] Thanks. I don't see any other placards, so I'll take a turn. Ms. Macia, did you review the F-PAC memorandum dated April 28, 2025, about P-3s?

[04:06:11] I had briefly skimmed it. I was also told it was still under development. So if there's also a more recent version, we'd be happy to look at it. F-PAC recommends designating a P-3 champion based on best practices from Prince George's County and other locations that have used P-3s.

[04:06:31] Is that something that you would recommend as well? - Sure, did F-PAC stipulate if it's a board member or a staff member? - Staff member. - Sure, I mean, we would definitely have a project champion to do this, it's such a large project.

[04:06:48] - F-PAC also recommended that the school board and our FCPS staff consider a follow on procurement action with the consultant who has used Brailsford and Dunleavy to have them prepare a presentation to come back and walk the school board through their study.

[04:07:04] Is that something that you would recommend as well? - Sure, we think that's appropriate. Our goal today was more introduce what a P3 is. There was a very robust analysis done that we can dive into and it would probably make sense to have the consultant there to walk everyone through it.

[04:07:22] - Can you go back to the slide with the next steps? Can you just elaborate on the two sub bullets there, specifically what you're recommending to the school board for next steps? - Sure, I mean, other than updating the policy and coming up with some funding strategies, we really want some board guidance on what this project could look like.

[04:07:46] As I mentioned before, their P3s really vary. we could do 100 schools, we could do one school, they're very customizable. So I think getting some overall guidance from this board and I think that could be best done in sort of a visioning or kickoff session where we could talk about what are the things that could define the project.

[04:08:06] We see it as that risk transfer session that was described in the cost benefit analysis, the board's appetite for how much we wanna put into a private developer's hand. We could talk about the goals and the criteria from a board perspective to really help us establish what that scope of work could be, 'cause I think that's gonna be necessary just to make sure we're on the right track.

[04:08:29] - Can you elaborate on the second sub-bullet? Is that sequential following the kickoff or is that done in parallel? - It's just a side note to say really we wanna make sure we're meeting the goals and the vision, but one suggestion we had was if you're really looking for a starting place because this P3 package could really vary from one school to 100 schools.

[04:08:52] We did come up with a framework that was used for the cost-benefit analysis, and that could be a starting point. Just to say, hey, we had looked at seven schools, and actually part of that was intentional. PG County, Prince George's County, they did six schools in phase one and eight schools in phase two.

[04:09:11] So starting with seven made good logical choice. Starting with schools in the CIP, they're known projects that we've been directed to do part of our capital improvement program so you know having them analyzed made a lot of sense so we just know that because of the variety it you kind of want to ground yourself in something this would be a good place to start uh so that second bullet is essentially uh recommending that staff come up with a proposed package that could be put out in the on the street and an rfp again we want to make sure we have that buy-in envisioning and appetite for risk all eyes open but we do think

[04:09:49] this could be a starting point for that discussion because we did pick seven schools you know very intentionally when doing the analysis and and those are the last seven schools in the current renovation queue is that correct it's the last six schools in the renovation queue plus the first new construction school in the cip and so that would enable us to essentially accelerate the development of a new renovation queue if you took those seven schools and put them into a p3 correct the thought was right now we have that facility condition assessment going on we actually just

[04:10:23] had the solicitation closed and we're reviewing the rps and we hope to award you know the summer and that means in a year's time we're going to have a new queue developed so really one thing we could do if we want to keep moving now instead of waiting around for that new queue we could expedite the end of the current queue so we could put this in the hands of a developer and then in a year's time we'll know that next set of schools that we can continue to work through as part of our traditional cip and would that have a positive effect on the 42 in terms of reducing the 42 year renovation cycle it would because we would be jump starting and doing those six or seven

