Coraggio Consulting
Fairfax County School Board Work Session, Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026
Place: Fairfax County School Board, Virginia
Length: 1h 57m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfTgQcEsT1s
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 2026-10-26. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:00:02] October 6 2026 work session will be called to order at 11:53 mr. moon has submitted a request to attend this morning's meeting this afternoon's meeting almost remotely due to travel out of the country and is located in Seoul South Korea the chair has performed an initial review of mr. moon's request and has found it to be in compliance with the school board's remote participation resolution, and the chair has approved the request. Mr. Moon,

[00:00:35] please check your audio and video. Good morning. Can you hear me okay? It's 1:00 a.m. here in Seoul, Korea. We are very grateful for your dedication. I now ask-- I'm sleepy here. There's an echo. Is that on our end? Okay, we will manage through. I now ask board members who are physically present to vote on the following. All those in favor of confirming the approval of Mr. Moon's request. One, two, three. Oh, I have to call names mr. Frisch miss Marin missing John Cunning miss

[00:01:12] Anderson miss lady mr. McElveen and all those against that would be me and that motion carries mr. Dan and has also submitted a request to attend this morning's meeting remotely do oh thank you I did not know so please let us know when he arrives we are here for the strategic goal one report strong start pre K K to 12 and I will call on dr. Reed for a presentation on this report

[00:01:47] thank you dr. Anderson we're excited to share our goal one report that's quite a goal one team and we have a lot of I think really good news in this data so I'm going to turn it over to miss Neal and the team to present goal one I apologize I failed to set the state the scene a little bit missing John and I'm Ms. St. John Cunningham and I will be managing this meeting and we have two parts there are two parts to go one There is the kindergarten readiness component and there these there's the language acquisition component

[00:02:22] Staff will go through the first part and we will pause and ask board member questions and comments And then we will go through the second part and rinse and repeat Until our time is up, which should be two o'clock. I apologize for the interruption. Ms. Neal, please continue Thank you, dr. Anderson, and it is still I think good morning to the board As dr. Reed said this is our first school report for this school year, and we're excited for today's discussion So we are going to be talking about goal one today, which is our strong start pre K to 12 We're gonna make sure our slides are working there we go And our objectives for today are to provide the board with an update on our progress towards our 2030 goals

[00:03:01] And to share our data as well as the work we're doing to make progress and to talk about policy and strategic considerations there are six measures for goal one which you can see on the slide and goal one recognizes that all of our students need to have a strong start to their educational journey no matter when they enter our schools in the full report that's posted on board docs you can find all of the data in the appendices for each of the measures for each of our metrics that has a target we do assign a performance label to communicate the progress we're making from the baseline the rules for those categories have not changed but we have

[00:03:39] renamed some of the categories for ease of readability and accessibility and you can see those changes on the slide so as dr. Anderson said today's presentation is going to cover two priorities first we're going to take a look at pre-k experience and then we're going to talk about English language acquisition so we're going to start with pre-k so we know the pre-k experience is an important area for school readiness which is a part of our focus for our strategic plan and we assess the readiness of our kindergarten students in the fall each year and the areas of reading math and behavior and overall students are more

[00:04:17] likely to demonstrate readiness in these three areas when they've had a pre-k experience as you can see by the yellow bar as compared to students who have not had a pre-k experience as you can see by the blue bar on the chart so in looking at last year's data 83% of our kindergartners had a pre-k experience the rate overall rate has grown by nine percentage points since the baseline and we've seen progress for all groups with several student groups having double digit increases since the baseline because of these gains we have seen the gap between student groups shrink the growth we're seeing is largely driven by

[00:04:55] increases in our students who are accessing FCPS or VPI pre-k programs offered through Fairfax County. So on this slide you can see that the blue line at the top is our students who are accessing other pre-k programs and that's been pretty consistent over time. The green line represents students or kindergarten students who are entering without a pre-k experience we've seen that declining steadily since 2021 and then the yellow line are our kindergarten students who are accessing either FCPS pre-k programs or the VPI pre-k programs in Fairfax County and again we've seen a 10 percentage point

