Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Date: Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 3h 23m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYDjyZGInjw
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 2026-10-27. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:01] All right, folks, the April 7th, 2026 work session is now called to order at 11:36. Today we will be speaking about goal four, the strategic goal, I'm sorry, equitable access and opportunity.

[00:00:16] I will turn it over to Dr. Reed for an introduction and then I'd like to say a few things after her introductions regarding our sequence. Thank you, Dr. Anderson. my pleasure this morning to have our team here to talk about goal four um i want to introduce dr stephen gehring from abel which may have a different name now but i know the board knows him for the work uh with regarding abel uh stephen joined us last year for our goal for work session and we'll be co-presenting the updates today so we're very pleased um to have him with us we also

[00:00:53] of course have um miss neil who is our assistant superintendent for strategy and planning and miss hunstad who's our executive director in strategic planning and dr ponce our chief of schools uh joining us today as well as four of our high school principals who will be part of the presentation of this goal mandy burke from edison go eagles amy goodlow from chantilly go chargers eric healy from Centerville go Wildcats and Raven Jones from McLean go Highlanders. So Dr. Anderson we're excited to present this report there's some great data here and I really look forward to the

[00:01:33] conversation. Thank you Dr. Aiden we're very excited because I know the ABLE work has been talked about in relation to other goal reports so there's a lot of anticipation to go through that work and to better understand its impact onto student success. Just to kind of set the stage a little bit, we have about three parts to this goal report. We have the academic preparedness, we have academic intensity, which also includes the ABLE work, and we have the strategic actions.

[00:02:03] Staff will present all three of these components and will then engage the principals to highlight THE WORK THAT THEY'RE DOING THAT RELATES TO THESE AREAS. WE HOPE TO BE ABLE TO TAKE ONE ROUND OF QUESTIONS BEFORE WE BREAK FOR LUNCH AT 12:30.

[00:02:20] BUT IF THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN, JUST PLEASE HOLD ON TO YOUR QUESTIONS UNTIL WE RETURN. THIS SESSION IS ANTICIPATED TO GO UNTIL 2:30? 2:00? 2:00, THANK YOU.

[00:02:35] SO WE'LL HAVE PLENTY OF TIME. AND, AGAIN, THIS IS THE CRUX OF OUR WORK, STUDENT ACADEMIC SUCCESS. THIS IS WHY WE EXIST. So I'm very excited to turn it over to Ms. Neal to begin. - Thank you, Dr. Anderson. And this is exciting. It's our final goal report for the year.

[00:02:52] So I do wanna also acknowledge we have some of our goal champions and a goal four members who are in the room today, including Tony Dabari, who is one of our goal champions. So I just, if you can raise your hand if you're one of our goal four team members, we just wanna acknowledge all their work that they've been doing for the year.

[00:03:09] So thank you. - Actually, before Ms. Neal takes off, I wanna mention the importance of goal champions. One of the things we realized early on as a strategy is we were not gonna make the progress we needed to make working in silos. So our goal teams cut across departments, Dr. Presidio and Ms. Glazer is here, from instructional services to the chief of schools office, through Title I, through strategy and planning, our region offices, our principals, our schools, right?

[00:03:39] Everybody had to be involved and on the same team. So I just think that's been an important strategy. And it also, Mr. Smith has kept us working with our PELP framework and keeping a coherent, aligned strategy that utilizes our resources efficiently.

[00:03:55] And you'll see the results we're achieving. So I'm very proud of the team and the many teams that have contributed. - Thank you, Dr. Reen. So we will dive on in. These are our objectives for today that are on the slide. And we're looking forward to a great conversation.

[00:04:12] As a reminder to our public, Goal 4 is our equitable access and opportunity goal, and this work is deeply connected to all of the goals within the strategic plan. There are five measures in Goal 4, which you can see on the screen. In today's presentation, we're gonna focus on data covering measures A, B, and D, and there is additional data in the full report.

[00:04:34] So the current research indicates that by 2031, a significant majority of jobs will require some form of post-secondary education or training. And we see this reflected in our students' intentions with 86% of last year's graduating seniors planning to attend college immediately after high school.

[00:04:53] Advanced and CTE courses can help our students gain skills needed to achieve post-secondary success, whether their next step is college, career, or military service. FCPS offers advanced options in a range of subjects, including in the core content and in a variety of elective areas.

[00:05:11] This means our students can pursue coursework that helps them acquire the skills needed to be post-secondary ready, while also pursuing interests and passions through electives. Last year, 82% of our graduating seniors successfully completed advanced coursework or earned the CTE completer status.

[00:05:30] And this was also data we looked at in our goal three report. The overall rate did decline by two percentage points from the baseline, and we did see several student groups also with declines. These declines were due to decreases successful advanced coursework completion while CTE completer rates increased during the same time period. We also monitor advanced and CTE course taking in earlier grades and last year we saw 94% of our 11th graders had successfully completed at least one honors or CTE course in high school and nearly all student groups saw increases from the baseline and five met their

[00:06:08] target for the year. This data suggests that the vast majority of students are accessing honors and/or CTE courses by 11th grade. However, our students may need additional support accessing college-level courses or earning CTE completer status before graduation. So it's important for us to look at honors enrollment in earlier grades as we see patterns emerge when we look at access.

[00:06:31] So this slide shows an example of how English course taking patterns look over time at one of our high schools. On the left hand side of this slide you can see how students who started in a standard level English in ninth grade progressed through their English courses through 12th grade as opposed to those students who on the right hand side started in honors English in ninth grade. So our students who took honors in earlier grades were more likely to remain in honors and eventually access those college-level courses in high school. We also monitor the completion of honors coursework in middle school and last

[00:07:08] year overall 77% of students successfully completed at least one honors course by the end of eighth grade, which is up from 73 percent of the baseline. All of our student groups made progress, and while gaps are closing, they remain substantial for some student groups. Our next section is going to look holistically at students' academic intensity across core subjects. And to examine academic intensity, we began contracting, as Dr. Reid said, with ABLE last year. And ABLE applies different business rules for who's included in their analysis based on methodology.

[00:07:44] So you will see some differences in denominators across these data points. So I'm gonna now turn it over to Dr. Gehring, who's gonna share our methodology and walk us through some of the data. - Great, I like to think of these three as momentum metrics.

[00:08:00] So if you're trying to give students from Fairfax more momentum into their post-secondary pursuits, the three biggest indicators are the academic intensity, the GPA and the test scores, out of these three, the two that have the most significance are the intensity and the test and the GPA.

[00:08:17] Test scores are not as predictive as for post-secondary momentum as the other two. We measure academic intensity through a holistic transcript analysis. So we look at the overall body of coursework that students in Fairfax are signing up for over their four years of high school.

[00:08:33] We look at things like how many years are students taking above and beyond minimum Virginia graduation requirements and your district requirements and division requirements. We look at things like advanced coursework, honors, AP, IB, dual credit. How many of those are they taking? What combinations of those?

[00:08:50] And we look at two indicators in STEM. What's the highest level math that students get to? Very predictive of post-secondary readiness. And do they do something in science with a bio, chem, and physics progression? Also very predictive for STEM majors. So all of that is measured on a continuum.

[00:09:08] We score those transcripts on 25 points. And our data science team has tracked students going on to trade school, technical school, two year, four year. And we found if students can get to 10 points out of the 25 total possible points in math, English, science, social studies, and world language, that they have much more post-secondary momentum.

[00:09:26] So that's that momentum benchmark in the intensity, which we'll focus most of our time today. We also have two other momentum metrics. GPA is very close to academic intensity in terms of its predictive nature. We have two metrics in the data that we provided, but the one that's the most predictive is the 3.33 unweighted GPA.

[00:09:46] We're weighting our courses in your intensity, so we're not weighting them twice. And then we also gathered from you all your SAT, ACT, PSAT scores, and we included students' highest scores. That's not as predictive as the other two, but it is a really good triangulation point. So all of those together are the momentum metrics that we use to measure students from Fairfax, the likelihood of moving on, enrolling, coming back for a second year, and completing some sort of post-secondary study.

[00:10:14] The one that we'll spend most of our time today that aligns with your goal for very closely is the academic intensity. We looked at, again, how many years they took, which is what we call persistence. Did they go above and beyond the minimum requirements? We looked at advanced courses, the combination.

[00:10:30] We, as I mentioned, five subjects, and we looked at only students who had 18 or more credits. So we're looking at big picture trends in your data and students who had 18 or more credits with their likelihood of being post-secondary ready.

[00:10:45] - So this slide shows a combined baseline with data from both the 2024 and 2025 ABLE cohorts. And the stars that you can see on the slide indicate our targets for the 2026 cohort. So our high schools began piloting using the AVL analysis to guide course selection for the 2025 school year.

[00:11:05] And all of our high schools are currently using it for next year's course selection. Because we do not anticipate an impact for the class of 2025, we have adjusted our targets to begin with the 2026 cohort, which is a more accurate reflection of the annual growth that's needed to meet our 2030 targets.

[00:11:23] So 74% of our students at baseline meant the academic intensity threshold, and this does vary significantly by student group, which indicates a need for a more systemic response. - Again, there's two ways we measure the intensity.

[00:11:39] On the left, you're seeing the advanced coursework. So this is combinations of honors, AP, IB, dual credit, which students took at least one of those courses at some point in their four years of high school. And you can see the strength for Fairfax County is your humanities.

[00:11:57] And I do wanna comment, we measure these intensity metrics all across the United States. And your division in general, across all of your high schools, has much more access to intense coursework than typical school districts. So you all are doing a great job on opening access.

[00:12:14] Across the board, we benchmark all of your schools and every one of the Fairfax high schools that we work with is outperforming similar high schools across the United States in terms of getting students access to intense coursework. So clearly a good to great situation with you all.

[00:12:30] You all have done some incredible job opening access. So the left is the advanced coursework, on the right is the four years of coursework. One methodology, slight difference from what you all do, is we don't include all courses that you might include as meeting your graduation requirements.

[00:12:49] So said another way, we're looking at post-secondary preparatory courses. So is that course considered a post-secondary preparatory English course or math course? Even though it might meet a graduation requirement, what we're including in our analysis is a post-secondary preparatory. So if you see something like 95% of English, that's impossible.

[00:13:06] All students in Fairfax have to have four years of English. We're excluding some courses that don't meet that post-secondary threshold number as part of our analysis. Here's an example. So the two areas again, your strength is in your humanities. So you all have done an incredible job opening access in your English and your social studies.

[00:13:26] So the areas we're gonna focus on are places where your good to great situation could really move you one step forward. we'll start with science you'll see a couple big pieces here in the science data first of all it plays out differently by student groups so families are navigating your course catalog so one thing i can say about your course catalog it is incredibly rich incredibly varied and when we tend to see that we often see when we work with school districts lots of variation in how families can navigate that course catalog how do they interpret what is that elective that i might

[00:14:03] take my junior or senior year why would i sign up for a chemistry course or a physics course or an ib chemistry or ib physics like why would i why would i do that so the more choices and options you have we we tend to tell school divisions one of two things either pare down your options or increase your guidance and advisement and we'll talk about we'll talk about those strategies so you'll see it's playing out very differently in terms of families access particularly for your multilingual students, students with disabilities, Hispanic students and African-American students getting less access to advanced coursework and also

[00:14:41] showing less persistence in science. So this slide is looking at our data for the senior cohort over time and we also see similar rates of persistence in science over time with a slight decline in recent years. The other subject where you could have some gains is in your math course taking. Again, very similar trends with the same student groups, your multilingual students, students with disabilities, African-American, Hispanic families, less likely to get access to advanced math and persist into

[00:15:14] a fourth year of mathematics while enrolled in high school. So our advanced math course taking in high school appears to be linked to earlier entry into an advanced math course. And these patterns suggest that to close gaps and increase access to higher levels of math in high school, systemic changes will need to be made in earlier grades.

[00:15:35] So one of the ways we're addressing this is through the intentional focus of increasing equitable access to Algebra I by eighth grade, as this allows more students to access a broader range of both advanced math and advanced science courses in high school. So while the majority of our students are graduating with one or more math credit beyond Algebra II, we have seen a decline over time for our senior cohort.

[00:15:58] And that is part of the reason why more than half of our high schools have identified math persistence as an area of focus as a part of their ABL work. And we'll talk about that more with our principals today. - And out of the five core subjects, the other subject where you all could increase access in your intensity is world languages.

[00:16:17] You'll see some of the same trends in your data. One of the big differences is students not persisting as much as the other four disciplines beyond that second year. So typically students are stopping after that second year. That's one way that students could continue.

[00:16:33] When we work across the country, we tend to see a couple different things that school divisions are doing in this area. One, really focusing on native speakers and increasing access through competency-based assessments and trying to provide opportunities for students to get more years of world language transcripted into their transcript as they move on to represent their actual gifts in their native speaking.

[00:16:57] Also, some school divisions are doing a great job across the country on taking native speakers and moving them into dual credit coursework. And that's probably an undertapped area for Fairfax where you all could do a better job on providing more native speaker access into dual credit, AP, IB coursework, as opposed to just using competency-based testing as an endpoint destination.

[00:17:21] - So we also are providing some data that looks at our students graduating with three or more years in any world language. And last year we saw 77% of our students the senior cohort graduated with three or more credits in a world language. And this rate is higher than the AVL analysis primarily because it includes credits in the world language that were earned in middle school, which are not going to count in those persistent years, as well as students pursuing that two plus two option, so two years in two different languages. It also includes our students who end their world language, as Stephen said, after three years of studies and don't go

[00:17:56] on and persist through that fourth year. We have three strategies focused on student course taking that prepares them for post-secondary opportunities and success. Our first strategy is building the pipeline to rigorous coursework in high school.

[00:18:13] We are focused on exposing all students to consistent rigor through our honors framework, regardless of the level of course that they are taking. Through programs like AVID, we are equipping students with academic habits that students need to succeed in advanced courses.

[00:18:28] This year, we are also expanding the ABLE work to middle schools to better prepare our students for academic intensity in high school. A focus of this work will continue to be access in Algebra 1 in middle school, which we reported for Goal 3. As seen on this slide, we have seen increased enrollment just this past year with large gains for our multilingual learners.

[00:18:50] And as of yesterday, we are projecting around 84% of our next year's 8th graders will be enrolled in Algebra 1 or higher. This is a celebration, and this success is due to the work of our amazing school teams. Finally, we continue to support students who are academically advanced, but may face barriers to accessing advanced courses, such as Young Scholars Program, and our work with our twice exceptional learners.

[00:19:17] Our second strategy addresses how students are enrolled into courses and how families and school staff guide those decisions. Key actions include academic advising checklists and public facing resources for families, strategic scheduling practices through our ABLE work that monitors whether students are accessing rigorous pathways, increased teacher capacity to serve students with disabilities in inclusive settings, and a new parent view feature allowing families to review and acknowledge course requests.

[00:19:49] The timeline shown here maps out the ABLE scheduling rollout. All comprehensive high schools are implementing this this spring and the class of 2027 being the first to experience one full year of impact building through 2030.

[00:20:05] As part of this strategy, we have four of our principals with us to highlight some of the work they are doing at their individual schools related to scheduling and academic advising practices. I'm going to invite each one of them to share some highlights with their work, starting with Dr. Goodloe.

[00:20:27] - Well, hello, and thank you for having me today. I'm really excited to highlight the ABLE work and the impact that we're seeing just in this first year. Our goal at Chantilly High School, our main focus has been persistence in mathematics, and that aligns with our pyramid goal Chantilly pyramid where we're focusing on equitable access to advanced math coursework starting in elementary and then leading to that persistence of four years of math coursework in high school. We did notice when we first looked at our ABLE data that we were seeing gaps with our multilingual learners as well as our students with disabilities and persisting in math but also that persistence was a common trend. We were seeing students drop off at 12th grade

[00:21:07] They were no longer taking math, and we do know that it's a very important indicator for post-secondary success to persist in mathematics and take at least one course past Algebra II. So that has been our main focus this year. A few things that have been strategic moves in terms of the impact for us have really been that focus on course advising.

[00:21:27] As you heard in the presentation, we have a very robust course catalog, And Chantilly has some very significant choices and broad-range opportunities in electives. And so many students lean into our academy and CTE programs and may not see the value in persisting in math.

[00:21:45] So we've really focused in on looking at that data. We noticed this year that we have 100 seniors who were not taking math. So we looked strategically at our course advising structures to identify the students who might be in terminal math courses, Algebra II for example, and have strategic one-on-one conversations in that advising conversation, where it's not just what do you want to take, but here are some math options you should consider taking. Expanding our course pathways has been another very important strategic move at Chantilly, offering data science, offering a trig and stat combined

[00:22:23] year-long course offering additional math pathways in dual enrollment and ap pre-calc and really helping all learners understand those classes are accessible to them that started with professional development with our math department and also communication with our families so this year we instituted during our advising timeline zoom meetings by grade level the dss and i conducted those meetings online with families and we had over 400 families access those meetings this year so we could talk about course pathways. Why is it important to persist in math and science? Why is it, what are the differences between dual enrollment

[00:23:01] courses and AP courses? What does an honors course look like? How can every learner access those courses? And so what are we noticing so far? We have an increase in 7% of students persisting in math for our rising seniors and so what that enrollment looks like is 91% of our seniors are currently opted into a math course for next year but when we dove deep into our data in our last session with Steven we noticed that that percentage is actually closer to 98% of our 12th graders because within that number we see our students who are graduating out of cohort our students who are accessing our step programs and our extended special education programs who may no longer be in mathematics

[00:23:40] courses and also our students who are so far advanced that they are taking online courses through alternative programs and therefore do not register as currently having a math course. So I wanna be really clear about that. 98% of our seniors will be taking math and persisting in four years for next year.

[00:23:58] We have also seen increases in science persistence and our students with disabilities and our multilingual learners increasing their persistence in math and science. So this work is really exciting. I think that partnership with families and with teachers to talk to students about what the pathways look like is critical to ensuring that they maintain these course choices for the future.