[04:11:03] facilities while we still do our typical cadence of a few projects a year with the cip and is the benefit of p3s that it brings in outside money so essentially giving us access to a new pool of money beyond uh the school bonds that get sold every couple years it does and i talk a lot about barrier to entry i mean you saw the the prince george's county it's a billion dollars and it's kind of like when you buy a house you might not have that money up front so you mortgage it out so in the long run you might be paying more but you're limiting that barrier to entry right it

[04:11:37] makes it possible to do a large body of work without all the 100 of the capital in hand i I mean, that's how we're currently doing the CIP. We have to have all the money in hand before we then commence on a project. And was Prince George's County successful in negotiating a contract where at the end of the 30-year payback period, they get the school refreshed and renewed before it's handed back to the school system?

[04:12:03] It was, and we looked at a couple different options in our benefit analysis. So that will increase the cost if you're adding in 30 years worth of maintenance and 30 years worth of capital asset renewals. So we took a look and compared and contrasted those.

[04:12:20] I think that's something we would want to continue to do once we finalize the actual scope should we move forward. And there are legal guidelines to do P3s within our RFPs that are currently pending before governance and were developed with Division Council, correct?

[04:12:38] That's correct. No other first round questions, so we have a go back for Ms. Maron. So the ones pending, is that policy 8240 or is it something different? Okay, so that's -- okay. It's an -- If you haven't heard, we've got to update that policy.

[04:12:55] I'm sorry if I missed this, but is there an identified funder or type of funder that we'd be interested in partnering with? Well, we would put out a solicitation, and there are developers that are doing this type of work. So they would probably be putting together some kind of team, and it would be a developer with that equity component, and then they would hire a design-build team, so it would include the architect, include the contractor.

[04:13:21] So they would do the financing, purchase everything up front, design it, and then build it, hand it to us, and then we pay out over a certain term. So I've been trying to learn a bit, and some of my budget questions reflect this about the financing and leasing and you know i'm still making sense of some of those numbers but i mean really to me when i think about kicking it off it seems like it's got to be with the board of supervisors i mean they are a partner and the primary funder and so again you know if we really want to do this like what are the action steps do we plan out meetings and i know we have this joint facilities

[04:13:59] task force that's going to start up and i'm really eager that i'm pleased that i'm on that but you know what does it look like to the visioning well maybe it looks like going to some schools and getting excited about what the risk is going to pay off as so um again i really would love to sit down you know as a board and maybe this is some of the retreat time which is to talk about if we really want to do something for our facilities we've got to think really big

[04:14:26] If there are no more questions, then I'll see if we can reach consensus on the next steps that are outlined.

[04:14:46] Okay, I'll take a go back. There's a question that on the consent agenda for Thursday, there's a resolution regarding the bond.

[04:15:11] that related at all to this new business. May I? Sorry I just I just happen to have the printed printed out. I just don't know if there's anything that you might want to say because we're doing the same thing we always do which is asking for the same amount of money we always ask and so is that what we have to do for this time around? I mean we're asking what was most recently approved I believe there was a joint CIP in 2021 between the school board and the board of

[04:15:46] supervisors that increased starting in FY25 and beyond to 230 million so that's what we're basing this on. Mr. Frisch. Just to clarify I was going to reiterate what Ms. Szymanski just said we have an agreement with the Board of Supervisors over the amount which has escalated over the last few years obviously if there are other considerations I think that can be part of the facilities task force conversations although we do have some fairly extensive Q&A back and forth

[04:16:21] on what limitations the county sees in that approach to the work but I will say and correct me if I'm wrong this bond is the first bond that includes next Q projects is that right or is that the following bond now that'll that'll be in subsequent bonds this one's still working off of the proposed cash flow in the CIP okay great thank you um okay so I unless there are other questions I'd I'd like to see if we can express consensus on a couple issues.

[04:16:59] So first, I'd like to see if we can express consensus to receive or to have staff organize a kickoff with essentially the first bullet, to express consensus for staff to organize a kickoff with visioning for the work and defining the goals, criteria, and risk tolerance to establish a list of projects for possible P3 agreements?