[00:05:30] increase since the first year that's on the slide 2021-22 which is showing that our investments in pre-k are helping to close that experience gap so in recent years we started asking our families for additional information if their children did not have a pre-k experience to try and understand better what barriers might be at play for those families so about half of our kindergarten students from last year who did not have a pre-k experience lived outside of the Fairfax County area in the year prior to kindergarten so this slide is looking specifically at our families who were residing in Fairfax

[00:06:08] County the year prior to their child's kindergarten experience what we see is about half of families who shared information shared that they preferred to keep their child home for that pre-k year so again those are families that lived in Fairfax County the year prior to their child's kindergarten experience we see about a quarter however of our families reporting access barriers and the most cited response here was cost and then about another quarter of our families didn't provide a reason for their child not having a pre-k experience so what we know is somewhere between about 260 and 500 of our students may

[00:06:46] have unmet pre-k needs which helps us better understand the areas of work we have to do so as we increase pre-k access we're also committed to providing pre-k opportunities and inclusive settings and this slide shows indicator 6a which is a part of the state special education performance reports and the state sets annual targets it looks at the percentage of preschool students with IEPs who are aged 3 to 5 who receive the majority of their special education and related service services in a classroom setting primarily serving students without IEPs last year the state target was just under 26 percent

[00:07:24] and again this is data that has not yet been officially reported by the state but we have the process of internally calculating it every year and gotten very accurate at that and we estimate that 37% of our students met this criteria which shows significant growth over time so we have four strategies that are focused on pre-k experiences and we're going to take a look at each one of those so our first strategy is addressing community demand for pre-k over the last three years FCPS has invested 6.1 million dollars into expanding pre-k for those students that were unable to serve in our programs we

[00:08:03] work with community partners to help families connect to programs in the community finally the board and staff are engaged in advocacy through the work of skipped or the successful children and youth policy team as well as a part of the legislative agenda to support student access to pre-k this slide looks increased capacity to serve students with economic and educational risk factors and as a reminder our students who are identified through child find do not go through the same application process so since the 2022-23 school year we've seen an increase in our capacity to serve students by over 600 slots and

[00:08:41] while there are still over two applications for every one pre-k slot the increased capacity is addressing some of that community demand fully addressing unmet need does require support outside of FCPS and the board's legislative program outlines several priorities including state funding for pre-k programs we've also seen significant growth in our inclusion rate and this progress is a result of focusing in on increasing inclusion across our pre-k sites we've adjusted staffing models to now provide one of four inclusion models at each of

[00:09:18] our co-located pre-k sites we also continue to support our educators with endorsement opportunities and professional learning to support those the inclusive instruction we currently have four inclusion models which you can see on the slide and this year our pre-k team introduced the co-teaching inclusion model which places a teacher with an early childhood special education endorsement in a classroom with a general education teaching team the chart on the slide shows the total count of pre-k classrooms using an inclusive model which have grown exponentially over time program placement

[00:09:53] and the co-location of programs does remain an area of focus as we continue to expand inclusion. Many of our FCPS pre-K sites serving students with disabilities do not have pre-K classrooms serving students without disabilities or without IEPs co-located. So for this reason we continue to provide the community peers model at sites where inclusion is not possible. Our third strategy is delivering high quality pre-K to our students who are enrolled in our programs. As students access our pre-k programs we support their growth and development through evidence based programming such as letters second step and glad we provide our teachers

[00:10:31] with professional learning on these programs to support student development of critical skills such as language and literacy and problem solving and emotional management our final strategy is supporting students as they transition into kindergarten and throughout the year so beyond offering pre-k we also support kindergarten readiness through additional opportunities for preschool-aged children. This includes programs such as Hippie, which is a home visiting program, early literacy offerings, and Bridge to K. For our students entering kindergarten, we use fall assessments to support our students' learning needs. So as I previously shared, we do look in the fall