[00:24:23] Thank you. - Thank you, Dr. Goodloe. Now we'd like to welcome Mrs. Jones from McLean High School. - Like Dr. Goodloe, I'm very excited to talk about ABLE. This is a tool that I wish I'd had when I was a school counselor and a DSS.

[00:24:39] We are finding it incredibly useful at McLean. So what we found when we started digging into our ABLE data was that 87% of our students were identified as either ready or highly ready for post-secondary work. However, only 19% of our multilingual learners were identified as ready or highly ready for post-secondary work, and only 45% of our students with disabilities were ready.

[00:25:00] That was alarming for us at McLean High School. So that led us to focus on two goals. One, persistence in English and access in world languages. That is where we found that our gaps were. In English, ABL data showed a pattern in students beginning advanced coursework in our English classes, but persistence declining.

[00:25:19] This led to targeted conversations with students and reveal common themes that led to students dropping the courses in our school. What this led us to do as a school is look at why that was happening. So through those conversations with students and parents, which had not always been happening for us at the level that the ABLE data allowed us to have, we found that students were worried about several things.

[00:25:42] One, teacher preparedness. Two, instructional delivery. The format of the courses and the workload and the course difficulty. As a result of that, we're now redesigning the format of classes and rethinking how we select the staff that teaches our advanced coursework at McLean.

[00:25:57] English teachers are also participating in their first vertical CT, which I'll talk about a little bit on Friday with both our elementary and middle school compatriots. Through ABLE data, we also found that in world languages is an area in which students have more potential to access rigorous coursework, but they weren't able to because we didn't offer the courses that they needed at our school.

[00:26:17] So this led to us, after reviewing this information, we've decided to run Spanish for Heritage Speakers 4 at the honors level next year, And we are already seeing an increase in the number of our multilingual learners who are signing up for that course already. We also think this could enhance our AP Spanish language enrollment in the future with Spanish for Heritage Speakers 4 Honors as a bridge to the AP course for those students.

[00:26:39] In talking with the families and the students that we've met with, and we've met with about 45 of them individually, they are excited about this option. They were waiting on this option and we would not have been able to identify this without our ABL data. So how has this changed or will change our ways of working with staff, students, and families.

[00:26:57] One, we're having more individual conversations with parents and students, because the ABL data allows us to identify students by name. We're able to reach out to individual students, individual parents, where we may not have had kind of that overview of who it was that was taking the advanced coursework in our school and why they were not taking them when they chose to drop out of those classes and not persist, or why they chose to not sign up at all.

[00:27:20] We also have more proactive outreach to historically under-identified students and families, which is leading to a broader range of students being identified to take coursework. Greater access, greater interest, greater excitement about the coursework, and we're able to generate that as a result of our ADL data.

[00:27:37] We also have earlier identification of support for historically underrepresented populations happening. Longfellow Middle School, who is also partnering with us in this work, is one of the middle schools who signed up to pilot this. They're also excited about this work, and so as a result of that, we reached out to our elementary school feeders, and we started a vertical CT in the McLean pyramid.

[00:27:56] The goal of that CT is to work on one early identification of students who are historically underrepresented for advanced coursework and to figure out what supports those students need starting in elementary school to be able to carry them all the way through to graduation with advanced courses.

[00:28:12] The second goal of that is to make sure that students who are taking algebra at the sixth grade level and the eighth grade level or seventh grade level and in the ninth grade level are receiving the same level of instructional delivery, the same instructional planning from their teachers, no matter what school or what grade level they're taking that coursework in.

[00:28:30] We found through our ABLE data that algebra really is a foundational course. And when students miss key concepts or key standards or don't come out of algebra with certain skill sets, that they struggle when they take the higher level coursework.

[00:28:47] So by aligning vertically across the elementary, the middle and the high school, we hope to be able to identify what those key concepts are that students need to be able to be successful all the way from elementary school through graduation. The early impacts that we're seeing are closer alignment across our pyramid in scheduling practices.

[00:29:04] These are conversations that we've not necessarily had with the elementary school because who thinks we should talk about high school courses with our elementary school friends? They are excited to do this work with us and they're excited to be on board with us doing this work. So we are very happy that the ABLE data reveals some of these gaps for us because it's changing our practices, not just at McLean High School, but across our pyramid period.

[00:29:26] And we've also added an increased selection of advanced courses in world languages for our students. Those are tangible outcomes due to the ABLE data that we have. We're still learning quite a bit about how ABLE can support our work with students. And most recently we've provided access to student data that demonstrates where students can level up.

[00:29:42] So these are children that we might not have identified for advanced coursework, but looking at the profiles of similar students who've taken advanced coursework and been successful in the past, we were able to identify a new group of students to reach out to those families and those students to suggest that maybe you should take this math class, maybe you should take this English course, let's try it.

[00:30:01] And we're excited to say that the majority of those students are willing to give it a shot and they are changing their course selections for next year so that they can go into higher levels of courses. And finally, we've implemented a small group for executive functioning skills during our Highlander time and we're looking to expand this next school year as we build our master schedule.

[00:30:21] What this support does is it offers students ability to take a course other than strategies for success and it enhances their executive functioning skills for rigorous coursework so that they can be more successful when they go into these advanced courses thank you thank you mrs jones now we'll hear from mrs burke the principal of edison high school um thank you again everybody it's nice to see everybody today um

[00:30:56] i know okay um it's nice to see everyone this afternoon um at edison high school we're currently focusing on persistence in our world languages and taking higher level world languages courses when we looked at our data we saw that that was our lowest compared to the county data that you saw up there one of our lower areas so we decided to tackle world language which might be a little different than my counterparts that are tackling kind of our math and sciences but world languages let me just move the screen world languages is an area that not only prepares them for high school but prepares them for the world that we're

[00:31:35] living in as well. So we found that as an important area to tackle and it's one that our multilingual learners or students with disabilities had the biggest gains to be to be made in as well. Not to say that we're also not monitoring areas such as math and English because we're also looking at that data and making adjustments on our scheduling for that as well. Well from From our ABLE data, sorry, my colleagues are also in the same document and my screen keeps jumping.

[00:32:04] I'm like, I'm trying, moving target. So from our ABLE data, again, we found that students were not completing four years of a world language.

[00:32:20] Even our heritage speakers were not going through levels one through four of heritage speaking or accessing the higher level IB courses. So that was a focus for us this year, especially during academic advising, having specific conversations with students about continuing on, even though it might not be needed for a graduation requirement to go into that fourth level, how that can impact them once they leave school.

[00:32:44] We also targeted during our curriculum fair, our world languages was up front and center so that they were in the main lobby scene as everybody walked in. So we gave them prime real estate and our Latin program, which I know Latin is growing. We have AT contracts in Latin.

[00:33:01] That's how much it's grown this year. So we are continuing to grow our world languages program in that way. We also saw that we had a gap in math for our students who were taking IB math. They didn't have a higher level course for 10th grade to take.

[00:33:17] So a lot of them were taking prop stats or things like that. And our 12th graders who weren't in the IB curriculum didn't have a higher level math to take as a 12th grader. So this year, we implemented our DE pre-calc class that our 10th and 12th graders can take, and we currently have one full section, and we're busting, I think, into a second section of that as well.

[00:33:37] So something that we're continuing to kind of keep track of and monitor. Things that have changed, we've really focused again on specific conversations with students and families during course selection, and having conversations about, even after graduation requirements are meant, what that means beyond.

[00:33:57] We've had targeted course selection discussions for our 10th graders because those are the students getting ready to access our IB curriculum. So our IB coordinator has gone into every advisory and had specific conversations around the IB curriculum and encouraging students. And then also having that communication go home to family so they're aware of the conversations that were had about the higher level courses.

[00:34:19] This has also allowed us to have real time analysis and looking at trends before our master schedule is actually fully created. I don't know if anybody's tried to create a master schedule, but a lot of these changes come in after you start to place things and then things start to move about. This is allowing us to look at that data prior to that and make changes before we start setting courses into place and making sure that kids are in the right place and those conversations are meaningful with families and not rushed in the summer.

[00:34:46] Like, ooh, we should have moved this. Oh, now we see this trend. It's allowing us to see it in real time and really have those good conversations. some impacts we've seen again like I mentioned we have some increased Latin sections our French program has also grown we've seen a 2% increase in advanced coursework and persistence in our world languages since we've started this target this area so continuing as we go on we're gonna continue to look at our students we have used now where we can see where that targets and says hey

[00:35:23] look at the student to see they might need a level up so we're continuing to look at that this time of year is the best time to do it again we haven't built our master schedule yet so we're allowed to kind of have that flexibility and make those changes that we need to make continue again to monitor enrollment in our different areas and it's also allowed us we're an application for our career pathways program for IB so we're not only looking at those higher level classes but how can we pair that CTE pathway with the IB higher level curriculum so that is really allowed us to kind of look and see that need and

[00:36:01] very excited about being able to start offering that program here in the near future as far as vertical articulation we have an advanced academic pyramid night coming up two weeks from now where we are going to be talking K through 12 about advanced academics in the Edison pyramid so we're very excited about parents being able to kind of see what what it looks like in elementary how that translates to middle and what that looks like in high school we already did one advanced specific math night and like you said talking with the with the sixth grade parents about multivar math they I think we're sitting there a

[00:36:38] little bit with the eyes open but if you start taking algebra one that that young then you are looking at some of that higher level math courses so I think it was nice to start those conversations at the younger ages and I know the parents appreciated that as well. And again, just anything else, kind of just summing it up a little bit.

[00:36:57] We've really been able to combine the ABLE data, which has given us a very visual way of looking at it. A lot of this information is in CIS, but unless I am not a V lookup, X lookup, you know, all those different lookups, this has given me a very easy way to go in and find that information that would have taken me a long time or I would have had to use other people to get that data.

[00:37:19] But that data combined with our inclusion work has allowed us to continue to support students accessing that higher level coursework to provide this strong tier one instructional strategies and pathways for all students. So just, again, that's what I have.

[00:37:36] - Thank you so much, Mrs. Burke. And next we're gonna ask Dr. Healy to please share what's happening at Centerville High School. - I know, yeah. Yeah, that's my fault. So again, like my colleagues, thank you for the opportunity.

[00:37:52] And similar to Raven as a former DSS, I nerd out about this kind of stuff. So at Centerville, it's interesting coming into it because the process had already sort of started when I came in. And so it was interesting to kind of get a sense of diving into it with the team.

[00:38:11] And so what we did is we really looked at our, there's the two areas that we decided to focus on were math persistence and then advanced science course taking. Those were the two areas that we saw at Centerville that we needed to really be able to address.

[00:38:27] And what's great about the data is that it really helps you to begin to ask the questions around root causes, right? Is it a course pathway issue? Is it a prerequisite issue? Are we putting things in our own way or in students' way? Or is it a mindset issue?

[00:38:43] And so our data really showed that our, Similar to my colleagues, right, our ML students and our students with disabilities were not persisting in math or taking those advanced courses. And really, when you think about, especially, you know, at Centerville, when we have multilingual learners who are level one students coming in in ninth grade, right, oftentimes those students are put in, right, double-blocked remedial math classes, which makes it very difficult to persist, right, on forward.

[00:39:11] So we started to be able to have some conversations about how we could creatively work on getting these students the skills that they need to be able to address it, recognizing that it's a multi-year work that we would have to do. The other thing that we noticed, and you saw in the presentation, that our students who were in standard level courses remained in standard level courses throughout the duration of their high school year.

[00:39:36] So how do we ensure that the level of thinking we're asking our students to do in standard level courses is at the same level that we would ask our advanced courses to do, and just allow them some additional support to be able to get where they need to go.

[00:39:52] And also, what are the mindsets of our teachers, right, in that work, and what's the mindset that we have going into this? Do we really believe that all students, right, can learn and are capable of learning at high levels? So, how we changed this year, we really utilized a lot of the data kind of as a baseline.

[00:40:09] We did some real intentional conversations with students during academic advising, and even just slightly changing the language, and I think Dr. Goodloe spoke to this, changing the language from do you want to take this class to here are the options that you have, right?

[00:40:24] Even just something as simple as that, 'cause perhaps students aren't even thinking about what their possibilities are. At Centerville, we have something that we call core days. So in December, we spend a couple of days, our teachers talk to the students about all the potential options for where they can go from the course that they're currently sitting in.

[00:40:45] And what we really tried to do is emphasize not just like, hey, what are the course sequences, but we had our teachers talk about what are the skills that students need in order to be successful, right, in whatever the next class is. So the kind of early impacts that we're seeing is, first, it definitely allows us to clearly identify students, right, who utilizing the data, who are not persisting in math, who could, right, or who aren't taking advanced science coursework, we could. We've had a real emphasis on our classroom instruction, our T1 instruction, this idea of what is the level of thinking, what's the task we're

[00:41:21] asking students to do, so that we can make sure that all students are capable of being able to reach that expected work in advanced coursework. We also identified our rising seniors who are not taking, right, a math, I think one of my colleagues talked about Algebra 2, right, that's kind of a place where we want to make sure that we wanna look at our Algebra II students and make sure that they can persist right beyond that.

[00:41:46] And we cross-referenced that work with also students' GPA, what was their course sequencing, so that we could really be specific and targeted in the students that we were having conversations with. And what we saw was a slight increase in our students taking advanced science courses for next school year.

[00:42:05] And while we didn't see the gain in the math persistence we were hoping for for this year, what it does allow us to do is be able to be really strategic for next year. So in terms of our implementation, it's early identification, earlier conversations with students. It's increased family engagement, so making sure that our families are aware of what a four-year course pathway looks like and what the options are for students.

[00:42:29] And then it's also being really strategic about what are the courses we're offering. As you've heard, we have very robust options in Fairfax County. And when we talk about specifically multilingual learners, how can we ensure that our lowest level multilingual learners are getting the background knowledge skills that they need to be able to access that advanced coursework, right?

[00:42:48] And I think that there are course sequencing options that we have to be able to allow them to really build those skills. And then at the beginning of this year, we implemented an AP workshop at the beginning of the school year for ninth graders who were taking AP Human Geography, and we found that to be very successful because it was their first AP class.

[00:43:09] Well, so now how can we expand that to any student who's taking their first AP and be able to provide them, and that course was really just focused on executive functioning skills, study skills, things of that nature, and that in and of itself gives students more of a foundation to be able to be successful in the future.

[00:43:32] - Thank you all for being here and for all that you do for our students. Our final strategy focuses on expanding the credentials and course options that signal students are ready for what comes after high school.

[00:43:52] This includes broadening the number of advanced courses that counts towards diploma requirements, continuing to grow CTE pathways and industry certifications, partnering with our colleges to support transferable dual enrollment credits, and expanding access to the World Languages credit by exam.

[00:44:11] The results are encouraging as industry certifications grew by nearly 1,800 from last year to this year, and total credentials earned are up by nearly 2,500. You can see these data on page 29 of the full report.

[00:44:28] This is meaningful growth, and that reflects the expanded access to career-connected learning. To summarize our key findings from goal four report, advanced and career preparatory coursework supports student success after graduation.

[00:44:44] While 82% of this year's senior cohort completed advanced coursework or earned CTE completer status, That rate has declined from our baseline, and we are not yet on track to meet our 2030 targets for most groups. Just under three-fourths of seniors graduated with advanced coursework and academic intensity in core subjects.

[00:45:05] The gaps between student groups are persistent and appear to form before students reach high school, meaning our interventions focused on earlier grades are essential. This work has both policy and budgetary implications, as we will both need to continue to increase teacher endorsements to respond to expanding student access and both math and earlier grades as well as teacher endorsements for college level courses.

[00:45:31] Supporting expanded access to CTE will also require thoughtful planning to address staffing and building capacity. I will now turn the meeting back over to our meeting managers. Thank you very much for all that wonderful work. Folks, we have about eight minutes before lunch, so that is not a lot of time to get a comp to get a lot accomplished however we could perhaps have

[00:45:56] one board member ask their question and we will then reconvene after lunch at one o'clock um thank you uh miss marron why don't you go ahead and start oh okay um all right i appreciate the principals being here um i'll this will i guess inform them as well so i just need to raise world language instruction again i've you know it if we are tracking it we must understand that well one

[00:46:36] thing this board has brought up i just put the whole roster together 2024 a work session 25 work session on secondary work we had a forum in january saying we were going to schedule a work session on world language and this doesn't even touch the stuff earlier so i just you know to keep giving us this data about world language dr reed and we have done nothing substantial into our board chair like we just keep talking about it and we are certainly not doing anything to drive a change so i'm not sure what strategies the staff are doing to ensure that world language intensity is taken i also must share the experience i have with my seventh grader this year my seventh

[00:47:16] grader is dyslexic 20 of the population is dyslexic he was encouraged again and again to to take a world language because that is what the state says is in the advanced diploma. However, research shows that unless there is differentiated instruction, dyslexics will have a terrible time with world language.

[00:47:32] So finally he said, "Okay, Mom, I won't take world language." That means no IB diploma, which he wasn't going to do anyway because you need five years for that. So if eighth graders don't know that in five years they want to take their IB diploma, they're done. And also just continuing to tell a student with a disability without differentiating instruction that they should go for the advanced diploma so he's not going to get an advanced diploma but he's an advanced math and science and that's going to serve him well so until we change that narrative for kids around world language and we're trying to get to 100 i don't think that's a good goal for kids and until we talk about world language instruction how we're doing it well and

[00:48:09] who's going to be set up for success i don't understand why we continue to measure it we are not setting kids up for success in this area thank you i'm happy to respond i certainly appreciate the principals being here and appreciate the work of the leadership in a school as we shift paradigms right for children and i couldn't be prouder this morning as i listened um the work you're leading right now is transformational it will it changes lives and we have to remember that the work we do

[00:48:45] in public education isn't just about those 12-13 years children are with us but it's the doors you open and the trajectory of the rest of their lives you're setting them on so thank you thank you thank you the world language piece several of you talked about that and I know Steven brings national data about why that's important to consider persistence several of you did share strategies about that and I think your point Miss Marin around students with disabilities being able to access that we're certainly able to contemplate the differentiation strategies for that but Steven would you take a minute just and

[00:49:22] talk about why world language is included in the topical areas that are part of the national research that we're taking this work from it definitely the evidence shows that world language has a big impact on students post-secondary trajectory so one one piece of data that we shared with the schools it's It's actually one of the most predictive out of the subjects, so students who do take world language and persist, it's one of the most predictive, particularly for a four-year.