[04:17:28] - These are all suitable for the next steps document. We could probably shortcut for that. - Then I'll do that. Oh, sorry, I have one question from Ms. Dixit. - We have a process. - Well, if the three, six schools in the remaining queue will be part of that discussion, right?

[04:17:47] So that is, I just know a lot of the schools are already in the construction design phase. So would that impact their construction? There'll be some delays? - No, the intent is for there to be no delays.

[04:18:04] We're simply looking at the remaining, the very last of the renovation queue, those last six schools, because if a project's already underway, it's already underway. And in fact, we purposely didn't include the next two schools that haven't started yet, because we feel like those will start sooner than when we could get the P3 launched.

[04:18:24] So we would see no impact. - And would you be able to identify with the packages would be the best fit for those schools? - Yeah, we put in a staff response back in January and it might make sense to kind of go over some of that too.

[04:18:41] The reason it's hard to pull up numbers and everything is we explored a variety of options. Like each, we explored multiple packages and then we explored within those packages multiple financing and term options. So I do think it would make sense to kind of go through some of those. And then we were kind of leaning towards two of the three packages over one of them.

[04:19:01] And we can kind of explain the why on some of that too. - I think these are the schools which are in Ms. Anderson and my district. So I would definitely would like to look at all those different options. Thank you. - Quick question.

[04:19:17] I know we have a process of next steps, but this meeting is scheduled to end at 5:30 and we're here where we actually have the benefit of having staff that we could pick their brain. What would preclude us from going ahead and giving consensus now instead of doing it on the worksheet?

[04:19:34] We already gave consensus with two other sections. That's a good point. I guess I'm trying to figure out why this has to be next steps. Any objection? I mean, we did it two times already in this presentation. I think there's a difference between providing consensus on a question that is not pertaining to the need for the board's action and things that we would typically do on next steps, which are things where the board needs additional information.

[04:20:02] As far as I can tell from this, this is what staff is saying they're doing, why the board has to provide consensus for what the staff is already doing. - I don't think staff is doing this. Staff has previously conveyed to me that, and Ms. Marin, that they are looking for direction from the board.

[04:20:21] Ms. Szymanski, can you speak to that? - That's correct. I mean, basically, we feel like we put together a lot of information from the more summative explaining some precedents then we did the cost-benefit analysis but we were really just building our own framework and rationale for that I think to make sure we're on the right track we would want to work with you on that kickoff envisioning just to make sure we're getting a scope that you know is the will of the board and works best for our division and into that point this the

[04:20:57] reason why it matters right is that the board provides consensus on the board doing something, okay? So why doesn't the board just do it, right? The first item is that the board's going to provide guidance on policy, scope, risk tolerance, et cetera. One of these is about working closer with the Board of Supervisors.

[04:21:13] One of them is about approving changes to policy AD240. Those are all board objectives that have to be done by the board. Us providing consensus that this table is not going to achieve those things. Ms. Anderson? So sorry. I was still trying to figure out.

[04:21:32] We are not giving any guidance to staff on these next steps, the way that we did just a little while ago, giving guidance to Dr. Reed to go explore potential sites for swing spaces. I guess I'm a little bit confused. That's different, right? That's something that's directing the superintendent.

[04:21:48] This is our work. So if staff, if I heard from Ms. Zeminski, they're looking for us to give them some feedback on whether or not this is the right way to go. What is it that you're looking for? Can you say it once more? I'm sorry. Again, because this is such a big project and it could really vary from one school to 100 schools, we really need some more guidance from the board to move forward.

[04:22:13] Are you looking to us to say, yes, go ahead and do these things? I think we are something else altogether different. We are looking for some guidance from the board on what your risk appetite is for what types of projects you would want to do.