[00:11:09] at our kindergartners in three areas: reading, math, and self-regulation. And the assessments we use are defined by the Virginia Kindergarten Readiness program and that includes the VALS, EMAS and SIBRS, which are all required by the state. So this slide specifically looks at literacy in the VALS assessment. We provide differentiated instruction to our students who score in the high-risk category on the fall in the VALS and we can see from this slide that the percentage of kindergartners meeting VALS benchmarks rose nearly five percentage points from fall to spring. It is important to note this is not a pre and post test and the expectations change over time and increase as

[00:11:47] students age up so as we wrap up this section the key takeaways from our pre-k area are we have more of our kindergarten students entering with pre-k experiences we've increased our ability to serve students and our pre-k programs and we have greater levels of inclusion in pre-k so I will now turn it back over to the meeting managers thank you very much miss Neal at this time we would like to invite school board members for comments and questions mr.

[00:12:22] Dunn thank you I thank you for this great presentation I want to ask how how does this how does the potential expansion of Montessori tuition based Montessori play into this desire to expand pre-k well I can answer that so we do have a tuition based model right now that is a pilot at Great Falls and we do have a span of the ranging from reduced tuition no tuition and then full tuition paying so we are continuing to look at what we're learning there to see if it's a model that is replicable with the expansion of Montessori's into other

[00:13:01] parts of the county as well and and you go back to the slide showing the increasing number of I think it's one of the second side it had the three lines on it showing the number of students receiving pre-k has increased so for the yellow line within STPS or VPI Fairfax County program to go from 22% to 32% that's it that's a great trajectory but where did the money come for that and you know I've looked through past budgets I haven't seen any proposals and past projects either under the superintendent or previous ones for you know

[00:13:37] allocating additional monies to support a pre-k expansion so not having a formal proposal it's it's happened but I don't know if it's happened inadvertently or by deliberate design and and then if we understand you know the choices that are being made between you know investing in expanded pre-k versus other potential investments we mr. done we did set aside funding to expand pre-k I think it was 2 million but I would have to ask miss burden I can text a friend

[00:14:14] Lisa I think you're nodding oh Matthews here mr. Norton can you clarify what we included in the budget for pre-k expansion over the last several years please yes and in all three years FY 24 25 and 26 we included about two million dollars each year to expand 10 to 12 classrooms each of those three years I think it was 2.1 in one of those three years but roughly two point two million dollars for three years running it it seems extremely modest in a four point one billion dollar budget to be able to increase the percentage of pre

[00:14:50] pre-k students to you know by 10% with only a couple is it a couple million overall over several years or a couple million per year for the last few few years yeah so it would be a cumulative investment of six million dollars so I mean that's going to be one part of it while I can't speak to the percentages on the chart specifically I can say that we've also you know seen changing numbers and you know the number special education students being served obviously with the inclusive models that have been added so you know I can

[00:15:26] certainly go back and do some research to try to you know figure out that difference that you're sort of perceiving versus what's actually happening if I could just add a couple things to Matthews comment so that cumulative effect is a little bit over six million dollars that's 34 classrooms so it's over it's like 650 additional kids out of several thousand so you can kind of do the math on that piece additionally the county has expanded access and services. So this is looking at FCPS and county-based services. Our program is different than the county program, but county numbers are included in this increase to some degree as well. Would it be possible to disaggregate

[00:16:03] those in a Friday letter? It would be possible. Thank you. Yeah. Dr. Dr. Anderson. Oops, I'm sorry. Mr. Frisch. I think this is an interesting chart to talk about a little bit. When we talk about, and I think Dr. Presidio just mentioned, other types of pre-k experiences. There's a recent state law, I think in the last two or three years, that required some more formal mechanisms