[00:49:52] A lot of four-year universities require it. It does something in our brain. We're still learning. It does something rewiring our brain and our neurons, so we're finding elderly people who speak multiple languages, for example, tend not to have dementia at the same rates.

[00:50:08] literally does some some some some that's good news i need to apply espanol immediately i don't think we're talking elderly people at this table it does something to our brain like music does like like mathematics does literally i don't think we quite understand but it actually like connects neurons in ways that we don't know so i agree with the the board members um uh comments about making the course accessible world languages actually can be one of the most accessible courses out of all of the core subjects if you use really good uh instructional strategies and there's some

[00:50:46] great instructional strategies that can be done with world language that make it incredibly hands on incredibly engaging and it's actually one of the subjects that students with disabilities or students could get access and have some of the most early success in so the data shows that students who take world languages it's highly predictive and if it's taught well and you use some great great instructional strategies i've been fortunate in my career to see some some world language classrooms that are so highly engaging that a student could not not learn if it's done well with good good instructional strategies so i think it's i'm that's good you're surfacing that

[00:51:25] well thank you and i don't have the timer on but i'm pretty sure it wasn't all three minutes so just if i could finish i feel like the promise of world language is being dangled in front of us with no concrete steps i'm well aware of the benefits that's why i am advocating again may 7 2024 the board had consensus at a work session that we wanted to focus on this december 5th we talked about course selection and secondary coursework january 13 work session forum we were going to schedule a topic to talk about world language and then here today so if it's so great What is your plan, Dr. Reed, to make it more accessible?

[00:52:01] And also, we have a history of providing a lot of world languages. In this budgetary climate, what is the plan to provide meaningful world language instruction, differentiated as it needs to be, and fix this? This is two years, not to mention the work in '21 that Rachel Seiser and I did to analyze it.

[00:52:19] Nothing has changed. That's five years. Actually, I think you heard today that it actually is changing because of the strategies employed. But we are increasing the number of students who are persisting in world languages. And I think it is, if we're going to take a more at-scale approach, it's going to require some serious budget commitments, which, again, is another, we're going to have an opportunity to talk with our state education leaders around that being a priority for Virginia, as well as our board of supervisors and state delegation, because the level of funding to provide that

[00:52:56] level of robust wrap-around support is going to be significant. So those are choices that we'll need to be able to make future-wise. Well, I appreciate that, but Dr. Reed, you have not brought us any choices. We have not seen what it would cost to thoughtfully expand world language. And I will say, amazing examples and amazing work, but we keep hearing piecemeal approaches.

[00:53:16] It's not everywhere. What is the comprehensive approach? That's what I'm seeking. Thank you, Ms. Marin. I do want to take this last minute just to say thank you to our principals for being here, and we look forward to seeing you back at 1:00. So, board members, please hold on to your questions for 1:00. It is now 12:29. We are going to recess for lunch. This section, this portion of the work session is to end at 2:00, and we want to make sure everybody gets at least one turn. It seems as

[00:53:55] if we had less time than we anticipated um she is not here with us so i'm going to move on to the next speaker mr moon please go ahead thank you dr anderson i i want to wait until i some of my colleagues return no no go ahead please let's start we we have okay not a lot of time where the clerks i don't know whether this question should go to uh this side or dr reed or that side But some esoteric questions that I have include whatever we do, whatever we do, whatever we

[00:54:35] do in our schools, how do we know that's making a difference in our kids' success in college and beyond? So I think we're looking at the NCAA Clearinghouse data as a piece of that, but I would say that when we base our theory of action on research best practices, right, that are national models for best practice that have a tremendous amount of research behind it, I think we can be more confident that the outcomes are going to be positive for our young people.

[00:55:11] So I think I'll defer to Dr. Gehring to offer some amplification of that. I think one piece of evidence that you all do a really good job of tracking what graduates aspire to do when they're seniors and they're exiting the system.

[00:55:29] And to Dr. Reid's point, one thing I'm a huge advocate for is you all should track your students moving on to post-secondary, the percent of students who do not just say they want to, who actually do move on, who actually come back for a second year of a multiple year program, and who complete and get post-secondary degrees.

[00:55:46] So those three metrics, they're lagging metrics, but I definitely think should be part of your long-term vision to actually see, is this making a difference? more fairfax students enrolling somewhere coming on back for a second year and completing us a program of study and obtaining some sort of certificate apprenticeship or or degree uh those are those are key metrics that every school system thank you is that is there a school district somewhere out there that is already doing that has been doing that that we can use adopt as a model

[00:56:22] yes yes there are school systems that are doing that um and regularly track that so i definitely Definitely, and you all have that data, so you've been collecting the data, now it's aggregating the data and actually using it to track and adding it to your future board goal reports.

[00:56:40] Mr. Mun, I would just add that we do track some of that data and report out some of that data, but I know the board has asked, I think, this year at the Goal 5 work session for some additional reporting on the National Student Clearinghouse. Okay, thank you. I look forward to receiving that. The next question that I have goes to, correct me if I'm wrong, you know, there are certain areas that we have not actually met our goals, even falling behind our baseline.

[00:57:10] And does that also include our graduation rate or college entrance rates? Because I remember, I remember, you know, going back many years, about 90% of our students went to college versus what do we have right now, 86?

[00:57:31] It was the '86 with last year's graduating class. Is that generally national trend? So our college-going rates exceed the national trends, but we could provide-- I mean, it's going declining, whether that's a national trend. Yeah, we'd have to follow up with some additional data, but happy to do that, Mr. Moon.

[00:57:50] Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Moon. And now we'll go with Ms. St. John Cunning. And if we could have the clerks begin the time, thank you. Okay, so I had some prepared questions, but before I go to those, I just want to have some questions for the principals and first of all I want to thank all of you for the report and the work and I want to thank all of the principals that shared what they're doing at the school because I know that you know down in the trenches work is really valuable and it's how we operationalize everything and I know

[00:58:25] that's very valuable and I thank you and I saw one of my colleagues nodding her head a lot and I'm very happy to see that there are two principals here that were former DSS's one of the things that you said mr. Neal was that when you

[00:58:40] I just want clarification when you say that the lowest level multilingual students that come in are you talking about the lowest level in language acquisition or content acquisition yes so what I was referring to is our students with ELP level one so it would be their English language proficiency that I was referring to more often than not those students are coming in and are being placed in right remedial math classes or you know remedial English classes things of the that nature okay so so that leads actually to one of the questions that I

[00:59:17] had regarding our multilingual learners and how we take in credits from international transcripts and what their level of content knowledge is because sometimes there are two different things and I have concerns about that putting a highly academically successful multilingual learner in a lower-level course and I'm gonna maybe invite rich to come up and sit next to miss glazier because there may be some additional questions on this but just

[00:59:57] just to clarify the comment we're talking about students that have interrupted formal education we do an in-depth transcript analysis of every multilingual learner student or any student who transfers into the system we do that through our central registration process we assess them for math content skills as well as English language skills and then we get the WIDA assessment scores as well and we triangulate all of that data to figure out like where they have some learning gaps so when we're talking about students that might be in remedial classes those are students typically that have had a year or more of interrupted formal education maybe on their process to you know enrolling in FCPS so those are students that are typically several grade

[01:00:36] levels behind in terms of content knowledge and do need some additional scaffolding to get to the point where they can meet graduation requirements so and also dr. Ponce I know that you've been working on this project also I don't know if you want to add to dr. Presidio's response yes and I wanted to

[01:01:07] to ask Marcia if you can hello yeah yeah it just I was just listening to if you you can actually ask again the very specific question.

[01:01:30] So my concern is that we might have some multilingual learners that come in from their countries and they are advanced academically or they're a certain place academically, but then because their language skills are not where they should be, where they're placed.

[01:01:46] And so Dr. Presidio kind of helped answer that and so did Mr. Neal. But my question is, follow-up question is, do we have that data of our multilingual learners that come in, who are the ones that have interrupted learning and what do they need, and then the ones that don't, and then is there a place for them if you've already taken advanced courses in your country and you know the content, you just don't know the language?

[01:02:14] So I want just to add to that one. I believe that we can do a better job with that. I really do. I have seen a lot of our own children that, because we don't, I would say language barrier, that we don't necessarily assess the prior knowledge.

[01:02:34] Like I have seen a student that they could be in calculus probably, that because that English language, they had to be in remedial classes, which put them in really behind. And rather than being able to graduate in four years get all that credit that they bring with them we actually put them in a situation that they will never meet the standards in four years or lower so I think that we could do a better job with that definitely I'm a hundred percent

[01:03:12] sure of that so I I think you've answered because I had a whole series of questions about this because I've experienced it at the elementary level which brings me to my next question which is to the doctor well Raven I'm sorry I remembered your first name and not your last name miss Jones I love your idea of going to elementary schools when you say who thought of that like I thought about that all the time I think that vertical articulation is critical and I know that as when I worked as a family liaison I would explain particularly to multilingual learner families like they already have

[01:03:51] language if you put them into you know the language courses in their language are going to be more proficient in their language as they grow up and what it will do number one how many elementary schools are you working with which would be a question for you but a broader question would be can we expand this to a more systemic level so we're working with five in our pyramid five elementary is one middle and I set the top of the pyramid is the high school we started with four one of our elementary schools is kind of an outlier when it comes to performance data things like that with the rest of our schools but

[01:04:29] we brought them in as well finding commonality around the algebra for all goals can you explain how that looks because I think sometimes it's the operational part that a lot of people don't get and if you can explain what that looks like I would appreciate it's very interesting it took us some time to figure out how to make it work and to find a through line for elementary middle and high because instruction looks so differently at each of those different grade levels so we've used our school planning days that we started with math and we're expanding out and adding in different content areas as we go so this Friday school planning day we're rolling English into it as well it really started as kind of an idea between Ms. Butzer the principal at

[01:05:08] Longfellow Middle School and I we previously worked together and kind of pie-in-the-sky ideas of what we would do if we were ever in a pyramid together and we got our chance so she and I had conversations around some of the things that we were seeing as new principals coming into the pyramid and just started brainstorming what it might look like if we could align vertically around some of those things transitions between the elementary to middle to high school coursework especially as we push more of the high school coursework down to lower levels that's something that she and I both feel pretty passionately about that we need to align with key standards what standards are the through lines no matter what grade level that you take these in what do you need to be

[01:05:45] successful and that looks different what we found was that when we were talk to the elementary principals, what they would identify as key standards were very different from what middle school would identify as key standards, which were completely different from what we at a high school identified as key standards. And those skills, same thing on the skill side, we weren't identifying the same things that were needed just because of the view that we had, our individual lenses at our grade levels. So we started with our monthly principals pyramid meetings, talking to the elementary principals.

[01:06:14] Chris and I would go and say, here are some things that we're seeing. What can we align around and it really grew from that we started with just Chris and I our APs brought in some of the other principals they sent some kind of delegates that represented them from the elementary level and we were having zoom meetings is really how it all started talking about standards skills what what needs to transfer for children to be successful and backwards planning right so starting in 12th grade if you're taking Diffie Q what math skills do you need in elementary school and what does that pathway look like what does that curriculum mapping look like to get you to where you need to be to be successful by that 12th grade year and get the cue when we started having those

[01:06:54] conversations we mentioned it to other teachers and they got excited about it so we looped in science and we looped in English and it kind of it kind of grew past what we thought it was going to be initially I'm glad that it did because it's really become something that we we want to make a hallmark of our pyramid but now it is all of our core content areas we're now looking at how we can also incorporate some of our electives courses that transfer so engineering at the middle school level and the high school level and some of the elementary schools have some engineering curriculum not all of them but looking to see languages how do we incorporate that into the vertical CT and what does that look like so really we we don't get to do the work as often as we'd like to

[01:07:34] because we can only do it on the school planning days where everyone has some kind of chunk of time of freedom but we hosted at the high school our PTAs provide lunch for all the staff that come our APs sit down from each of the schools and build out what the content is going to be for those CTs each each time that we meet actually approving that this afternoon for Friday so I've got to go back and meet with my AP to go through what Friday sessions are going to look like and they're breakout sessions so we start whole group talking about what what covers us all what pertains to everyone no matter what great level you're in no matter what content you're in because good instructions good instruction right so what are those foundational tier one

[01:08:11] skills that we all need to know and then after we kind of do a whole group session we break out into individual sessions throughout our buildings of different classrooms will have different sessions different departments have meetings so that they can talk through English at all three grade levels they can talk through math at all three grade levels so it's a work in progress for us we're still finding what works this is our first year doing it we're noticing shifts as we bring in more of the elementary content right now elementary only joins us for the algebra piece but again looking at the electives and looking at other coursework that we might be able to loop them in on this

[01:08:47] group is also planning this group is also planning our outreach with families so pyramid curriculum nights pyramid-wide math nights that's kind of the purview of this group as well thank you I appreciate that I see my time is going down as I'm gonna need to go back but my my follow-up question to that was how can we incorporate this at a systemic level so ms st john can i just briefly i think one of the ways we're going to do that is through the expansion of the able work to middle school because all of our middle schools will be fully on board next year with the pilot school starting this year and so that's the opportunity to really have that strong through line that's happening

[01:09:24] middle to high school and as our high school principals have identified like that work has to include our elementary school so very intentionally systematizing it thank you ms anderson yeah i just I just have a few things that I had questions or comments about.

[01:09:42] The first one is I have heard from one of my constituents that not every middle school is offering seventh grade math, like mathematics seven, and the concern is that many of them are offering math 180, which I understand is the remedial course that is non-credit-bearing, and my concern is I 100 percent know that we're trying to get all of our kiddos to algebra by eighth grade but we need to make sure that if we have a credit bearing option in seventh grade for a seventh grader that needs more help for whatever reason we should be offering something

[01:10:18] and so i get concerned about the fact that while i understand and appreciate the importance of the advanced coursework i don't want us to lose kids that aren't going to be interested in moving forward in math because they don't have an option that isn't ap or whatever and so i would hate for us to lose those opportunities to get the higher-level math courses, even if it's not as fast-paced or an AP class.

[01:10:43] And so that is something that I definitely want us to continue to look at as we're determining our coursework. The other aspect of this, and it goes along the line of what we were just talking about related to elementary, is I worked on curriculum for a fifth-grade STEM program for 15 years, our goal was not proficiency we had more than 30 objectives that we did in 25 hours of instruction and our goal was not proficiency but it was a spark and we are missing that opportunity right

[01:11:18] now in our elementary schools which is why getting stemmed consistently or steam consistently in every school is so important because that is the entry-level engineering concepts that are going to help make our kids successful when i fully understand that when dr reed said at the ai event that we need to get those concepts in young we're not talking about putting kids in front of machines that have the capability of doing generative ai we're talking about having the concepts related to those to to that work and so having um very robust steam programs in all of our elementary

[01:11:58] schools in addition to everything else that we have to accomplish is is really important as an opportunity and i just want to say thank you it's really awesome for us to be able to sit and listen to all the good things but having you guys come and actually talk through what's happening at your actual schools with our actual kiddos is very helpful for us to see how the work is being carried out so i really appreciate you guys taking the time to come thank you mr dannin thank you very much. I echo my colleagues' comments. Thank you all and thank your staff and your educators for

[01:12:33] what you've done for this. To my colleagues' question about expanding these to a systematic level, I've heard a lot of great best practices and lessons learned and so forth. Do you feel that you have enough, I'm not trying to put you on the spot, but I ask this because I want to know what can we provide, if anything else, to help you collaborate, but do you feel you've got enough opportunities to collaborate and share these with your colleagues, other principals, other administrators and so forth throughout the division and if not you know what else can we do to support those opportunities? I'm hearing so many great stories and lessons learned and I hear these talking individuals and then I sometimes hear that there are silos and so just curious how we can break those

[01:13:10] down. Thank you for asking that so just kind of to summarize we've had the opportunity to engage with Stephen and with all high school principals because all high schools have adopted this tool to really engage in deep data dives and workshops after all county principals meeting throughout the past year and so So some of the structures that have been put in place have facilitated collaboration where we work in consultancy trios and share our reflection, share our challenges, and then share feedback with one another.

[01:13:45] So I think the high school principals are collaborating really closely using this data, and I think probably the best resource we can have is continued access and continued opportunities to learn from the data. This is just the first year, right? So we're not seeing those impacts necessarily on this class of 26, but the impacts on 27, we're already being able to predict what's going to happen.

[01:14:06] So long-term access is going to be important time to collaborate across high school principals, but also now that it's expanding to middle school principals, and you've already heard the plug for working closely in vertical articulation with our elementary schools, more opportunities for us to connect in those ways using the data provided by the tool.

[01:14:25] Thank you. Do you feel like your teachers have enough time as well, whether it's through staff development days and so forth, or again, and we can take this as a go back, but I'm curious for, again, what can we do to help enable you all to share this across the division? Well, I can speak for our leadership team at Chantilly. You know, we have a core team of teacher leaders who are working with this data because that's really the level that they're accessing it. This is not a day-to-day teacher instructional resource or tool, but our leadership team is analyzing the data to see what the instructional impacts may be and how we can,

[01:15:00] to Raven's point, collaborate with our colleagues at multiple levels to support instruction and support access. You know, I don't know if anyone else has anything more specific to add to that.