[04:22:31] Again, we had recommended as a starting point these seven schools, and we kind of gave some reasons why. But I think before we jump into those seven schools, we want some more guidance on is this the right track, or are we looking at something much bigger, or is that too risky for you?

[04:22:46] I think we just need some general feedback on helping us define the scope. I think as a next step, if you were to work on this more closely, we could provide some of those more specific questions, like hey how do you feel about these six schools or hey how do you feel about the your appetite for that length of term you know we could put together some of that but I do think to just make sure we're on track we we need a little bit more heavy guidance from the board just to go then to go off in a vacuum right you're looking for an official board vote which would not be a next step no but there's a path to it right so even if we voted on this right now we'd be voting on us doing something for staff which makes not a lot of sense what we

[04:23:25] could do is take these next steps which requests something from the board do a forum topic at the next work session or the work session after depending on how quickly it can be pulled together to provide the guidance requested and some of this doesn't have to be done in that forum some of it can be done by governance in the interim and then we've taken the steps that they're asking from us that can't be done through consensus because we'd be offering consensus to ourselves. All right let's go through the people with placards and then I'll turn to Ms. Marron. So Ms. Anderson. The other thing is I mean I guess my question

[04:24:05] would be to governance how fast is policy 8240 going to come to the board because a lot of these also could be follow be follow-on motions to that approval of that policy which is in line with the way we have done things in the past. My concern with creating consensus here is that we've had many conversations about the fact that we don't use this space to vote on things so the public doesn't consider this a space to watch us for voting this is purely for discussing these things and then the next steps document is a public facing document so giving general consensus to direct the superintendent towards a particular direction I believe is a little bit different than

[04:24:44] the path that we seem to be going down here but I think that for me the smartest way forward it would be to let's get that policy approved so that we're not doing something outside the policy and we seem to have a general consensus on that so far so I don't think that that will be a difficult process to have and then we can handle some of these next steps as follow-on motions to that that approval I think that makes perfect sense and we can put it on new business Thursday so that we don't have a delay I mean it may take more than a meeting for it to be pulled together but we could have it ready to go okay miss

[04:25:18] I was going to make the same point that Ms. Anderson made, so I'm good, but I do think this is a lot, and I really appreciate the work of colleagues who have been working on this for a long time, but there's many of us who are seeing a lot of this information for the first time without conversations around it, so I'm not sure I'm really ready to give consensus.

[04:25:39] I think the process as outlined will give more time for those conversations and digestion, and we can use the next steps process, but that's kind of where my head is right now. Mr. Moon? Just quickly, I apologize that I didn't get to review a 80-20-40 before I came to the meeting, but does our policy 80-20-40 at the present time preclude considering P-3?

[04:26:11] Correct. We would need to update the policy to include P-3s, and we have proposed that in the red lines. Okay, because long, long ago, I don't know what the 80-20-40 back then looked like When we did South County, South County back then, South County, there was a secondary score that we did do P3 at the time.

[04:26:35] And you think that was done because board connection to do it or board do it outside 80 to 40? Or do you think that was included back then? You know, I really don't know the answers 20 years ago. All I know is that Division Council has given us the guidance to update the policy before moving forward.

[04:26:53] Okay, I don't have all the notes going back to the case ago, but we did it. Yes. Okay. Ms. Barron. Yeah, so thanks for reminding us of the meeting end time, Dr. Anderson. So in the consensus and discussion, like we do have the time to talk about it, and like this is when we do the work, so I'm happy to talk a little bit more about this huge new area.

[04:27:18] But I think, yes, we're trying to understand all of this and all of these different avenues. I think when it comes to the P3 in particular, Ms. Szymanski, and you're drilling down to like seven schools, so again, this is new for us. So is it helpful for us to -- does it matter what the seven schools are?

[04:27:36] Or maybe we just talk for a few minutes about this renovation queue, because this has been something that, you know, keeps popping up with the boundaries, with the CIP, and maybe just reiterate where we stand on it, because we now have, you know, the renovation queue, We have athletics facilities queue, and now we've got some new things in the hopper.