[00:16:43] for judging pre-k experiences outside of public schools. Can you talk a little bit about that and any, I believe there's now a scorecard that the the state maintains for for judging those things and part of that includes some type of curriculum maybe not to the levels that one would expect an FCPS but something better than what was before yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna start a little bit and I'm gonna ask miss Pilsen who's our director of early childhood and works in collaboration with the county on our joint initiative because expanding access

[00:17:19] to preschool is a joint county and FCPS initiative but generally mr. Frisch I think captured it well is that there are new state requirements for program quality both for preschool programs in school divisions private preschool programs community-based services that don't necessarily meet the same standards as a full-time preschool program or part-time preschool program so there are child care subsidies and different things that are supported with those state funds what I will say and Lisa might expound on this a little bit is we worked in partnership with the county through SCIPPT over the last

[00:17:55] couple years to develop a new equitable readiness plan as it pertains to preschool experiences and early childhood so we collaborate with them on an ongoing basis and we provide actually curriculum materials and support to some of the community-based providers but Lisa do you want to add anything Dr.

[00:18:14] Presidio I think you captured everything can you think of anything else that we could be doing to formalize relationships with the independent providers I know in my community there's a preschool that just launched in the Kingsley Commons community for example great program with curriculum but again as noted they're not all created equal right and the same could be said within our schools right the standards are much higher but they're not all created equal because there's every experience is going to be different what can we be doing more to collaborate and while we also acknowledge that the only real

[00:18:51] solution to this problem is a state funded universal pre-k experience for every student yeah absolutely and that's part of the board's legislative package and if we want to we could talk a little bit about the affordability believe it's one of the priorities if I'm not mistaken it is it absolutely is and if we want to week today we could talk a little bit more about some of the affordability issues that families face in Fairfax County because you know for our preschool programs for example their income limits and thresholds so most of the families that we're talking about to meet those income thresholds is at 200 percent of the federal poverty level which is sixty six thousand dollars so

[00:19:30] you know that we were allowed to go to above that for a small percentage of our students to 350 but that's still a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars and you know the costs of childcare are significant if families aren't able to access the income based programs so there's a lot of affordability issues but in terms of your your question about the relationship with private providers we really partner with the county on that and they are staffed and funded to actually coordinate those services so we're a supplement not a lead on that so we share curriculum again we offer opportunities for providers to

[00:20:07] participate in professional development and things that we're doing but the main technical assistance is provided through the county staff and I'm not advocating that we take that over because I have a feeling it would not come with that's why that's why that partnership with the guy so important I think we would all benefit from learning more about the curriculum that we're providing the training that we're offering etc because I think that is critical you know the quality matters significantly because it's not just the experience that creates the opportunity for the kid when they enter kindergarten right it's the quality of the experience right there's a difference between being in daycare and being in a more formalized academic setting where you're

[00:20:45] learning how classrooms function and you're learning other essential skills so figuring out a way to ensure that those trainings the curriculum is out there as broadly as possible and perhaps us knowing more about how we're helping to make that happen because in essence we are subsidizing these private providers in their ability to meet the state standard yeah which benefits us too it does and I think that's a really good point our partnership around that work in terms of you know internally the office for early child in Fairfax and in Fairfax County work together so FCPS in Fairfax County but that's also a

[00:21:23] joint skipped initiative it's one of the priority initiatives for skip so we partner and talk about this work and share those practices and resources there but we could do probably a better job sharing some of what's happening at skip with the full board I would love to see like a video at an upcoming board meeting where we talk about this is one of the components to our early childhood puzzle. The last thing I would say is hopefully we continue to make progress here and then we don't have to do it anymore because the state steps in and provides the funding for Universal. That's the only thing that's ever worked in any other state in the country is when the state says it's required and here's funding. If I could just opine on that for one second on the funding. I think