[01:15:16] I think this is what this is giving us, just like, you know, similar to when we were talking with Goal 2, it's giving us like almost a data dialogue type tool to have more in-depth conversations around instead of hunting and pecking for our information it's all right there so we're able to really hone in and have strategic conversations instead of maybe some why you know bigger umbrella conversations we can drill down and we can have those conversations so a lot of this is admin teams or instructional leadership teams really looking at this data and then figuring out from there now that we know it how do we operate operationalize it what do we do with instruction?

[01:15:52] What do we do with our academic advising? So I think that's really kind of how we're looking at it. - That's great. I'm gonna go maybe slightly off topic, but I heard it's okay to go off topic sometimes. Around, so anyone who's traveled around the world can tell you that a lot of countries do world languages differently, right?

[01:16:14] They start them off at four, five, six years old. And so it's ironic, the American system by and large, where we start language instruction once kids hit the critical acquisition window, or once they pass it during puberty. And so it's kind of ironic, but I recognize that maybe the goal isn't to achieve fluency.

[01:16:32] And I think you spoke to some of the benefits of world language instruction. So what is our goal with world language? And is it setting kids on the path for fluency? Is it cross-cultural understanding? Or what are we, what's our goal with this? - No, it's an excellent question. And you know, our decentralized form of education in the United States varies quite significantly for most countries and that complicates things, right, from a national perspective.

[01:16:57] But from a local perspective, Fairfax for many, many years was really at the forefront, I think, of innovation as it comes to world languages. And depending on the programs we're talking about, there are different goals, right? So when you think about the elementary programs that we have, we have basically two types of programs.

[01:17:14] Foreign language experience, our FLES program, that's a part-time program, 60 minutes a week. The goals are not proficiency, they're not even basic communication skills at that point, right? It's really about exposure, cultural exposure, and developing interest in the language so that hopefully students are gonna develop some of those skills but also continue when they go to middle school and high school.

[01:17:35] Then we have the immersion program, and we have two different models of the immersion program, and I won't waste all of our time on this, but those programs do focus on fluency, right? And we have assessment measures to measure student progress towards those goals. The same thing is true when you think about comprehensive language programs that we have at the secondary level which start in seventh grade so students are able to take more than four years of a world language experience and then you know we have external assessments to measure the effectiveness AP and IB exams for secondary programs so it depends on the program there's different goals based on the program so setting aside the

[01:18:11] benefits of it but what are the constraints are we in the realm of possibility for shifting to a model where we teach world languages a lot earlier and a lot more in depth versus just introducing them? Yeah, so, I mean, I think that the board, well, I know that the board will be scheduling a future work session on this topic because a number of different board members brought that form request a couple months ago, so staff has been working to kind of think about what are some expansion opportunities at the elementary and at the secondary level.

[01:18:41] As Dr. Reed kind of mentioned in an earlier response, though, when you think about some of the expansion options they are very expensive because you're talking about different instructional delivery models which typically requires more staff so even in our immersion programs those are staffed a little bit differently than we staff our traditional classrooms there's more flexibility built in for students that may exit the program which basically means there's increased cost associated with those but we're working to provide options at every level elementary middle and high with some cost estimates for the board to consider

[01:19:15] when that's scheduled for a work session shifting a little bit algebra for all so I've heard a lot I've heard from a lot of parents about excitement right having access to this altered from a lot of teachers and educators especially on algebra eighth grade can you speak a little bit to the benefits of this and why there's this this push to have kids accessing this I can I you're gonna hear and we talk about it Thursday night.

[01:19:41] - Yeah, yeah. - I think I'll have Stephen-- - I'm not very patient, sorry. - No, I think that the Office of Civil Rights actually tracks that data point, because we know that when children complete algebra in eighth grade, they're twice as likely to be successful in post-secondary education, regardless of what that is, right?

[01:19:58] Professional trades, university, military, it's just, math right now limits 84% of career choices. I think you heard Dr. Gehring talk about math being such a key predictor. heard several of our principals talking about that and our world is only becoming more math dependent really with quantum AI and so forth so we just want to make sure there's a level playing field for students and we know that 8th grade is across the world not just the United States but across the world is sort of a it's a data point that children need I think that our educators

[01:20:35] to be fair many of them what we're having to work to provide certification because not all of our middle school teachers have been credentialed to teach algebra right so it's creating I think another level of work for the adults in the system and I understand that and I appreciate the efforts many many of our staff have gone to to get those certifications also the math team and instructional services is very well aware of those data points and how important that work is it's not our children that aren't ready right it's the system that hasn't been ready for our children and so what we're trying to

[01:21:14] retool that to be better ready but Stephen if you want to talk about it just for a minute on a more national research scale the other thing I'll just add before Stephen talks about it is in many school divisions around the country sixth grade is in the middle school so you see six seven eight as a grade band and we have that of course in several of our middle schools but not we only have three out of our 25 but when sixth grade's in elementary in 141 sites it's harder to find 141 net credentialed algebra teachers to offer that as an option but children who attend a middle school that's a six seven eight are gonna

[01:21:53] more easily be able to access that and it's very common across the country to have several sections in sixth grade so we just want to make sure that's also available for our sixth graders and that's requiring a whole different model look at which Dr. Ponce and Dr. Presidio have worked on but Stephen you want to talk for a minute about that yeah the algebra as a benchmark is particularly important for stem pathways so any student moving on into the stem with if you don't hit algebra by eighth grade then it limits your what you're taking your senior year which then limits your opportunity so there's two really good routes it looks like in the research there's the the calculus

[01:22:30] route and then there's also a great AP stats route for students going on to the humanities and both look like they're from the national studies look like they're equally viable and long-term earnings for students going either route the key part is you want to make sure if you have algebra by eighth grade you're opening up stem pathways for all students who want to pursue that and then having a really viable a stats route a strong stats route so not not stats light, a really strong stats route for students wanting to go on to humanities, that seems to set students up for the best post-secondary opportunities and where most school systems

[01:23:08] are trying to get to. So that eighth grade algebra is just a, if you don't provide access for that, then what the evidence shows is families end up taking it on their own and paying for access and paying for their own opportunities. So some families with means will find ways to get kids the access to the summer courses to get them to those STEM rounds.

[01:23:30] And then families who don't have those means don't have the same opportunities and the same post-secondary access. So that's why algebra has been a big gatekeeper across the country. - I will also ask Dr. King to weigh in for a moment in terms of equitable access to algebra in eighth grade, because what we've seen is students with the same academic profile not be in algebra in eighth grade as students who are.

[01:23:54] and I think that was a turning point for us as a system and a division. So Dr. King, you wanna add to that? - Sure, Dr. Reed, and thank you. I think that this is probably in my 30 years in Fairfax, my most exciting thing that's happening for our students.

[01:24:10] There are many of us who sit around the table when we're talking about this and sharing our own experiences with our own children who went through the system who were blocked because Algebra I was an elite course. When I was principal at Mount Vernon, I had nine sections of pre-algebra in the ninth grade.

[01:24:28] Our students weren't even getting access at the greater level to algebra in the ninth grade, and that's not the same today. So the mindset and the access that we've opened up to students is gonna be, I think, our greatest win in Fairfax County Public Schools.

[01:24:47] It's opening doors for many, many students who did not have those doors open for them. And when you think about the 734 students, 6th graders that we have sitting in algebra today, they're in the 6th grade. Those are probably a lot of our gifted kids, but if our gifted kids can have access in the 6th grade, why can't our general education kids have access in the 8th grade?

[01:25:10] That's a question that you have to ask yourself over and over again, right? We have made Algebra 1 an elite course. It's not an elite course. If you pass 7th grade math as a prerequisite, then you're ready for Algebra 1. We somehow put another math course in there for a very long time, and everybody was okay with it for a very long time.

[01:25:31] There's many of us around the room who were not okay with it and had to fight to get access for our kids who were very successful as general students. They weren't in gifted programs. My son wasn't in the gifted program, but he did very well in algebra in the eighth grade because they had a mother who would fight for him to get that access.

[01:25:48] We shouldn't have to fight for our kids to have access to a math course that's going to set them up to meet their dreams. - That's really phenomenal. I promise this isn't some kind of a gotcha question, right? But I have heard from middle school math teachers saying that I've got kids that are frustrated by this, that they don't feel like they can do this.

[01:26:06] I mean, is this your sentiment on the ground and are we overcoming it? And again, what else do you need from us to help overcome that? Because I agree, I think this is phenomenal to have this access. I think rigor and pushing kids is great. I think kids should be making mistakes and trying and failing and learning from that.

[01:26:21] But I recognize that's a very difficult thing to navigate. So again, what else do you need from us to help achieve that? Well, I think just your leadership, right? This board has been very committed to equitable access and opportunity. And I think we were making incremental progress until we began to look at the student profiles.

[01:26:38] And when you start to put those academic profiles up on a screen, and then you realize that we're looking at profiles that had green, green, green, which meant good to go, good to go, good to go for hundreds of kids, and realize they're not in the class.

[01:26:54] In fact, their academic profiles looked better in some cases than kids who were. It was a very quiet moment in the room because we couldn't answer why is that other than we're not keeping the promise that we make to our community, which is that we're gonna make sure equitable access to excellence is for every child.

[01:27:19] - I appreciate that, thank you. - Thank you, Ms. Dannon. Ms. Lady. - Thank you, this is fun for me. I first want to start by thanking school counseling office who has been doing vertical articulation K-12 for longer than anyone even thought about it.

[01:27:39] I know when I was a director and I pushed for that articulation when it came to science because for some reason all those kids who came to Chantilly in bio honors who were in some kind of honors science couldn't hack it in bio honors. Like can we vertical articulate, do it with special ed, with IEP transitions, always begging for that.

[01:27:56] So I'm glad to see that that's happening more with fidelity. I will also say as a director that I worked with counselors and they are whipped at the end of an academic advising day because of trying to get kids to take things they don't believe they're good enough at. And I will say that what I'm hearing with the ABLE work is now APs are actively engaged in this reality when it was hands off in my time.

[01:28:23] know I felt like I as a director was fighting for access and then I had to put out every year I think Eric Healy said this the best when you're talking about certain barriers one is mindset there's student mindset there's parent mindset and there's teacher mindset I knew the teachers who were gonna have a line of kids telling me they were weren't good enough for algebra 2 honors and they needed to go back to algebra 2 and I was fighting at that time in AP saying this has to stop every child who walks in your room can do the work okay and we will evaluate yes we'll have to assess yes there might be some changes

[01:29:01] but then that that instructional belief in people it has to be admin wide it always bothered me that I would go twice a month once with the Association for Directors and once with school counseling office but an AP who was supervising sped never went to a sped meeting the AP supervising world language never went to a world language meeting how are you doing this how do you know what's coming down from central and when they would go to a department meeting they'd sit in the back of the room and the chair would run the meeting and they didn't know how to answer any questions because they didn't know what really was going on in that particular discipline so this able work

[01:29:38] and what i'm hearing over here is just fantastic um and and i kept hearing from people intentional conversations and more one-on-one conversations um and again i'll say this and i'm going to end up need to go back but the bottom line is we have not thank you I do want to see these advising sheets when I was a director we developed our advising sheet and it wasn't just about coursework it's like what are your extracurriculars what's your what's your postgrad goal I'm talking I'm asking a ninth grader log it write it on the sheet I mean some of my people weren't a fan of me because we

[01:30:15] took two weeks per grade level and we met one-on-one with every kid and if you A kid walked in and handed you a sheet and you counted to seven and said you're on track to graduation, and it was a three-minute conversation, that did not meet with me. I will put you on a go back. Let me just finish this one comment, because this has to happen, you know?

[01:30:34] And similarly, I'll take a go back. Just thank you. You have more in there. Ms. Dixit. So, there are a lot of different points here I would like to hit, but I'll start with word languages, actually. While we are like, I agree with some of my colleagues that they said that the language introduced much later as a proper curriculum, like Spanish one too, it starts like in middle school and other parts of the world and you know, from India where I can give an example, we study two languages from kindergarten back to back.

[01:31:10] It's like you're doing your home language and you're doing English. graduate with those skills when you're coming out of high school some schools even do more than two languages three or four languages so this starts at kindergarten with the schools kids starting their school so this is very different and if the world language are important then i think then they need to start that early or at least in the elementary school and the importance which is given to world languages in our elementary school is not a lot.

[01:31:50] The coursework is very, yeah, it just depends school to school. It's just like a checkbox most of the time. Most schools are a little bit better, I think, but I'll stay still. We're not there yet within world languages, not as other parts of the world are. Regarding math, I also don't understand why math is not introduced early harder math like I you know kids who have gone to from US to other parts of the world they always said that we fail those classes and math classes in other part of the country of the world I should say

[01:32:25] because our math is so back and I'm saying FCPS is doing the I still a lot better than other places in the in the country but I we have a and and some of slides actually seemed you know kind of you know sad to see on slide 17 it said only six percent of our ml population is doing one plus advanced courses you know it's just a stat which will you know keep our division that inequitable i guess so unless and unless each kid of one of those kids

[01:33:03] who are in the six percent right now and that group I think has this own like a path of math or any other uh extracurriculars uh course taking that they can do is created I don't know if able has that you know knowledge to do that like can you can we create individualized kind of path for each student take them from that point to the next point where we want to achieve because this is is very hard stats to to to bring yeah yeah just to just to change this right

[01:33:39] now and I know nobody's fault I'm just I'm not saying it's something we can do immediately to fix it but we we can work towards it did anyone want to offer a response I think we agree 100% which is why we're doing this work right I think you heard some intentional conversations happening with principals particularly around the multilingual students dr. Ponce I know we even added the pilot this year with the Spanish text for mathematics.

[01:34:13] So, because I do think, yeah, go ahead. - We have two, we started in Bryan for algebra and only one student did not pass. And this year it is another one in eighth grade in Glasgow and it's going well.

[01:34:34] I feel a little bit uncomfortable, like the subject, especially the multilinguals and the way that we are expressing about it. I really feel a little bit uncomfortable because we are very smart and sometimes just because we don't understand the language doesn't mean that we don't understand the content area.

[01:34:55] And I think when we open that, one day we will open the, when we can teach them in our own language, a lot of things will change. And I really would like to see that happening in so many other subjects, not only math, science, history, I think that will be a really good opportunity for us, if we can do that.

[01:35:22] There are other states where students can test on their own language. Virginia doesn't do it, but there are other states which make it very, very difficult because language barrier, it is beyond us as a division it is just a state but there are some other states from central united states to the west you will see a lot of state they test the students in their own language

[01:35:54] thank you so much dr ponce i'll go ahead and take my turn and i will start here if you could put up slide 23 that would be helpful i i have to acknowledge that i've heard something in this room that i have not heard the entire time we've been talking about these gold reports because i typically i'm the one who raises it and i i'm not the first one to raise it here and i want to show my appreciation for that um recognition uh multiple times it's not written anywhere but it was and i want it to be but it was said multiple times by people up on the panel that we have a systemic

[01:36:32] issue we have a systemic issue where certain subgroups are persistently underperforming and And you also said it, Steven. That acknowledgement I think is key. If we don't know the data, we will not move the data. If we don't identify and highlight what is exactly happening, we will find ourselves in the same position.

[01:36:50] And this is the first time that I'm hearing this from staff as a persistent issue, a systemic issue. That is not the fault of those who are underperforming. It is of the system to do something about it. So I appreciate that tremendously.

[01:37:07] I want to bring up some of the key actions, because that's how we move things forward. We see the data, we have to do something about the data. There have been particularly call-outs on multiple slides for the four subgroups that you've talked about consistently, Stephen.

[01:37:23] I see some call-outs for students with disabilities. I see some call-outs for multi-language learners. What I don't see are call-outs for the other two groups that are consistently underperforming, that we have kids who fall into more than one group so dr. Reed can you speak to that for me regarding the other two groups that are missing in these key actions and activities so thank you dr. Anderson I know the team has been working on this because we obviously we want no group left behind on this so I'm gonna turn to miss Neal and have someone on the panel who has very specific

[01:38:00] information to reply with yeah I mean we can share with the board sort of where our schools are targeting so this is obviously a sample of the conversation today where our schools looked at their data and starting points I think you heard some of the principals talk about though you know these are greatest areas of growth but they're going back and having very intentional conversations with all of their students where they're not seeing that where they're under enrolling essentially in courses that could help support their post secondary readiness so well that may not have intentionally showed up in this conversation in the way that work is still happening in an intentional way yeah I would also add just to miss Neal's point I believe we asked high

[01:38:37] school principals the first time around right this is the very first year we're working with this particular data and I've had the experience of having multi years within a different system but we wanted to take one data point right pick one group and just be laser focused on one group of students that they pick at their school which you heard was different honestly for each school and at this point all the high school principals have groups but we also know that if you have too many data points you want to move you won't move any right so we want to build up the skill set around a particular group and then they

[01:39:14] will expand that focus so we believe that we're seeing good progress and as we expand that work we'll see them more much appreciated I'm gonna push a little bit to ask you to show your homework if the work is happening show the homework -Mr. Guerin, I'd like to ask you a question regarding the data that you've shared here, I think particularly on slides 9 and 17. Do you see a consistent data set of results across all of the schools, or does it ebb and flow a little bit with particularly targeting

[01:39:46] our schools that are identified as Title I? -There's definite trends across the system. So when you say systemic, there's definitely trends across the system, but it does vary by school site. So you can see a fairly wide variation even inside that.

[01:40:03] So when we're reporting these averages, there's a range on both sides where some some student groups at a few of the a few of the schools looks very similar to the the rest of the population. But in general, in general, the it's it's systemic and it ranges quite a bit across school sites.

[01:40:24] Thank you. I'd like to ask for that data to perhaps be broken down by at least Title I schools and non-Title I schools. I love and appreciate everything that you all have brought here. So thank you for this work that you're doing. Thank you for digging down deep into this very hard work to move people.