[04:27:57] So that is like one thing I'm wondering. But to Ms. Anderson's point about the action, I like that, right? Like how do we actionize these things? But I think if we really wanted to focus on a P3 approach, like could we, in the course of this conversation this afternoon, figure out like can we ask for something to come back to us to help us understand better and like even map out?

[04:28:20] I'm looking at the work sessions obviously this year is done the school year but what's in a year what's two years like maybe the superintendent or miss missy can help us vision how far out this work goes I'll take it go back sorry oh sure I think as a resource we when we done the cost-benefit analysis the consultant had put together a timeline now again I think at this point it's a little bit outdated because we you know they had assumed maybe some this would have happened as soon as they had done the report so please keep that in mind with an

[04:28:56] asterisk on it but i would just point you to that direction as a good resource so you can get a kind of general time frame um i'll take a go back i'll just uh note that uh the december uh the very bulky december 2024 cip follow-on motions report on page 68 had um the draft p3 guidelines legal guidelines prepared by division council and um facilities and so those have been pending before the school board that that was shared with the entire school board at the time it was released in a Friday letter and right now 8240 has been in red line

[04:29:35] before governance for a few months I think which includes the addendum which is the p3 guidelines so if governance adoption recommends then we can put these into place and and and operationalize it in terms of would it be difficult to put together a timeline Miss Somancy kind of laying out you know from the timeline we sorry from the time the school board adopts the revised a 240 including the p3 guidelines you know what next steps might look like over the next few months in terms of kickoff and kind of a sequence of actions that

[04:30:10] need to happen so you can get to an RFP stage sure because we outline what the milestones are and then the consultant did put together a theoretical timeline so just be a matter of more updating that if you will i'll just extend my go back a little since sounds the other placards except mr frisch do you have additional okay okay uh dr anderson thank you just try to unpack this a little bit and and trying to envision what the next step is you're looking for the board to speak about you know policy got it we've got that in front of governance

[04:30:47] and it will come to the full board eventually scope and risk tolerance these are conversations that are a little bit outside of us being um not fully able to make decisions regarding funding so with the next step in these um be conversations with the um with the county executive dr reed do you see a space for that to be will that come out of your collaboration with him or is it something that we need to bring to the full board of supervisors you know i think that it's something that I believe the Board of Supervisors has suggested a joint

[04:31:26] committee on facilities and I think it's perhaps something more so to be a conversation with that group I certainly can talk to the county executive about it but I think it's more so a staff to staff or board to board at a retreat type of conversation thank you just trying to figure out how do we move forward we could certainly move forward on the policy but I don't think we could the other questions if it's going to be if it's going to be based on information that is determined from this jet I'm sorry from this joint committee which is

[04:31:59] going to be meeting in the fall per the board really call it at the board of supervisors what the board thank you the board matter per the board matter after the budget process concludes this year okay so it could be very okay so it's gonna start very soon can't speak to their availability but that was the board matter okay I'll take a go back I don't know why we're still in two minutes we have until 5:30 can you extend the go back to the two minutes seeing no other go backs dr. Anderson just wanting to go down this list a

[04:32:37] little bit kick off with visioning for the work defining goals criteria in risk tolerance the risk tolerance I'm imagining that's related to funding so let's put that to the side a little bit goals and criteria can you articulate a a little bit in terms of what that is going to be is it the number of schools the types of schools well sure i think it's combining all those things right so when we talk about goals like do we want to get all the way down to 25 year renovation cycle that would be a ton of schools so therefore it kind of exceeds our risk tolerance or might exceed what we would want to pay so i think it's