[00:22:01] they just did it in New Mexico. I might have the state wrong. And Matthew and others I mean would probably have to check my math on this but the affordability issues that I was kind of mentioning you know even for those limited families that could go to 350% of the federal poverty level the Department of Health and Human Services says that affordable childcare would be 7% of your pre-tax income so you're talking about way more money than you could actually that the actual cost in Fairfax County to get childcare preschool on the public market would be over $20,000 a family at that 350% percent threshold the seven percent recommended by the Department of Health

[00:22:41] and Human Services is like eight thousand dollars so that income gap is huge and that's why we see in our numbers our families saying that cost is a barrier right because we don't have that universal funding or we're not at least funding to a higher level beyond what we currently fund that so I appreciate the board's priority of having this as a legislative priority and it will always feel like a broken disjointed conversation as long as we're talking about it as childcare right and as long as we're trying to fit these pieces it's like fitting a square peg into a round hole for the purposes of the conversation when the state could just decide we don't means test kindergarten we don't means test elementary school we shouldn't be doing

[00:23:20] the same thing for for early childhood mr. moon thank you thanks for the presentation just a couple of questions regarding the a 6.1 million dollars that we saw on slide number 13 so this question may go to mr. Norton or dr.

[00:23:46] procedure, when you stated that that figure is cumulative investment, what I'm trying to understand is whether all you, I remember hearing Mr. Norton saying $2 million first year, another $2 million, and another $2 million.

[00:24:06] That's a cumulative $6 million. Is that first $2 million? First $2 million, did that go into the base? So when you say second $2 million, so for the second year, total investment is $4 million.

[00:24:21] And then third year, another $2 million goes into the base of the budget, so it's $6 million. So annually at the present time, it's $6 million is in the base. So Matthew is going to help clarify that, but we believe that.

[00:24:37] I believe that's correct. Go ahead, Matthew. Yeah, that's exactly accurate, Mr. Moon. You have the numbers perfectly right. So, okay. So, you know, a community could be even, you know, you could say $2 million, $4 million, $6 million, so it could be described as altogether $4 million. But right now, it's $6 million is in the base.

[00:25:00] Correct. Okay. So with that, another set of data that you gave us shows that there may be another, based upon, I guess this is survey questions, from those parents who did not put their children through pre-K, 25% of the families indicate that there were barriers and mostly cost.

[00:25:31] So that's about 250 kids. I'm assuming they are from throughout the county. Throughout the county, so there could be some facility implications as well. But if you were to accommodate the needs of these 25 percent, about 250 youngsters, how much would you be able to estimate?

[00:25:55] How much would be required? Well, we'd have to run the calculations on that. But basically, we'd need about another 14 to 15 classrooms based on the state class size limits that we have for educating students.

[00:26:12] So per class cost, I don't have off the top of my head. So we could we could get that to you. So would you be able to come up with perhaps if you have a little more time to let us know? Not necessarily today, but sometime soon.

[00:26:28] It would be roughly three million dollars. Three million dollars. OK, thank you. that's what i need to know thank you mr moon uh miss lady thank you uh thank you the report um when i ran for school board this was one of my number of priorities because um students need to read and have numeracy and literacy as we know by third grade so i'm actually looking at slide 10 and i'm going to piggyback a little bit off of my colleague but my curiosity and i looked at the

[00:27:02] the report as well and it shows a little bit more in depth of the 600 1,060 reported right reported residing in Fairfax County prior to kindergarten to better stand any barriers these families were asked why their student did not attend about half reported this arrangement was based on the family's preference on the specific needs of their child my question is when did we survey these folks so this is when they do their kindergarten registration so at the start when they're registering their child thank you can we perhaps follow up at the end of the first semester of school and ask the same question I'm curious to know if they would change now that their kid is in

[00:27:41] kindergarten maybe they're a little bit more aware of how they're behind versus their peers I'm just trying to leverage opportunity here because these could be the people who could really be our advocates out in the community of why they if they had it to do over again would they have perhaps done it differently yeah I mean that's certainly something we can look into misleading okay I just I just think we don't know we don't know and you know it's just I think there might might be more there obviously the percentage of families that have excessive barriers you know that's something that's

[00:28:20] different and the 24% of the families that did not state a reason I'd also follow up with and see if they might provide one or and I don't know how I I don't write good surveys, but I trust Lisa Hill's office to help do that in however we would articulate that.