[01:40:42] And I have to highlight what you've shared about mindset because when we have individuals who do not believe that our students can, no matter what you have in place, you're going to get the same results that you've always received. So that's a softer skill to move. And I'm going to just pause for that for my go back because I wanted to ask my question regarding what are some of the practices that we're seeing in our Title I schools? Because I don't think any of the principals here had Title I schools. I think that one we're going to have to get back to you on, Dr. Anderson. Okay, thank you. Quick question for you, Gary, when you talked about

[01:41:21] access. Are you talking about availability or just kids in the groups? How are you reading it? so i can understand how to understand your comments when you talked about access is it availability of courses or actually participation in courses we're talking successful completion so most school systems i meet with across the countries uh say well we've already solved the course is open and anybody can sign up so then we look at the data and say well okay if the course is truly open and anybody can sign up is the evidence showing up that you actually it

[01:42:00] looks like your student body population and if it doesn't look like your student body population then what are the barriers that are stopping that and that's some of that root cause analysis is it a mindset issue is it an information issue is it a teacher issue like what what's stopping when the data is not following up but we're actually talking the ultimate evidence that gets back to the earlier question should be successful completion and the course is looking like the overall student body population thank you very much i'll put myself on a go back and we'll do minutes Ms. Brown and we will start with Ms. St. John Cunning. Thank you so I want

[01:42:37] to go back to like the question that I have in terms of the persistence of academic intensity and the report highlights a significant gap in the academic intensity between current multilingual learners 12% and their peers 82% that's on page 16 of the report it also shows that despite using using the ABLE platform to track course requests, there's still a clear unmet need.

[01:43:01] 22% of multilingual learners and 18% of economically disadvantaged students report being interested in courses like World Languages or CTE, but they are not able to access them. And so I'm going back to, again, when you guys were discussing this, one of you said that this is a systemic problem that you're seeing.

[01:43:25] And so my question is, what would be the systemic response to meet this need? I think we're talking generally speaking, not in a specific content area. Is that correct, Ms. St. John-Kinney? Yes, yes. Do you want to talk?

[01:43:41] A couple of systemic responses that I see across the country that school districts are using. One is some automatic enrollment. So it gets back to what some of the principals were talking about, some of those strategies. Even he talked about the slight change in the language. i see some school divisions actually going a step further and it actually like shows up on their registration form so you actually get your math course pre-filled out for you and you have to opt out so there's one thing i guess the continuum of do you want to take any math at all and then you heard principals talking about changing the tone and changing the conversation to say all right

[01:44:18] you're going to take math here's your options and then you see some school divisions across the country with systemic like it'll actually like fill it in and you actually have your math course on there and your family would have to opt out to not take it that's that's kind of the full continuum that you see across the country it's wide open we're opening access and we're gonna reactively recruit you so those are great steps and then you see some school divisions like literally filling it out for you and making it difficult to not take the course okay so my next question is in is a follow-up to this like using this

[01:44:56] data that we have from able how are we making staffing and recruitment decisions for the next school year and then how are we ensuring that when a student demand is identified particularly in math or CTE that we're putting the necessary staffing in place so students are not continuing not continue to be turned away or due to scheduling conflicts or lack of available teachers or lack of you know being put on waitlists so I'll talk a little bit about the work that we've been doing on math endorsements so starting last year we did some targeted efforts to expand middle school teachers who had the

[01:45:32] algebra 1 math endorsement we have continued and expanded that opportunity this year we're running additional cohorts where our teachers get access to preparation so that they can take the praxis to add that as an endorsement so that teacher endorsement doesn't become a barrier to student access but so my concern is like with our some of our CTE courses I think about our underrepresented students economically underrepresented multilingual learners and some of the background experience that they have which might sometimes predispose them to getting some really nice CTE certification that puts them on

[01:46:06] a nice path to great employment like what are we seeing there look I know it all comes down to money I mean so I mean systemically what we could we do if we think about money I really don't think force-taking is about money because we have the courses available and students have the time in their schedule if you think about it right so you've got 28 credit opportunities in your schedule even if you're getting an advanced studies diploma and taking four core of

[01:46:42] everything you still have additional elective opportunities in your schedule so I think it's a lot of the work that we heard from the principals right it's that problem-solving with the student in the family to really try to determine determine what are their interests, what are their goals, not treat the academic advising process as just, you know, a once a year event.

[01:47:02] That's why Ms. Glazer's team, the Counseling College and Career Readiness Office has developed multi-year academic advising plans that start in middle school so that we can really help students and families figure out what their interests and goals are, try to build a four-year plan and then update that every year to make sure that we're helping students get access to the courses that they want.

[01:47:22] And it just takes an awful lot of time, and you hear from the staff that are here, the principals that are here, how invested they are in that work, and I think that's what it takes to be able to change some of these trajectories for students. It's not doing academic advising as what it might have looked like in the past.

[01:47:38] It's really doing it much more intentionally, much more personalized, and much more collaboratively with students and families over a longer period of time. I take that point, but there's still, like, I know at Edison, our electrical program that we have there's a huge waiting list so I yeah I again I mean I think in certain situations yes I mean we don't have maybe as many sections of certain courses as we would like to have so I take your point to that but if we're building those four-year plans for students that can inform us in terms of where that projected student interest is and we can think and plan ahead to be

[01:48:17] able to staff and create more opportunities for more students in the future right but when we do it on a just one once a year basis we're never getting ahead we're not thinking down the road to building the programs that we want our students in and that they want to you know be enrolled in as well if I could also if I could also respond I think the the math conversation is really connected to the trades the skilled trades I was at one time in a division that was very close to the naval shipyards and many of our

[01:48:52] graduates went to work in the naval shipyard it's very proud work and early on some of the staff at the high school said that well our kids don't need to know algebra trig right because to go work in the shipyards they said really so I went over to introduce myself to the commandant of the shipyards who came over and met with our staff and said you know actually they absolutely need algebra trading the level of mathematics required to do the welding the underwater welding the shipbuilding work and the ship repair work the math was critically

[01:49:25] important actually and the reading level required for entry-level skilled trades in the naval shipyards exceeded the entry-level reading requirement for university because professional text and technical texts are very challenging in their lexile level so i think when we talk about college and career ready, which I know Jen oversees, academically that's the same, quite honestly. So we just want to make sure that we have as many doors open as humanly possible when our children leave us so they come back and take jobs here. And to the point around

[01:50:04] offering more engineering, electrical engineering, HVAC, some of the skilled trades, I think one of the pushes I've made with our state delegation is really saying we need to be able to cross credit some of those courses and give math credit for example for some of those courses and then students can fit them in their schedule right but if we're not able to do some of those things yet in Virginia it makes it hard also for students to get those courses in their schedule but I just want to remind everyone that the math and reading levels are critical for our young people going into skilled trades too it's not just a college prep kind of

[01:50:39] a topic thank you miss lady thank you so in regards to the checklist I see it was a DSS checklist I'm very interested in a checklist with every child when we do advising there's got to be something archived from my perspective I'm gonna talk for a second about world language I appreciate Mandy sharing about adding native speakers I believe that was one of the things that Edison or was that at

[01:51:14] McLean and thank you at McLean. Absolutely we need to do that. I also want to comment on the fact that the state's advanced studies diploma requirement of two years of two different languages is a joke. I mean I hate to be so frank about it but that's not college prepared or college readiness so I would challenge Fairfax County to require our advanced studies students to get through three years of one and then you'll see more people thriving in four. I also want to talk about online campus. Right now there are certain subjects taught online. I think it's Arabic, Korean, Chinese, sign language, Spanish. Spanish is the only

[01:51:53] language with no Spanish for online. You have one, two, three or you have AP lit, AP lang. And we've got kids at IB schools who get through three years of Spanish and they don't want to do IB Spanish for a variety of reasons and they'd like to take it online and it's not available. In the summer the only Spanish available is three. Now I understand we don't want some starting language perhaps in an online environment, although Duolingo has kind of proved to people they can actually learn.

[01:52:21] I'm just challenging access from an online campus perspective. I definitely want to see Spanish 4 at a summer and during the year. And then I'll jump to this idea of, you know, world languages at younger grades is incredibly important, but FLESS is not working.

[01:52:42] So we may have been out in the front of things years ago, but we've been on a treadmill. And this is what I hear from parents and kids. I wasn't participating in that as a child, I'm going to need a go back. But we need to evaluate what is or is not working, because it's not language acquisition, it's sort of exposure.

[01:53:01] And I'll take a go back. Thank you. I'll take my turn at this point. Mr. Garrett, this question is for you. you talked about the availability of courses in Fairfax County, that it's rich and deeper and wider than any other place across all of our schools.

[01:53:16] Is it your thinking that maybe we offer too many things in order to be a little bit more laser focused on this kind of work? - I can say probably a faster route towards solving systemic barriers is offering fewer options.

[01:53:34] I would guess, knowing what I know about your school division and your county, that that's probably not a viable option with a lot of families is paring down the course offerings. So I'd say every place I go in the country, I say one of two things, pare down your offerings or expand your guidance and advisement.

[01:53:54] And the principals here talked about how they're expanding the guidance or advisement. So those are the two routes that I preach all across the country, one of those two. - No, it's interesting. Thank you so much for sharing that. Again, going back to some of the things that the principals have shared, which is the vertical articulation, which is always tremendous because we cannot get in front of kids early enough because by the time you get to where you are, it's too late to prep for that place.

[01:54:19] You need to have prepped earlier. So two things come to mind regarding that, Dr. Reed. One, we are a system with some systemic issues. We have individual schools doing some really awesome things. How do we take some of those really great practices and make them mandatory across the system?

[01:54:38] - Yes, ma'am. - Well, that's, I mean, that's the scalability, right? And first of all, we hire great people, right? Which our principals, amazing, our senior staff that are presenting today. Dr. Ponce's office oversees our regions who oversee our schools.

[01:54:59] And I think that clearly having everybody on the same page and having those cross conversations are really important. think I'm gonna ask Dr. Ponce to comment on that here in a minute and I I was just making an aside comment earlier that had Katherine Johnson attended Fairfax County Public Schools ten years ago and she's one of my heroes hidden figures we might never have successfully launched and gotten an astronaut back from space because she might not have been allowed to be in algebra in eighth

[01:55:35] grade or might not have been seen for the talent she was and I think about the incredible intellectual power and gifts that each of our children bring right and why it's so important that every school in our county and every neighborhood their children that have those dreams right that we and their families have those dreams for their futures and we do for this country right we need every single child to expand their gifts so I think you're asking a critical question how we bring it to scale and dr. Ponce currently that's on

[01:56:10] your shoulders so let's share some of the magic yes I want to say thank you for that question and also I want to personally thank this is a teamwork we work with Dr. King and the appropriate procedure as well to make sure that all six regions are supported in the same way and I want to make sure that we We understand also that even though we are trying to keep the six regions pacing and

[01:56:47] beyond the same, I would say, cohesiveness, still we have to keep their own identity as well because it's different. When you talk with some families in some areas where they have the three meals and they have a mom waiting at home when and you have extended family supporting as well you have some other families in other areas where nobody's at home waiting for or they had to to help that that

[01:57:24] family as well and have a work and moms have two three jobs so i don't want to lose that perspective as well. Nonetheless, all six regions, all six races, they were really hard to make sure that every single school received proper education. And I can tell you that there have been some days where midnight we had communication with the races. And there are some others at four o'clock also making sure that the students receive not only academic support, but mental support,

[01:58:03] emotional and in some cases um uh physical like economic like uh food and some other services as well so um yes indeed we are making sure that all children receive quality education even though these some are more difficult than other because external factors not because they cannot all All children can learn in the same phase, but there are some external factors that hinder that.

[01:58:37] Yes. Thank you. I'm not sure if that was my question, actually. I was looking more specifically for the strategies that are mandatory across the board. I'll give you one. One is looking at the ABLE work. Everybody's doing that. Is another the vertical articulation? Is a third something else?

[01:58:53] That's what I was searching. School Improvement Plan. I think that this is something that you like the topic as well, but the school improvement plan, we work collectively. We revise them and the region as well meet with the principals and they work together to make sure that that the strategy that they're going to have they work and they share together.

[01:59:22] I'm going to give you a sample right now. I remember being the one where Mr. Divari was presenting his school improvement plans to other colleagues to share his goals and also strategies to reach those goals. So I think that that was very powerful.

[01:59:40] I'd like to share as well, because we work so closely together. You know, I recognize that our regions work very closely together. They meet weekly to share best practices. And I think that our standard starts with our strategic plan, right? But when the strategic plan went into place, we knew exactly what the goals were as a system, and so to reach those goals, we worked together, the three departments, along with Marcy's team, to ensure with whatever strategy is showing most success is what we implement across the board.

[02:00:14] When ABLE came in, we started with the pilot. The principals who were the pilot principals were so excited about it, it immediately went to other principals. it's something that i said that if i was a principal that would have been the best thing that happened to me because when you're a school administrator and you're sharing with your staff over and over again why don't we have more students of color why don't we have more students who are diagnosed with special needs entering our higher level courses you have four people trying to impact an entire staff but when the data is shown to everybody that you take away the excuses

[02:00:50] So Dr. Reid often says that we are one school system and not a system of schools, and we use that as our mantra when we talk about best practices. That's actually a great segue into my second question. As we're talking about pipeline, I heard lots of conversations about what's happening in middle schools.

[02:01:06] Let's push down a little bit to the elementary schools. A place where I could see us really start to germinate some of these ideas, especially talking about sixth grade math, are our local level four programs. They are all so vastly different. That is an opportunity that I believe is super low-hanging fruit, paring that down to a very narrow process.

[02:01:29] Because right now, there's a wide menu, and you have elementary schools that, oh, we're going to teach, we're going to regroup for math this year. Next year, we don't want to, so we're not going to. So you get all these inconsistent results. Where can we start taking advantage of those local level four programs?

[02:01:47] So I think that making sure we have algebra accessible at every elementary school and hats off to Dr. King, Dr. Ponce, Dr. Presidio, Marie Lemon, the team that's been working on that, just ensuring it is available, right?

[02:02:06] The common assessment work that the team has provided is important. Dr. Presidio, thoughts on the local level four calibration? I know we've got some folks here for that. Yeah, we're going to talk in our next work session about middle school program standards.

[02:02:23] But I would say, and I understand your point on this, but just as a reminder for what it's worth, we use the same curriculum in our local level four programs as we do in our centers. You are 100% right that schools have different grouping strategies, and that's what really differentiates the local level four program from a center because depending on how many students are found eligible, schools have to make decisions about how they're going to group students so if you have a full cohort of 25 students to run a class of just level four students then that's pretty easy to do at the local level but if you only have 17 third graders you have to make some strategic decisions about

[02:03:02] how you staff and group students and I think that's where some of the inconsistencies come into play so I do think we need to continue to work on that I think when we talk about the program standards for middle school that might give you some sense of where we're trying to go so to tighten some things up.

[02:03:18] - Thank you, just my last question for my last six seconds. On slide 14, when we see the differences in terms of advanced courses, is it an accurate assumption that the reason why the English is so high, it's because that is a required four-year course, and if we had similar requirements across other grade levels, we might see some increase participation and completion yes ma'am that's true okay thank you

[02:03:50] we have a couple of google backs 90 seconds please uh miss brown i'm sorry oh i think you're pointing to something um miss st john cunning and then miss lady okay so now i want to turn over to to multilingual learners and and not multilingual learners um language world language um i want to ask at Edison, Ms. Brooke, what you're doing in terms of expanding the world language offerings. And because you do have a school in your pyramid that does have a Spanish immersion program, how many of those kids are going on to world

[02:04:28] language at Edison and you're doing that continuum? Use your teacher voice. I've heard you in the halls. I've heard you in the halls. They can hear me upstairs in the halls. Sorry. So I don't have the specific numbers about the students coming out of the immersion program and their continuation. That's something I I can look at seeing if I could also get for you.

[02:04:59] But what I do know is Spanish is one of our biggest world languages at Edison. Right now, what we're currently working on building up a little bit more is some of our other languages in the building as well. Like I said, our Latin program, we're fantastic teacher.

[02:05:16] Again, it comes down to the teaching strategies. I think somebody had mentioned that, the teaching strategies that are going on in the classroom to go in Latin and seeing them freezing and they're like describing whatever scene, I couldn't understand what they were talking about, but to see them engaged in a language that people don't think is out there anymore, it's just amazing.

[02:05:36] So I think it's working on finding those teachers with those great instructional strategies and building that up in our classrooms is really the key to building our programs. I think if we build it, they will come in a sense. And I think finding teachers that will ignite that passion.

[02:05:53] I had a parent do a thank you to a teacher and she said I've never had a kid come bring a permission form to take a test because you have to take a test for some program they were going to be doing. The kid was running home to take a test and mom you have to sign this form so I can take a test.

[02:06:08] And the mom wrote mic drop at the end of it. So I think we just need more teachers that are doing that. But I can get to those numbers on the immersion. And my other question is how many courses do you offer for speakers of a native language that is the language programming?

[02:06:23] Right now, it's just we have our Spanish Heritage Speakers courses, so we offer levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 in that. So I will say that I do think that we do have a great world language program, and we have in the past, and my daughters who have long graduated benefited from that, starting from immersion all the way on up.

[02:06:42] So I don't think that we're lacking in that, but I do want to ask a question. When we're looking at heritage learners, do we look at the populations that we have and offer those languages? I know Spanish is obviously a big one, but we also see influx of immigrants from other countries.

[02:06:57] I know Arabic countries recently have been coming in. Do we have those course offerings as we see our demographic change in terms of our immigrant populations that are coming in? And then we see increased numbers of native learners, and are those available if we want to enhance this world language capacity for our communities that already speak those languages?

[02:07:21] Yeah, and I think it's a good suggestion. We don't have heritage speaker programs in all 12 languages that we're offering at the secondary level. I think that's an opportunity for us to expand. The majority of our multilingual students, the vast majority, of course, are native Spanish speakers.