[04:33:14] right finding that balance of what we want to achieve from it how much we're willing to pay you know what we're looking in terms of a timeline and and so forth okay and to develop a solicitation can you speak a little bit about that that's your sure and i think that's where staff would then start to carry some of that once we can kind of come to consensus on what this looks like maybe it's seven schools and we decide to do the design build finance model and we want to do a 30-year term with like a target budget that's when we would then take some of that information turn it

[04:33:49] into a solicitation we put out an rfq we would get proposals from developers and kind of shepherd the project from there thank you it doesn't seem at least in my understanding that we'll be able to move on until that conversation begins with our board of supervisors partners which is not likely until the end of this month and then who knows how long that will take to complete that work so that's kind of where i'm standing mr dunn love to hear your thoughts if you see it differently yeah i i mean i i think there's definitely an important conversation we had with the board of supervisors but uh we we've already done this once with south county um and you know i've spoken

[04:34:29] extensively with the p3 champion on the board of the school board for pg county and they said it was primarily a school board that school system conversation there was some with their board of supervisors equivalent but i i think we need to figure out our own risk tolerance internally and how, you know, what we want the scope of projects to be because this is a black box, it can be anything.

[04:34:55] As Mr. Manske said, it could be 100 schools, it could be 10 schools. It could be schools that are geographically concentrated. You know, you could do one in the eastern end of the county, one in the middle, one in the north. You can do it any which way. And I think once we get the facilities condition assessment back, and I think that's two years from now, is that right?

[04:35:15] Or a year and a half? - Should be a little over one year. - Okay, a little over one year. So that will provide us for the first time with data so that we might be able to identify which schools are really in the worst condition, not just by age since the last renovation, but overall, and that might be a separate group of schools that we wanna prioritize because they're not on a queue at all, right?

[04:35:40] And so I think we should have some internal, just my opinion, we should have some internal dialogue kickoff internally so that then we know like where we are and then we can engage in a thoughtful manner with the board of supervisors sure um thank you and i'll just kind of finish the rest of my time it seems to be at least to me that we need a little bit more information in terms of what are these buckets that we need to give some decisions about like where do we find all those options um is it that if we do x number of schools um geographically it costs this amount i i i feel like i don't know which is

[04:36:14] first here the chicken or the egg what do we need in order i feel like we need a lot of information in order to arrive to this or even to have informed conversations with the board of supervisors so i'd like to get a sense of like what's the next potential step i i'm still fairly in the dark here um again it is a chicken and the egg situation because i don't want to go off and do 50 schools if you're like whoa that's way too expensive or don't do them there so that is right So, I think one thing we could do is give the board some guiding questions, more specific,

[04:36:51] like, "Hey, what's your appetite for removing maybe from CIP funds and reallocating to P3s?" You know, "How big of a project are we willing to go down?" You know, like, maybe some guiding questions would be helpful. Again, I just want to reiterate, though, we've done a lot of work to date, and I don't want to do too much more until we have just some general feedback that we're on the right path 'cause we can take it in a million different directions.

[04:37:18] - No, certainly, I just feel like, it's not that I think I need to be more informed because you did provide a lot of documents and I read it very thoroughly when you first sent it. I just need it to be organized so that I'm a little clearer on what is our ask of the Board of Supervisors because if we were to walk into a meeting with them tomorrow, I would not know how to engage in that conversation in a way that's going to be productive.

[04:37:42] - Okay. - Mr. Frisch. I'm gonna try and bring this home first I'm gonna misuse some child slang my risk tolerance is mid and what I mean by that is it'll be the first time we're embarking on this in recent memory and so knowing that that's a risk but I don't want it to be too aggressive of a risk secondarily if we adopt the approach that Miss Anderson noted where we put on new business the updating of the policy some of this stuff can be brought to the discussion of that policy change

[04:38:17] at the board dais as part of a presentation in anticipation of the vote I would suggest that we list the revisions to policy 8240 on new business on Thursday which would enable us to act on it as soon as governance is finished with it in the interim perhaps our meeting managers or the chair and vice chair or any combination thereof can work on or perhaps the superintendent to facilitate the board's work on the more specific guidance or the questions that Ms. Szymanski is talking about.