[00:28:36] But I'm anxious to have a follow-up related to that. Thanks. Dr. Anderson. Thank you. I have a number of questions. But I'm going to start with, what is your evaluation of student readiness based on the preschool type that they've attended?

[00:28:55] Not just that they attended preschool. Yeah, so it's a great question. And some board members might remember that we were part of a longitudinal study that wrapped up really around the pandemic time. Actually, it was interrupted during the pandemic and did not fully resume that looked at long term impact based on programming types.

[00:29:16] So a full time public FCPS preschool program versus private preschool program versus part time versus a couple of different versions of essentially different child care services and the quality of the program.

[00:29:32] matters greatly right so similar to what mr. Frisch was mentioning you know in our program and this is not even necessarily true in private preschool programs but we have state licensed teachers who have gone through an education preparation program pass their certification exams receive ongoing professional development and support from our early childhood office use an evidence-based curriculum and you can see that in the results in terms of how students perform now obviously you have to control for certain demographic factors and everything but that's what the UVA study was really working on but we don't collect that internally we don't have the we don't have the ability

[00:30:11] to do that we don't have the means to do that because you have to collect the information from all of these different providers so because I would be curious to see because it would lend some greater support to the fact that we need to lean into perhaps one model over the other yeah speaking of models I would for you to speak to the four models that we have regarding inclusion and just full disclosure one of the things that I've always been worried about is the state mandates particular inclusion targets I've always been worried that that's usurping the IEP team decisions that are supposed to be individualized

[00:30:47] and different cohorts of kids are going to present differently can you speak a little bit in terms of how we balance this yeah it's an excellent question I I apologize if there's some echo on this I'm trying to get this adjusted well so I think the first thing I would say is that when we talk about our inclusion work whether it's at the preschool level or the general education K through 12 level we talk about the least restrictive environment that we want to provide services in but we recognize as part of the IEP process that we will continue to offer a continuum of services and honor the decision of the

[00:31:23] IEP team which is really driven in terms of setting based on you know parent recommendations because they know their students needs most so we're not forcing anybody to be in an inclusive experience if they prefer to have something that's a little bit more self-contained then we continue to provide those options for families in terms of the state targets were above the state targets now for inclusion at the preschool level and I do want to recognize all the work that Lisa's done I think it's excellent leadership work that she's done with her team to move us basically from just you know three years ago to a handful of classrooms to over a hundred and sixty-six inclusive classrooms and you

[00:32:00] know that's obviously by supporting our schools and our teachers that are doing this work which gets to your first question which is we have these four different models how are these different models working and one of the reasons that we went with different models when we started this work is we wanted to have flexibility at the school level because we knew this was going to be a practice change for teachers and for administrators so we wanted some flexibility about how to do inclusion so we developed the four models the first model is the single teacher model it's a great model but it requires a duly licensed early childhood educator and special education credentials so you've

[00:32:35] got to have two credentials most people don't have that and in that model all of the students are in an inclusive setting they get their special education services and their general education services from the same teacher but again there's not that many duly certified teachers so knowing that we couldn't just rely on that model to move forward with our inclusion work we introduced the co-teaching or excuse me the paired teaching model next which is where teachers that are working in a special education classroom in IAS and teachers that are working in the general education classroom in IAS move students