[02:07:37] But, I mean, to your point, we have students speaking, you know, over hundreds of languages, obviously, in Fairfax. So there's more work that we can do to increase access in some of those heritage languages. Well, I think just because of my work I've done in the schools, like I will see a whole influx, like a whole community come in and they're all speaking one language.

[02:07:56] So if we have like a certain percentage of our incoming immigrants who are speaking that language, then if we're looking at data, it's like, should we start offering these programs? No, I agree. I can. One national perspective, your native language sequence that you all offer is a longer runway than most school systems across the division, across the nation that I see.

[02:08:18] So the school divisions that I see making bigger gains have an ending point to try to get those native speakers into dual language courses faster than what your current system is set up to do. So a lot of school divisions in Texas I work with, they have like a one-year course.

[02:08:36] I just sat down with a group of five kids, all native Spanish speakers, and they all took one year of the native speaker course. And then the second year, they took both Spanish Lang and Spanish Lit, and every one of those kids got fours and fives. You all have a Spanish one, two, three, four sequence, native speaker sequence.

[02:08:55] That's longer than most school divisions across the country. So I think like two things I would recommend is one, having a dual language. You guys have a proficiency goal. What's your destination at the high school for those dual language speakers? And then what's your destination for native speakers to get them dual language credit, which is some of the most transferable credit in the country?

[02:09:15] can you shorten that timeline up and get them into those dual language courses faster than maybe you currently are and just as a point of clarification because I definitely agree we don't have like a two-track program those students can enter and exit and we do it differently in different situations but to your point there's a lot more that we could do to ensure just like we're talking about with enrollments and all of these advanced classes to really make sure that our multilingual students and families really understand the options really understand the differences and understand the benefits of taking an an AP class or an IB class, and I think that's a big growth area for us as well.

[02:09:49] Thank you, Dr. Facidio. Miss Lady. Okay, I'm going to try to be quick. Elementary STEAM, we need it in every school. The high school is being too robust in terms of offerings. It's absolutely true, but here's my -- because here's what happens, right? And we're hearing it now with middle school theater, and I'm going to talk more about that the next session, about a wheel at middle school, but the bottom line is counselors are often blamed if somebody's elective loses enrollment and that course catalog has so many course choices in it it's that's just not fair right but i do think that we offer this buffet that's kind of ridiculous and it's very

[02:10:28] hard as a counselor to convince a child to take another year of math when they're like but i'm interested in doing x and you know in college and studying it i'm like great okay pursue it there um math pathways i mean take your core right like i'll be the first one to advocate for it we need four years of math four years of science four years of world language okay i mean not four years of world language math and science definitely math we need to make it four years like english math pathways at ib schools again if you don't stand on ib track you're thrown into the online

[02:11:02] campus they lose pathways if you if you start in an ib some ib maths and junior year i'm dumbfounded by this it's a problem and so i'm grateful for data science i'm grateful to hear dr goodloe talk about additional pathways at chantilly because i had friends who taught math other places they had more pathways for their kids than we had and it was our math department seemed to be controlling it can i finish thank you um dual enrollment in the arts we have to pursue this in our music and in our fine our performing arts this will have to do with our accreditation but we have a lot of students again the barrier in our state is you have to test in your native

[02:11:41] language and some of our kids are struggling but they could get dual enrollment credit in other areas central office you know we my colleague asked some questions about transcript analysis I no one's here from central office but my concern when I was a counselor was a do we test kids in their native language at central office do we do rich do you want to provide some more yes we do mathematics test in

[02:12:18] that can be taken in multiple languages as well as a science test that can be taken in multiple languages okay his reason I ask that question is because I on more than one occasion, because internationally, people do interdisciplinary learning more than we do here at home, mathematically and scientifically.

[02:12:34] And it seemed like if the kid age-wise was a 10th grader, no matter what science they had learned previously in their other country, they were given bio. So are we still doing that? Are we actually giving them what they took? Because we would sometimes get them in bio and the teachers would come down and say, they know, you know, or they'd be in chemistry and they're like, they know all the chemistry 'cause they were in some integrated course.

[02:12:56] Yeah, and again, I don't know what all those experiences look like, but we do the transcript analysis, and if they've earned the credit in the country that they're coming from, then they get credit in that course. I think if they didn't have science credits in the past, we were really feeling like bio was a good place for them to begin that science course-taking journey.

[02:13:16] Okay, and I know we've got to go. It happens the same in social studies. They seem to have gotten world one if they were 15. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Ms. St. John-Connor, you have one last quick question. Yeah, and just going back to world languages, in terms of when we're looking at immersion and going back to that whole vertical articulation.

[02:13:34] I mean, I was the main mother that made my kids take Spanish in middle school and not have any other electives, but that was because I made them do it. But if we had that vertical articulation, I think we would see more success in world languages, which we don't have necessarily when it matches to the immersion program in those pyramids.

[02:13:54] Thank you. I guess I'll share a personal story since I don't tend to do that very often because the schedule is what it is. My kid is taking his TOK after school so he could do other things throughout the day because otherwise he would have no electives. And so it's a real problem. And for those of us who know how to work around it, we're able to, but a lot of us are not able to because we don't know that that exists.

[02:14:18] I do want to share a little bit when Dr. Reed was speaking earlier when she said we have kids with the same academic profile and yet they're not slotted into classes and what I wrote here to myself as well what are the differences I wrote that as a question that I was going to ask her and then I answered it myself before she got her turn to talk about Katherine Johnson and the answers that I have here in terms of the differences of in those academic profiles this is just Riccardi Anderson's thoughts, race, class, gender, and then I added language.

[02:14:51] Those are the differences. Those are the things that we have to address in order to move our kids where they need to be. Because we know those three things that we need to get our kids moving. Good teaching, staff who believe in them, and using data for intervention. They're not all easy things, but they're the three things that we need to do.

[02:15:08] So thank you, all of you, for your time. Thank you, principals. Thank you, staff. i do want to remind the board members that the clerk has sent out the link for the next steps for this work session so please see your emails and um add your items and i think the date by which they are due will be shared in that email we will take a five minute break and we have concluded goal four at 2 23 so we'll be back at 2 28. thank you miss lady um it's my pleasure this afternoon as we think about the expansion of middle school advanced

[02:15:47] academic programming to have Dr. Presidio and Miss Maloney talk about the expansion plans and what our thoughts are around this topic so Dr. Presidio well thank you Dr. Reed good afternoon everybody we're excited to have this opportunity to talk about the staff proposal for expanding advanced academic program centers or AAP centers to all middle schools and I am joined by Dr.

[02:16:12] Kirsten Maloney our senior manager for Advanced Academic Programs but we've actually been collaborating with quite a few folks on this proposal it's not just a AAP proposal we've been working with the Middle School Principals Association at length we've collaborated a lot with our regions and then our facilities team has really been instrumental in trying to help us put this all together so we're excited to share the plan with you today we think that we've got a good proposal that will continue to ensure academic rigor and address some of our operational challenges as well so with that we'll go to the next slide and kind of jump in here so the board clerks will help me

[02:16:49] with advancing the slides basically this is just our work session objective for today you can see that really what we're focusing on is getting your feedback and input into the draft proposal that we've developed to expand AAP middle school centers I do want to remind the community though that this proposal is in direct response to the school board motion in September of 2025 that directed the superintendent to develop a comprehensive expansion plan to bring AAP centers to all middle schools.

[02:17:20] So again, we're looking forward to your input and feedback on the plan today. On the next slide, we wanted to share a little bit of the rationale for why we're bringing this plan to you today. We do believe that we've developed a proposal that will create greater equitable access and operational efficiencies and how we deliver middle school AAP services and first I do think it's important to note that there are a number of middle school students that are eligible for full-time AAP at each of our individual base middle schools now there's a sufficient number of students at those schools to be able to offer AAP centers at all of our middle schools and that would really

[02:17:59] provide an opportunity to expand access without requiring students to leave their base school for AAP services so that's that's the most important component of the rationale additionally opening middle school centers at each base school would support that peer group continuity by allowing students to remain with their neighborhood classmates at their base neighborhood school all the way through middle school and into high school and then finally serving AAP students in their base middle schools would also reduce transportation costs and simplify some of our long-range facility planning from the next slide I

[02:18:33] I wanted to just kind of share the current state of where we're at with access to AAP services at middle school. And I think as everyone knows around the table, we do not have a consistent access model right now. Different things are happening in different schools. So currently we have 14 middle schools that serve as AAP centers.

[02:18:52] So 14 serve as AAP centers today. Ten of those schools serve students from multiple middle schools, and four of those 14 schools are already only serving students from their base school. So that's the model that we're proposing, where base schools would offer centers and serve students from their base school.

[02:19:10] So we have four schools that are doing that already. Additionally, we just approved, the board approved, opening Poe Middle School as a new center to serve sixth grade students starting in school year 26-27. And then when you look down the rest of the list, we have six additional schools that offer local full-time services, and that's where AAP students are grouped or cohorted together in classes that are designed to be separate classes just for AAP students.

[02:19:37] And then finally, we have five schools left that don't currently cohort students, but they do offer open enrollment access to honors classes. So as a result, you can really see that the current student experience and access to AAP services in middle school really does vary by geography.

[02:19:54] But with this proposal, we'd be able to create a consistent division-wide model. So on the next slide, I just wanted to point out that in addition to working with the middle school principals, we've also worked with the School Board Advisory Committee, APAC, Advanced Academic Program Advisory Committee, to get their input.

[02:20:13] it. And both Dr. Reed and I attended sessions to solicit their feedback, and they were extremely helpful. Their main recommendation in regards to expansion is that anything that we do really needs to be paired with explicit program standards or expectations to ensure that we really have equitable programming experiences for all students. So their feedback to that end really kind of centered on three specific recommendations. One, system-wide accountability to ensure academic rigor in all of our programs and all of our schools teacher readiness that training and professional development that teachers need to be able to deliver the instruction effectively

[02:20:51] and the curriculum effectively and then having a sufficient cohort size just again a group of students to really maintain continuity of programs at each grade level at the middle school sixth through eighth grade so on the next slide you're going to see how we've translated those recommendations into explicit program standards and implementation expectations and you can see on this chart the APAC kind of feedback and standards on the left hand side and then on the right hand side you can see how we've updated our program standards in red to really make sure that we were addressing the input that they provided.

[02:21:25] So first here, when we look at our updated program standards, we would expect every school to have at least two full class cohorts or two classes of eligible students per grade level in each of the courses. Second, instruction and assessment must be based on the extended learning standards. So that goes beyond the standard level curriculum. And then third, schools would need to have a variety of academically focused after school enrichment opportunities.

[02:21:55] So you can think about speech, debate, those types of activities for students. Then our school leaders, our principals, directors of student services, counselors, department chairs would all need to receive training so that they really do understand the needs of advanced learners, and how to use the tools and resources from the AAP office to be able to really effectively evaluate instruction and program implementation fidelity.

[02:22:18] We would also be requiring schools to submit annual data to the AAP office so that we could review program implementation fidelity, and then finally, we've developed some expectations regarding teacher readiness, then I'd like to unpack kind of all of these a little bit more on the following slide.

[02:22:36] So on the next slide, basically what we're looking at here is what we refer to as critical mass, or the student enrollment that we really need to have to be able to offer the program consistently from school to school. And when we talk about critical mass, again, we're talking about having a minimum of two full class cohorts per grade level at each school.

[02:22:57] And we ran the student enrollment data of eligible students as if they were attending their base neighborhood school. So that's what you're looking at on this slide. If all of the students that are AAP eligible attended their base middle school today, what would the numbers be per grade level?

[02:23:13] And you can see here on this slide that there would be sufficient enrollment at each of the middle schools to have at least two full classes per grade level per cohort. So that's the current data. And then on the next slide, probably the next biggest thing that we need to think about is really the professional learning to ensure that teachers are ready, because teacher readiness is really probably the most important factor in program implementation, fidelity, and consistency.

[02:23:40] So we're proposing two tiers of training expectations, basically based on whether a teacher's teaching full-time in the advanced academic program or in honors courses, because honors courses are advanced classes as well. So a teacher teaching a full load of advanced courses would have a set of requirements.

[02:23:58] And then there would be a tier two for teachers that are teaching part-time. So their full load is not advanced classes. So first, when we think about those teachers that would teach part-time, because that's much more common than teachers having a full load of advanced classes, the majority would just teach part-time, we would have the expectation that those teachers would participate in three days of training related to instruction assessment and curriculum and advanced academic and honors courses and then after each training the teacher would receive some job embedded coaching from the advanced academic resource teacher so they would actually be able to practice what they had learned in the

[02:24:36] central office training in the classroom with guided support from the advanced academic resource teacher and then for teachers that were teaching full-time the expectation would be the same as it is today. They would need to earn either their Virginia endorsement, and they would have to do that through a private college or university, or they could actually earn the local endorsement offered through Fairfax County. So they'd be able to choose if they'd like to pursue it independently or if they would like to do it through Fairfax County. And all of those course requirements would count towards advancement

[02:25:11] on the salary scale. So on the next slide, we talk about, well, how much would it cost to train all these teachers to do all these things. And luckily, I don't think that it's an exorbitant amount of money. These are one-time costs that you see. These aren't ongoing costs.

[02:25:28] So you can see basically that the costs are around $110,000 per year for three years to be able to train all the teachers in our middle schools that we would have teaching in these courses. The cost is here, as illustrated here, basically the biggest cost driver is for substitutes because we want to be able to provide this training opportunity during the contract day.

[02:25:50] One of the problems we've had in the past is that we haven't had a budget to do that, and we've had training offered for free but outside of the contract day. And when a teacher is done teaching an eight-plus-hour day, there's not a lot of enthusiasm always to go to an evening training.

[02:26:06] So we'd like to be able to do this during the day so that we can ensure that everybody actually completes the training. So, again, these are one-time costs, and I think they'd really represent a targeted investment and professional development, and it's not an ongoing recurring cost. On the next slide, this is where I really want to thank the facilities team.

[02:26:25] We've got a couple folks from facilities here with us today who did a ton of work really conducting an impact analysis to try to determine what would the impact of this proposal be on the program capacity and design capacity in each of the middle schools. So you can see that data is represented on this slide, and it shows basically the facility capacity utilization if all the AAP students were attending their neighborhood-based middle school.

[02:26:51] So the data indicates basically the number of students that a school is either going to gain or lose, depending on the situation. And I also want to point out that this data has been reflected to be adjusted towards the new boundary changes, right?

[02:27:07] So this is kind of hot off the presses data, right? So you can see, just to take one example here, maybe taking Carson, you could see that they would lose 265 students back to their base schools. In this instance, it's primarily going to be Franklin that those students would go to.

[02:27:25] But on the other hand, you'd see that Franklin would receive 284 eligible students, mostly from Carson, but there's a few others, I think, mostly from Rocky Run. So you can do that same kind of analysis for each of the schools on here and see what the facility capacity impact would be.

[02:27:40] And there is some, of course. The most significant facility capacity impact is gonna be at Franklin, Irving, Thoreau, and Cooper. Cooper, though, interestingly, is not being driven by any of these program changes. That's a long-term, really kind of boundary neighborhood issue.

[02:27:57] It's not something that would be an impact as of moving to AAP centers at all middle schools. So on the next slides, what I wanna do is just share some of the plans that we've developed with the facilities team to try to address any capacity concerns that might exist.

[02:28:14] And so you can see here, for example, we've really tried to provide those strategies as well as the preliminary cost estimates for dealing with the most crowded situations. So starting with Franklin, luckily, we don't believe that there would be any cost or any new cost there because Franklin's already scheduled for renovation.

[02:28:33] So their facility capacity issues could be addressed through the renovation queue and that's why we put it in the final phase of implementation that we'll look at here in just a second. For Irving and Thoreau, then the types of options that we would be looking at would be maybe some minor boundary adjustments wherever feasible. We could reassign space within the building. Sometimes buildings do have more space when we work with them to try to consolidate things, and we can open up new instructional spaces. There might be some minor interior modifications that we could support to help with that. Sometimes there's regional programs,

[02:29:09] particularly special education regional programs that might be able to be moved to a site that has more facility capacity and then we could employ temporary classrooms or trailers if we needed to so that's kind of the list of strategies that we would be looking at i do want to say though this is only for planning purposes we have not fully vetted these any recommended solution as to any of the strategies i just mentioned would go through more detailed analysis community engagement and we'd have all the required approvals before we move forward but i just wanted you to kind of know the types of strategies we're thinking about and then when you look at the cost associated here

[02:29:45] one of the things that i want to point out is that we have to kind of consider these along with operational savings so we also worked with the transportation department who gave us a proposed estimate of about eight hundred and fifty thousand dollars of transportation savings from not having to bus students throughout the county to access aap centers at non-base neighborhood schools so i think the offset of the transportation savings should really cover the investments that we would need to make on facilities and teacher training so moving to the next slide just real quickly the

[02:30:19] last two slides here we wanted to share with you kind of the phased recommendation for a phased rollout instead of a division-wide implementation of all of our schools at once so you can see on this slide that every one of the implementation phases has a development year and that's the first year you could almost think of that as year zero because that's the year that we would complete the teacher training for the teachers in those schools and then after the development year there would be an implementation of the first grade level of that school so if it's a school that's just seven and eight we'd start with seventh grade one year then we'd go to eighth grade the next year if it's a school who's six to eight there would be three years of

[02:30:57] implementation so you can see phase one is PO and that's already been approved and that's already in the process so they're gonna open with sixth grade students next year and then for phase two we're including hayfield key whitman and homes and those schools again would use next year 26 27 to prepare staff with training and then the first grade level of students would start in 27 28 and then similarly on the last slide you can see the schools that would be in phase three as well as phase four and what that timeline would look like so by school year 30 31 every middle school according to this plan would be serving all of

[02:31:32] of their AAP students in their neighborhood-based schools and middle school centers and we do think that this approach this phased approach would really give us the time that we need to make sure that we can address the staff training needs as well as facility readiness and with that we're happy to conclude the presentation and open it up for board questions uh discussion and feedback all right thank you for that presentation and we're going to start with dr anderson thank you

[02:32:04] thank you i'm very excited to see this because this was you remember this dr presidio this was my forum topic from 2020 and to see that six years later we're finally here is kind of exciting not realizing it needed yet another board action because the board did agree to move it forward back in 2020 and I'm glad this has been resurrected and we're here so here's a few questions that I have for you just running through here one I do appreciate the opportunity that you're

[02:32:43] giving us to give feedback and input and to ask questions and to kind of kick the tires a little bit. The accountability and program standards that APAC has shared, I could not be in better agreement with them. The program standards have to be tight.