[04:38:54] And then by the time we come to a board vote at a meeting on 8240, which will likely be before the joint committees begin working, we will have something to talk about and to ground our thinking in terms of scope, risk tolerance, funding, et cetera.

[04:39:11] And that can help drive the conversations of our two members of the committee that work with the board of supervisors. at least in this piece of that work. - Mr. Fisher, you're done?

[04:39:28] - Yes. - Ms. Marin. - I like that a lot and I also just, you know, want to add that again, if we're really gonna do this, are we agreeing to dedicate our time to do this? Because this is a big, big project and it's ongoing and like I'm ready, I'm pretty sure Mr. Dunn's ready and some other people, but like again, would we be willing to dedicate part of a work session a month to this?

[04:39:54] Is this the PM work session or is it a work session a quarter? But also we do have our committee, the CPDC committee. Does that take more of a role? You know, other boards use their committees more actively to do this work.

[04:40:09] And so like what kind of time commitment do people have to really dig into this? Could this be the thing that this board sinks its teeth into for the next two and a half years of this term? Because we can't do all the things. And we've talked about, you know, especially with our student rights responsibilities, trying to do that differently, so it's not as much of a amount of time that it used to be.

[04:40:33] I mean, we've got to come to an agreement about what else we want to pile on the workload, or are some just gonna really dig in, and maybe that's the committee and some others and the task force. But I think as we go into summer planning with the superintendent and she maps out what's ahead, really need to put down then in writing when we're going to talk about this stuff and develop a plan and if the facilities the fca the facilities conditions assessment comes back in a year well that's a great you know stake in the ground let's back map it what do we need to have done by then

[04:41:11] in order to use that information effectively but i think too kind of putting it into two buckets of save money and be frugal and raise revenue those are two very different things and we could spend all of our time just doing those things and and really make a huge impact on the school division so i'd love to hear people's thoughts um on those things uh mr frisch thank you um a couple things

[04:41:45] one i think that this should be cpdc work and that we should not be using pm work sessions as absolutely necessary um secondarily i'll be very interested to talk to board members and school divisions perhaps at the networking spring event uh the school board networking event this uh this month uh from prince william and others who do this to see how deeply engaged the board is in that work because i think once we get it to a point of initiation we should be able to step back from it and trust that staff is doing it appropriately and we can judge that work through through the EL process.

[04:42:23] So I don't wanna oversell the work required of the board. I don't wanna undersell it, because it's a lot for us to internalize and know, okay, now I understand what the work is, and staff can go do it, and I can provide appropriate oversight during the EL process. But I have a feeling when we talk to our colleagues from other school divisions, they're gonna say like, I'm not, I don't understand what you're asking me.

[04:42:44] You're asking me how deeply I'm involved in the contracting around the schools, other than voting on the contracts at our meetings. So my preference would be that this is the type of thing that CPDC should be doing. Its chair can update the board at the monthly meeting.

[04:43:02] And then when there's bigger ticket items that need further discussion, perhaps there's a work session similar to this, but closer, I don't wanna say closer to CIP 'cause I don't wanna get in the way of the work that gets us to the CIP, which is a significant time investment by staff.

[04:43:17] But that would be my presumption, is that at some point we'd circle back this front and just check to see that things are moving in the direction that we wanted. And then we've got various ELs that speak to this. I also just wanted to re-highlight the recommendation from FPAC to bring back the consultant who prepared the big lengthy report to have a presentation to the board.

[04:43:44] If that can be a next step potentially, Mr. Chair, do you think that's? We might have to talk to the next chair because we don't have any more work session space. Nor does the chair get to engage a contract.

[04:44:03] Any other thoughts, comments on this or any of the issues we've discussed today? Going on. With that, I adjourn the work session.

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