[02:33:00] We have to not have the grass is greener kind of mentality that we have with the local level fours. It's kind of the same conversation here. So it's going to be this is the model and this is what everybody's doing.

[02:33:15] That's correct. being much more explicit with the program standards as well as having some built-in internal accountability with the program audits that we would put in place on an annual basis. And I would encourage to perhaps Dr. Reed to take this very good idea of program accountability to the local level fours. It's a good time to kind of check in on that and to see how we can use a more consistent approach on the local level four that elementary to achieve some of our goals if we're going to do it for these grades I think it

[02:33:49] makes sense for the other grades I'd like to speak to the data that is on slide seven the critical mass I'm very glad to see this because I know this has been a point of contention since I got on the board because back in 2020 when that forum topic was shared there was some feedback from community that we don't have enough of our kids and each of these middle schools to achieve this clearly that is not the case we have hundreds of kids across all of the

[02:34:18] schools so thank you so much for including that on slide I think 11 10 10 you talked about capacity utilization are these numbers with or without modulars with modulars that's with modulars could we perhaps receive these numbers without modulars as well thank you the reason why I raised this because I see

[02:34:53] an opportunity and it's not one that I want to articulate if these are if the only numbers that we have to look at are with modulars dr. Reed some of these capacity utilization have really decreased if when and if this goes through we'll have some schools that show up at 84% I imagine whatever the modulars show it will still have some room I wonder if we could begin that conversation of bringing you know where I'm going with this bringing up sixth grade into the spaces that have room again it doesn't have to be everybody

[02:35:28] all at once like that movie it but it could be in some other places yes ma'am I think we'll have to prioritize removing modulars yep versus bringing up sixth grade and maybe you know that'll be a conversation do we want to leave the modulars in places where we would need them to bring sixth grade or is removing the modular is more important than having the sixth grade but I do think it opens the door at least at more sites in the division the ability to move sixth grade up that's correct yes which is why it would be really important to have the information without the modulars I'd like to go back

[02:36:03] Dr. Anderson my apologies but I believe mr. Gordon has a clarification but this clarifies with modulars doesn't include it I'm sorry without modules does not include the trailers so trailers are not part of that the temporary classrooms so So we never compare the two.

[02:36:19] - Right, I'm aware. It's just that in the CIP we typically have with modular utilization without, if you could just provide that just for the comparison to see where's really, really room instead of just doing more outdoor activity with our students. - Okay.

[02:36:39] - Mr. Ming. - Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you for the presentation. Dr. Presidio, you'll probably remember this. Every time when we talked about school-based models was a debate around critical mass.

[02:37:00] Do you think the AAPAC advisory committees agreeing with the two classes per grade as satisfying the requirements for critical mass? Because I have heard different numbers from some members of AAPAC, that is why I'm asking that question.

[02:37:23] No, I think it's a good question, and I think you're right. There are certain members on APAC that would prefer more than two, but two was kind of the minimum threshold to be set. And that's the standard that, you know, even before Kirsten was in this role and Dr. Carol Horn was here, that was the standard that we had set many years ago.

[02:37:42] But there certainly has been a lot of conversation in the advanced academic community that some people would prefer even more students per grade level. But we feel confident that having two is sufficient because it does give you the ability in a situation where you might have two teachers working together, that they can collaborate, work as a collaborative team and support each other.

[02:38:01] Whereas if the numbers get smaller than that, you wouldn't want to have just one teacher without a support system in place in the school. So we're comfortable with two. - But since this is a middle school setting, it's gonna require more than just two teachers to teach all the classes, correct?

[02:38:18] - Yeah, so when I say two classes per grade level, I'm talking two classes per grade level per subject. So you might think of two sections of seventh grade English, for example. That would be the two classes that I'm referring to. And then you'd have the same thing in Algebra I in geometry, social studies, and science.

[02:38:35] - So instead of, you know, some of the numbers that I've heard was anywhere between 100 to 150 to be the required critical mass. With 100, let me finish, 100 to 150, you might have, you know, five AAP teachers to be able to work as a team as opposed to two.

[02:38:56] - That's right. - Two. Is that the main differences? - That's the only difference, really. So what difference do two versus five, does two versus five make, in terms of being able to provide?

[02:39:12] - I really don't think it makes a difference. I mean, again, when you talk about where this idea of critical mass even developed, it was from kind of the research around having the ability to have multiple teachers working and collaborating together, because we know from the research that that creates better learning environments and better instructional environments for teachers as well.

[02:39:33] So as long as you have at least a teaching partner, we feel that that's sufficient. - Okay, let me go to some of the schools. I think there are four schools that provide these local, it's not local levels, center programs for their, just their students alone.

[02:39:53] They are Cooper, Johnson, Longfellow, and South County. Looking at the numbers provided on slide number seven, South County seems to have the fewest students in the program, correct?

[02:40:10] - Of those four, yes. - Among those four. You know, for example, for the seventh graders, for South County, we have 80 students versus Cooper's 181. 80 seems to be below what some of the AAPAC members describe as a required critical mass of 100, 250 students, while Cooper exceeds that number.

[02:40:37] Do you see any differences between the programs provided at South County and Cooper? - No, there's no difference. It's the same curriculum, the same program standards, the same teaching requirements, the same expectations for afterschool extracurricular programs.

[02:40:55] - You are able to certify that? - Yes. - And what about how the students are doing in those classes? So, we haven't compared students across schools in a while, but when you look at how students in advanced academic courses are performing, you know, they're performing very well in terms of grade point average, test scores, right, like all of the data points that we typically have for students, they're far exceeding division averages, and that's true at a general level.

[02:41:27] Now, I haven't done a recent comparison of South County to Cooper, for example. that's something we could do but we haven't found any outliers in terms of schools that were lagging in our center would you would you be able to share with the board you know what you find amongst those you know especially i don't want to necessarily pick two schools i just want to be able to compare you know schools with more than 100 150 students for the grade versus those less than that because since there seems to be differences in opinion what the size of

[02:42:03] critical mass should be no we definitely can do that okay thank you it might take a little while but we can okay thank you appreciate that thank you miss anderson okay i just have a few questions and this is something that um hits an interest area of mine so i'm gonna i'm gonna temper my questions carefully um looking at this slide one of the things that i want us to remember is that these this is all made up like we have decided which kids are able to access the level four curriculum and which kids can't because we have kids and I would love to know

[02:42:41] the numbers on this how many of our level 3 kids are serving right now in level 4 local level 4 programs that are not given access at the middle school level for no reason they are successful in an AAP class they have done all of the same work as their cohort classmates have and oftentimes what I think is actually going on here is it's related to the AARTs and what's being done in the elementary level that gives kids access at the middle school and if we want to see advanced coursework at the high school which is what we were just talking about this is the path it's one of the very first conversations I had

[02:43:21] with dr. Reed when I came on the board is that I see this as a barrier to success and quite frankly I would love to see the numbers over time to see whether or not if we have a change in an AART at a certain school and I'm not going to name any schools but if we have a change in and out of school what happens to the numbers because it's purely and completely dependent on the person that is the person that's putting the packets together and so I think there are lots of things that we could do to fix this immediately and I will be completely transparent here that my kids fall in this category but any level 3 kid that is serving in a local level 4 right now there's no reason that we

[02:44:00] shouldn't automatically just move them into level four I mean us going through the packet process at that point is a barrier to success for many parents that don't have the time so I just I would love to see us fix that at some point I would like to find out whether or not we are going to keep them cohorted in all schools and whether or not that's going to be the the requirement because again I think we have an access possibility here is that you could move kids that were just designated as level three into the AAP classes if you don't require a cohort at the middle

[02:44:40] school level. So that's one aspect. And a lot of these kids have been cohorted in one class with one group of kids for years and keeping them cohorted at the middle school level is a barrier to success on other social skills as well. I would just like to keep an eye on that and I think well that's that's where I'll stop for now I may have some other things but I just I really want us to look because I have a hard time believing yes I understand that some of these schools are in more impacted areas in terms of higher lots of things going on but I just have I don't want to see any of our kids put in a category where

[02:45:18] they're not going to be successful and so we need to figure out a path that opens this up rather than keeps it cohorted the way that it is. Is there a response to that? Are you looking for a response? I took that as advocacy. Okay, okay.

[02:45:35] Ms. St. John Cunning. First of all, thank you for this work and I do know that sometimes, as one of my colleagues said, this was brought up a long time ago and it's taken six years, sometimes change takes time. I know things I've advocated for within our district have taken more than that, but the fact is we're moving in the right direction I'm really pleased to see this and I'm really pleased to see that this is really going to solve a huge overcrowding issue in my district because only one of my pyramids has an AP middle school center so ditto to everything my other colleague just said depending on what your feeder

[02:46:12] schools are at the elementary level that's going to depend on the numbers that you see at your middle school but going back to our previous conversation and go for if we're going to start looking at vertical articulation and if we're going to move down to the elementary level, my hope is that we are going to have more kids that are going to be able to be in these programs, and that the idea is that every kid is possible to reach this, and that's why my advocacy is always for more local level fours, because it aligns with our boundary work and keeping students within their community,

[02:46:50] and you did answer the one question that I was going to ask when you were talking about the cost you know to give me the cost savings in terms of busing and I think that that you know that's just a no-brainer a hundred and ten dollars a year to implement this versus eight hundred and fifty K in savings I think we're headed in the right direction and I do agree that sometimes depending on who it is and what those packets are and what the barriers are not just for there are specific families that know how to work the system and advocate for their kids, and there are some that don't, even though their kids would very much fall into this.

[02:47:27] And that's why I'm really glad to see some of the ABLE work that is identifying some of those kids whose parents might not be able to do the advocacy for them. So I think we're going in the right direction. This makes me really happy. And just thank you for all the work. Thank you. Mr. Dan.

[02:47:45] Thank you very much. Just to kind of pick up on my colleague Ms. Anderson's comments about equity, and I don't know if Dr. King or Dr. Cedillo want to speak a little bit to this. I really appreciate the conversation an hour or so ago around access to algebra and so forth. Can you speak a little bit to the work that you and your team are doing to ensure equity?

[02:48:02] Because I'll say this as a parent, again, of a child in a level four program, I was surprised at the, I don't wanna say the barriers, but the amount of work it took to get into it. And I can only imagine for parents who don't have that time to be able to commit to doing that. So can you maybe speak to, do you envision changes to how kids are brought into this?

[02:48:21] And if so, is that being factored into this? - Yeah, thank you, Mr. Dallin. - I'll ask Dr. King to respond. I think that there's a fundamental difference about algebra in eighth grade because that's actually general education. There's nothing gifted and talented or advanced academic to be in algebra in eighth grade.

[02:48:41] Whereas the AAP program is an Office of Civil Rights Protected program. And in many states, an AAP student has the same IEP rights as a student with disabilities. So it's a very, it's a somewhat different question, but Dr. King, you want to talk a little bit about, or respond to Mr. Dan's question, please.

[02:49:03] - Are you asking specifically how we get more students into AAP or what my team is doing to work with schools around that? - Yeah, I really appreciate your comments and I'm forgetting that the technical term that you used looking at a student's course history and so forth to say, hey, there's nothing different between this child and this child, yet this child was being recommended for algebra one and this one wasn't.

[02:49:23] Is the same being done for AAP or how does that process? I recognize it happens at an earlier age and there might not be as much to go off of. - Yeah, so I think that Kristen is best to answer that question. My team works closely with Sloane's team and all the work that we do, but specifically I think she would be best to answer that.

[02:49:43] - Can you just say a couple things and then I'd like Dr. Maloney to weigh in. I think first thing I would say is follow Dr. Reed's comments. We have state legal requirements about what we need to do to consider access to advanced academics, right? So there are things that are required at the state level, like cognitive abilities test, right?

[02:50:03] And then what we try to do is we know that some of those things could be barriers. So we've tried really hard to figure out how can we round out that process to have a holistic view of the student to really make sure that we're not missing students. So we've done multilingual testing. We've done, you know, the screening process where files are read by multiple readers, not by an individual reader.

[02:50:23] So multiple people are looking at the file. We've provided opportunities for work samples so that we can really see, like, what does the student's work look like, not just what does a test score on one day look like, right? And then we've had three external program reviews of AAP since I've been in the division in 15 years.

[02:50:40] So it seems like every five years almost we tee up another one. The most recent one was in 2020, and one of the things that they recommended was when we think about the norms that are established on those test scores, instead of using a division wide norm we should use local norms so we apply local norms of each individual elementary school to find the students that are outliers within their elementary school meaning that they're ready to be accelerated more than what the current population in that school is and that might look real different in one part of our county versus a different part of the county so those local norms allow us to identify those students and qualify students that maybe wouldn't

[02:51:19] be qualified if we were just looking at division norms as a whole. And that has helped our representation be much more equivalent to the demographics of the division overall than they were before we did that. And that was one of the big strategies that came out of the most recent program evaluation.

[02:51:36] But Dr. Melanie, do you want to add anything? The only other thing that I will share, all those are excellent, is that we really want the opportunities that are happening full-time in advanced academics to be available to all students so that's a big part of the advanced academic resource teacher role is to be working in the CLTs working with the teachers to say hey this is this unit's coming up here's some curriculum that they're definitely going to be using in the full-time program and which parts of this or will we use all of this we have a lot of schools that just automatically go ahead and say that for social studies and science we're just going to use the AAP curriculum and

[02:52:14] social studies and science so I think even though students might not be in the numbers as as identified for full time they are getting access to the things that will have them be ready to take the advanced courses when they get to secondary so that tier one access to rigor used to be in the strategic in the last strategic plan and we keep collecting that information because we want to make sure that that's something that students regardless of identification still are getting the opportunity to do thank you miss Dixon I'm gonna tackle this in two parts one is the again this the capacity so while

[02:52:51] I'm seeing that the school like one of the Franklin Farm is Franklin, not Franklin Farm, Franklin Middle School is getting to a higher capacity. It will be 109 percent and, sorry, 112 percent.

[02:53:10] And Carlson is, you know, getting less students. So I think a lot of those kids who are going to Carlson are staying in Franklin, which is an excellent school, by the way. and I just enjoyed going to the school. But my issue was while the year the students are moving, this plan is going in action, that's where the construction also starts at the school.

[02:53:36] So logistically, I wanted to know whether, you know, it'll be difficult to have these 200 plus kids more coming to a school which is going to a construction at that point. - Yeah, and I mean, I'm certainly happy to ask anybody from facilities if they wanna contribute to the answer, but the first thing to remember is they wouldn't all come in the same year, right?

[02:53:57] So that implementation year, that first year when the renovation would be starting would be teacher training, then the following year you would start working with students in seventh grade, and then the following year students in eighth grade. So it'd be over a three-year period of time, it wouldn't all happen at once. And I know that we've done renovations obviously in Fairfax and buildings that are technically over capacity when you look at our CIP, And we've been able to manage that pretty well.

[02:54:23] So I don't think this is anything new. - Yes, ma'am. So I would look at it from a couple of different lenses and perspectives. So, you know, we do, first thing we always do is we look at see the capacity, program capacity versus, you know, actual student capacity.

[02:54:41] Can we come in, look to see how the building is utilized, help different set of eyes from the planning team to see how that school could be aligned to support the requirement. Then we'll look to see what requirements are needed in the construction piece. And right now through the process, we've identified three schools, which are Franklin, Irving and Thoreau, and we need some sort of construction.

[02:55:00] Specifically for Franklin, we would look to time that out in the later years that when it's going through the normal construction process. But for any other school that needed some sort of minimal rework inside, you know, as Sloan said, we pretty good at doing phase construction and process. So as we're working on one part of the building, we might have temporary classrooms that we'll bring in just for that, with that limited or a small amount of construction and process.

[02:55:22] I don't think it would be anything that would hinder us 'cause we do this on a kind of a daily basis. Does that answer the question? - Yes, yes it does. And also the capacity is also going to increase, right? With Franklin, the remodeling?

[02:55:38] - I think the capacity for us is inclusive of that and I don't think there's an issue with bringing the additional students in. - Okay, yeah. I think every renovation we see a little increase in capacity anyways. And my second question was, and my colleagues mentioned that, that the access to programming.

[02:55:57] And I agree with if one person is in charge of pulling kids out in elementary school, like the ARTs or anybody who's single-handedly doing it, the chances of subjective, I guess, their opinion or prejudice, sometimes people don't know they have it, it can be against students.

[02:56:19] So instead of doing a person, it should be a team. And just like we do for AAP, like I know AAP is a team of different professionals judging the files and they decide which kids go into AAP level four.

[02:56:36] That could help with this individual deciding which should be pulled out for different classes and access to more students in AAP. I think if we are doing this for middle schooler and we plan to do more rigorous academic planning in high school, I think we could invite more students in middle school for AAP because, I mean, those kids need to be busy at that age, really.

[02:57:04] Like, I mean, give them more work. So, and even though I know they have to get up early, super early, so this is helpful because they are going to a neighborhood school rather than driving. My son used to be in the bus for 40 minutes to go to Rocky Run and Liberty was like 10 minutes away from us, but he was in AAP level four.

[02:57:26] The extracurriculars will be very helpful to have at all these schools, if they're AAP, I think that's what the robotics program, do we have it in all schools right now, or at that level of competition, like level AAP?

[02:57:41] So I think overall, I like the program, thanks. - All right, thank you. I'm gonna go ahead and take a turn. I can't even find the words to talk about how impactful this is gonna be. And I'm gonna try to, we talk about critical mass.

[02:57:58] To me, critical mass is about money, okay? We can afford to do it every school, we do it. And I believe that two cohorts are, is fine. I believe that there's, that all children can learn.

[02:58:14] I believe that some children are more interested and perhaps more have greater aptitude in some subjects than others, which is also why the cohorting has always bothered me, because if I've got a math and science like can set the world on fire, but maybe that person's more appropriate for just local level four or something else in humanities, why can't they be in the AAP cohort for the math and the science?

[02:58:39] It's a barrier. We're getting rid of barriers. We're either doing it or we're not. So from my perspective, the cohorting has got to stop, but in doing so, the curriculum can't change, okay? Curriculum has to stay the same. I mean, I just look at this and I think about accreditation and I think about the boundary review work that we did and the ugly things that came out of people's mouths about schools.

[02:59:01] And I mean, I'm looking just at between Hughes and Herndon and Herndon will have more AAP eligible kids if we went to this than Hughes will. But yet Hughes has the much better, for some cockamamie reason, the perception is Hughes is the better middle school.

[02:59:18] this is so unfair to all of our populations all of our differences and that's why this work really excites me and i was excited to well it's one again one of the first conversations i also have with dr reed um this is how we treat people with humanity this is how we see potential in all students um the separating and the elitism um those days have got to be sunset in this county The other thing is, the $850,000 transportation savings, is that annual?

[02:59:50] Yeah, that was calculated on an annual basis. I've asked for a correction on that because I believe that's high. That's not the number that Mr. Mewick provided a year ago. So we're going to get a correction on that. So I'm going to... We'll double check that one for you. Yeah. Which is fine.

[03:00:06] Gas prices have gone up, but I don't think that far up. I'll be honest with you, if it's $500,000 in perpetuity, that's money. Yeah, I don't think it was that high. and and we're bringing programs to children instead of taking children to programs because the other thing i would like from mr muick is he can we look at healthy start times if we literally serviced all of our children in their in their base school would that allow us it's fewer buses that are passing schools would that allow us to healthy start times for middle school because that's it remains a priority of mine um the other thing i'm going to say is in terms of the comments around the eligibility.

[03:00:45] I agree it should be a team approach, or if I work at, you know, Robin Lady Elementary and Tom Dannen Elementary is, you know, across town, maybe I, as the ART, evaluate his kids. I don't know them. There's no bias, and vice versa, because I have seen the bias, you know.

[03:01:05] And I'll just champion my own daughter, who was an elementary kindergarten teacher at one point at Louise Archer. And she would push for kids who didn't have parents pushing for them, okay? Underrepresented status. And I didn't always appreciate the pushback she got because that person wasn't read to, didn't mean that once exposed to it, they couldn't thrive.

[03:01:27] So I might end up taking the go back, but for now we'll go to Dr. Anderson. Can I comment, just clarify, I think a misunderstanding that I might have caused, so I apologize if I did. the screening process is already a multi-reader process you can't hear me oh sorry okay so the screening process is already a multi-reader process right it's not done by the AART in the local school it's done centrally and the files are read by is it six so the files are read by six different readers that have to go through inter-rater reliability training and everything else they read

[03:02:05] the files blind so they don't know who the kid is they're not screening their kids. So we've already addressed that issue. What I was trying to say with the AARTs and what Dr. Maloney was kind of getting at is one of the equity strategies that we have used is exactly what you just described. Having the AARTs look for the students that maybe have been overlooked in the school and work with that student and that family to submit a file so that that student can be considered. So we're already trying to do that right now. I just want to make sure everybody understood the distinction there, and I apologize for any confusion.

[03:02:38] No, I appreciate it, and I think that maybe the ART has a little more power over local level three and being pushed up and things like that, and that is a little bit in isolation. So I think that that's also going back to my daughter's idea is maybe that kid tested at a level three, but what she's seeing in the classroom is a kid that's, you know.

[03:02:59] Okay. Dr. Anderson. Thank you. Hello. Okay. These things today. I was actually going to ask you to go through the screening process because I was a little familiar with it and some of the things that I heard I thought were inconsistent with what was happening but the one that I am not as clear on if you could speak to that local level threes can you speak to what is the ART's kind of influence into that world in terms of access to to

[03:03:32] programming so similar to the full-time screening there is a lot a lot of the schools actually just screen everybody they have multiple ways that they can sort the multiple data points that they have to look at it's still a holistic review all the same data points are used the main difference is it doesn't come to the central level to do it it's done at the local school so there would be a team of teachers typically the CLT with one administrator and the advanced academic resource teacher in the springtime they look at every student in that grade level as they're moving into the next grade level and you look at all the same data points and they have different ways to sort that see who are

[03:04:12] who's bubbling up in the different ways so it's it's similar data it's just done at the local school thank you I think it will be kind of important to offer some information to the board in terms of where in these places particularly given the Plunker report the parents can have that sometimes outsize influence in having their students be placed in AAP because I know know we we have the test and you have some kids that they make they are above that threshold so they're in then you have some others that are in a different threshold and you have the parent appeals there's a lot of places where

[03:04:50] there's different points of pressure and I think will be helpful for everybody to know that so let me go to my questions here on slide 8 you talked about teachers that are certifications either the Virginia gifted endorsement or the local endorsement from FCPS how many of our teachers from the 14 centers that currently have one or one or the other of these endorsements that are teaching full-time do you have that data yeah we'll have to well we'll get that to you as a next step but the short answer is the majority do not have the full

[03:05:30] certification now okay so if the majority do not have the certification now what does this mean when we are expanding so that's why we're recommending that we try to do a lot of this training during the contract day because what has happened is per our regulation teachers have five years to complete the training and often what happens is the best of intentions life gets in the way and it's difficult for them to complete those requirements outside of the contract day and then we're left in a position of somebody's got to teach the class anyway so we're going to take the person who's got the most experience so that's why we need a different

[03:06:06] training plan where we can control really the training experience more and put it inside the contract date so will this training plan then be inclusive of current center teachers yes okay wonderful and i see an opportunity dr reed i'm quite in support of doing the training during the day get a sub get the training because after a long day's worth of work no one has their full energy for you if we're able to have a daytime training for all of these teachers which i'm sure is reflective of the cost that you have here could we then adjust the regulation from five years to

[03:06:45] something less because i could see this as if a teacher is not at a school for for five years they're going and the kid can routinely or that school can routinely not have those certified teachers just because of mobility I don't know I mean anything's possible I also want to say that we know that interrupted learning with substitutes isn't necessarily our best move for children so I think we want to always balance the amount of time staff are out of the classroom with you know

[03:07:23] teaching and learning pieces but I I would have to do some research into why the five years was picked why that cycle but we certainly can look at that thank you and if there's some way to do one of the days at the beginning of the year and maybe just to throughout the year but just something has to be done so it's not an after-school requirement or not that we could make it then the other question that I have is regarding the phasing I thought that was a pretty reasonable phasing to have that year zero did poe middle school have a year zero for endorsement and training this this is their year zero so we've been

[03:08:02] working with them so they're having it now okay yeah you the four school the four phases I'm sorry the phase four schools I noticed are Franklin Irving and Thor and Thoreau these are the schools that would after it's all said and done have the highest utilization was that purposeful to kind of give some time to adjust that I'd like another go back please yeah but that was intentional so that we've got more time to resolve those issues thank you mr.

[03:08:34] John Cunning um so yes I wanted to going back to in terms of advocacy and ART's and I think the issue that we're all getting to I know how the packets are evaluated it's how the kids are recommended and I think that's the point we were getting to in terms of potential bias I also am interested in knowing and and I don't know if you keep this data, but if you know the number of students who are placed into AAP programs after parents appeal and they get outside testing.

[03:09:10] - Not off the top of our heads, but we could try to find some data on that. We've had that in the past. - Yeah, I think that that goes to equity in terms of people that can afford that and people that can't. So that's just something that I wanted to flag. And when I talked about this taking a long time, did just want to thank Dr. Anderson for initially bringing this up and staying through it and six years later here we are but but it's just I know that it takes time so and I just want to thank the staff and you know the fact that it was even brought up and that we're here but the other thing I wanted to just mention just for the public is I think one of the hardest things is that we

[03:09:48] want this in all of our schools this right now looks very cost-effective but then we start moving to does it include modulars or trailers then we're talking about construction costs and then we're talking about sixth grade and then I think the hardest thing for our board as a priority is to say do we want to have this in all our middle schools and it's okay with there's modulars do we want to bring sixth grade up to middle school and is it okay to have modulars because when we start talking about construction then we're talking about costs and I think that the hardest thing for us as a board is ideally we would like for there not to be modulars and trailers so then we have to set our priorities like do we want AAP centers in all our middle schools and is it okay if it's modulars do we want sixth graders in all our middle schools and is it okay if

[03:10:27] there's modulars I just wanted to put that out there because I know ideally what we want is for there not to be modulars but how do we balance those priorities because building costs a lot of money thank you mr Anderson so first I have a housekeeping question and it's kind of a question for the board and I think the clerks will be happy that I asked this question are we expecting that we're gonna have boundary meetings for all of these schools because that is going to be a pretty heavy lift if you're considering public hearings for everything.

[03:11:00] And so, can you speak to that a little bit? No, that wasn't the intent. I think per policy, we'd have to do the analysis, but per policy, it's 15% of the student population would require, if more than 15% of the population is affected, I think that's what triggers the hearings and everything.

[03:11:18] And in most instances, I don't think that's going to be the case, but that's the additional analysis that we're going to have to do in terms of where that's necessary. I think that we we do need to do that analysis because one of the things is we're actually not changing the boundary of their school they're actually going to be going to their base school so in theory but we're not actually changing anything we're actually just having them go to the school that would be appropriate to go to which would be well I think that we need we need to do the legal analysis on it but I'm just putting a marker down that that's necessary I'm also going to speak to dr. Anderson's point about the fact that we

[03:11:53] need more consistency related to our local level fours, and actually just our level fours across the board, because there's a pretty significant difference between the way kiddos at a center school receive instruction compared to local level fours, depending on which school they go to.

[03:12:13] And while I understand that the screening process is a group process, I completely understand how that all works. the kiddos that are going to be going to that screening process is not a group process right now and there are some barriers to success that happen often related to behavior and things like that where I know for a fact that sometimes that behavior is communication that a kiddo is bored and so I definitely would like us to see to continue just working on that consistency I'd also like to look at trends over time to determine like if a school has significantly

[03:12:50] decreased their number of AAP students or even their level three students over a certain period of time, knowing that -- I mean, and I will be completely honest, I didn't understand that level threes weren't designated outside the school because -- and I didn't figure that out until I became a board member.

[03:13:07] So I'm telling you parents don't know that. So I think that there are some opportunities for better -- and we've talked about this before, and I'm just going to go over just a little bit. talked about this before Dr. Presidio I know that a significant number of our kids are identified for services and I understand I'm just I will I don't want us to look at the cohorted information and you know in looking at middle school and see it as somehow detrimental when we have all these kids that are

[03:13:38] identified at other levels that could do the work so okay I'll take a go back basically going back to the question about the boundary work you know slide ten which shows a few schools being over capacity is in no way would stop me from moving forward 100% of this work we're doing boundary work every five years when I look at some of these locations and some of the mobility I mean Carson's gonna suddenly rocky run you look at these numbers you shift Franklin

[03:14:16] need to stay over capacity these can be boundary adjustments and so i just want to put that out there um you know i also think it's an interesting thing that once we keep students in their base schools that will really understand capacity and potential maybe to add sixth grade which might mean that we convert an elementary school to a middle school or or several to make it work where where we can add sixth grade.

[03:14:42] I don't know. I just wanna always put at the forefront of what we're doing, educational best practice. And I do think that it's a beautiful thing that the middle schools that have sixth grade, those kids can opt into certain electives by choice, like theater, for example.

[03:15:01] And the earlier we can expose kids to choice, I think is great. The other thing I think our community doesn't understand, because when I talk to parents who are appealing as if they think I have anything to do. For the people out there, I have no control over how your student performs on these assessments and whether they are recognized as AAP eligible.

[03:15:21] But when I talk with them about the fact that when you get to seventh grade or get to middle school, you can choose honors by choice. And when you get to high school, you can choose honors, AP, IB, DE, and they're just dumbfounded. There's way too many people in our community, and again, this is the vertical work, who don't understand.

[03:15:39] They think if their kid doesn't get into AAP and truly are identified, that they're doomed for life and they can't then take advanced coursework in Miller High School. And we just need to do a better job of communicating that with parents.

[03:15:54] I mean, every parent I talked to, except for one who had an older child, had no idea that that was a viable option. So I see Dr. Anderson again for a go back. - Yes, but one question that just came to mind another that was kind of planned there's again the conversation regarding the inconsistencies across schools that has been since I've been on the board and now it just continues to elevate we are about Dr. Reed to embark on something that is very exciting both what we're talking about here and what we talked about just a little bit earlier I wonder how can you give us some

[03:16:33] information regarding the consistency of programs across the local level local level fours whether it be the elementary local level fours the middle school centers how can we get some data about their consistency is there an audit that could be done I you know and we I met with the APAC committee Dr. Melanie was there I talked about how they evaluate the effectiveness right of the programs and I think that's a topic the committee is going to work on because there isn't

[03:17:10] a clear current data set that even the advisory committee is using to evaluate the effectiveness so I think that we have to be clear on what we expect from it and then expect the same thing from each program and so I think that's an ongoing conversation right now in the advisory committee I think that you know looking at assessments across all schools with programs is one way to to evaluate consistency of outcomes but again as an instructional curricular program how curriculum is delivered I would ask Dr. Presidio and his team to be

[03:17:50] thoughtful about how you would might look at a curriculum audit or how how that currently is evaluated at the schools and provide some some type of documentation perhaps to the board on that topic so I don't know if you have thoughts on that I know what the program was audited in 2020 I think very routinely right so I know that that provided some feedback but dr. Presidio yeah I mean we can do that I was just kind of started barring with dr. Maloney to think a little bit about that we do do an annual kind of fidelity check with the schools

[03:18:28] where they submit information about program models in their site so we can see what we can pull yeah I would be very much interested in that not only the effectiveness which I think lands on many of these goal reports that you can attach to it but also what is happening in each of these sites having clarity to that will be very helpful the other thing that I don't think I heard here in terms of how this could and inform the number of students that participate in programming which we used to talk about in the former former board quite a bit

[03:19:03] young scholars can you bring that into the discussion yeah absolutely I mean I'm gonna ask dr. Maloney to give you some more details but that that's our talent development program to make sure that students are receiving access so we're working with students that have been either maybe formally identified but are historically underrepresented and we want to make sure that they're gonna get access to students that haven't been formally identified but with some additional enrichment and support we believe in the next evaluation and identification cycle so they could be formally identified.

[03:19:35] So I don't know if you want to add some more details. I think the only thing that I would add on, I mean, at the elementary level, the young scholars, and I think the external reviewers talked quite a bit about this, the front-loading, just lots of opportunities. So having the summer learning opportunities.

[03:19:51] The board a couple of years ago gave that per pupil allocation, which is allowed for robotics and STEAM programs that aren't exclusively for young scholars, but the young scholars are definitely priority invited to those opportunities. All of those ideas, as the students get older, they maintain the young scholar's status and their needs change as they get older.

[03:20:12] So maybe there are different approaches to college application processes or study skills that the students might need. So as they get older, their needs change, but at the elementary level specifically, it's just front load, front load, front load. And the external reviewers talked quite a lot about that.

[03:20:28] That's what all the literature says we need to be doing, is just as much opportunity to use those advanced curriculum and resources as we can possibly give. - Sure, and just to be honest, and you've heard this before, Dr. Presidio, I've always struggled with young scholars because I feel that the whole goal of it is to give students access to academic programming, but it seems to be kind of a stop.

[03:20:49] Instead of just putting them in the advanced academic programming and scaffolding that for them, I feel like it's an unnecessary barrier, very similar to what Steven talked about earlier, which is we have too long of a runway with certain things that prevent kids from the actual access of the thing that we are saying that they should be accessing.

[03:21:11] So I will pause there. The other thing, Dr. Reed, that I wanted to just throw in, if we're going to do a review of programming or audit, whatever it is we're gonna call it, if we could also include a look at the other things that these centers provide.

[03:21:27] Are they consistent across, like the afterschool programming, robotics programs, et cetera, these consistently available in our schools. Again, just having a really good comprehensive look before we embark onto the next step would be really important for us to shore up what already exists before we add new ones.

[03:21:45] Thank you. - Anybody, anybody? Okay, I'll take one go at it. I appreciate the work. As I said at the outset, this is very exciting to me because I think this is true equity work and access work and removing barriers 100%.

[03:22:07] I do also agree with my colleagues regarding evaluation of programming, but I also just wanna reiterate, when we look at how we're doing across all kinds of metrics and goals, that under Dr. Reed's leadership and her team of experts, Dr. Presidio, Dr. Ponce, everybody, I'm not gonna name the entire LT, but everyone who's working, it's making an impact.

[03:22:34] You know, our teachers are becoming better teachers. They're better utilizing UDL. They're better, more appropriately using technology to enhance learning. I mean, all these things are happening. So even while there might still be some inconsistencies, I believe 100% the bar has been raised in every one of our schools higher.

[03:22:54] And I just want to make sure that I acknowledge that to the people doing the work and also to the parent community. So if nobody else has a go back, then we will, I'm gonna check my script here. This work session is adjourned as of 3:46.

[03:23:14] Thank you all.

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