[00:33:14] throughout the day to create inclusive learning environments it beats the state definitions of inclusion we leaned into that model because it that it did make sense in terms of service delivery available staffing but in terms of teacher feedback we've received feedback that that model can also be challenging because as you can imagine those of us particularly have worked in you know schools with little ones know that transitions are very difficult right so transitioning students throughout the day can be very challenging get students off track and requires a lot of redirection from staff so that model we're going to continue to use but that model is going to probably be more phased

[00:33:53] out for the other two models that we have the itinerant model and then the co-teaching model so in the itinerant model we have a special education teacher an IA who push into the general education classroom and provide specially designed instruction and support for the the students IEP services that teacher can push into multiple classrooms and it works great it's very efficient but one of the pieces of feedback that we've had with that is that sometimes that can be challenging for the special education staff and it can be challenging for the general education staff because that teachers only there for part of the day right so they don't have the same

[00:34:31] ability to plan together and work together throughout the day so we've introduced our co-teaching model which is pairing special education students teachers general education students and teachers together throughout the day and we've gotten a lot of positive feedback on this model because teachers again have the ability to develop a collaborative teaching relationship with their with their partners it's less disruptive there are fewer transitions and that this is a model that we're promoting more I think as we continue this inclusion work so you're gonna see more of the single teacher but again that's a licensure so we probably won't see dramatic growth in that but we'll

[00:35:08] see more growth in the itinerant and the co-teaching model and probably less use of the paired model thank you that was very helpful I'd like to bring attention to page 67 which is in the report I don't believe you have a an accompanying slide it's the heat map that shows where programs are located and where need is located and I know there's been an effort to include programs where the needs are but what I have found at least in the areas that I represent is the space has become a real issue have we leaned at all into providing something

[00:35:44] rather than nothing even if it means a little bit of travel to a place where they would be space even though it may not be in the community is that part of the conversation at all it is and you know this is an area where I really appreciate the support from the facilities team because this is a facilities driven issue right like in an ideal situation we get the program located as close as possible to the students home setting but that's not always possible for a variety of different reasons so we work very closely with facilities to consider what we can do to get the program situated as closely

[00:36:20] as possible and you know we're continuing to develop really like a multi-year plan to even move some programs around so that it might open up some space in a school where there's a greater area need in that community by moving another program to another school and facilities has been great to work with that's part of our inclusion work too is getting general education and special education programs co-located at the same building so we've got 17 different sites it's around I think 17 sites that were priority sites right now over the next three years that we're looking to try to do some programmatic moves but it just never works out perfectly but we're doing the

[00:36:58] best we can on that thank you can you speak to kind of you know over the last few years because I think it's been kind of the same heat map have we had any real significant change I'd have to probably go back and analyze that a little bit more to be able to determine the change over the last couple years but you're right that the same neighborhoods that we've seen historically or that have need or the same neighborhoods that continue to have need I would definitely like to have that exploration my next set of questions are around page 35 but we have some of the data regarding students

[00:37:34] entering kindergarten and I just generally want to be mindful and better understand how we set these targets I was always of the mindset that we would set the targets based on where we are but that doesn't seem to be the case and miss Neal if you wouldn't mind speaking to this for example for economically disadvantaged students in 25 26 their actual data was that 73 percent of them receive pre-k experience but the 27 20 the 26 27 target is 72 percent one

[00:38:09] percentage point lower than current I can you explain a little bit as to why that's the approach yes I'm going to do my best dr. Anderson so I think if the board is looking at the report on on page 35 is probably a helpful chart to look at for all of our all of our metrics that have targets we looked at where our students were overall and by student group at the baseline when we prior to starting our strategic plan and then we mapped a growth line from the baseline to 2030 and calculated the annual amount of growth needed overall

[00:38:44] and for each student group to hit our 2030 targets if you recall previously we had not set a target for pre-k and decided to set sort of a interim 2030 target of 80% as we better understood the data recognizing that pre-k is not compulsory and that we have a large percentage of our students without pre-k that's a parent choice they're making that decision it's not representing a barrier so last year we brought back the recommendation that we would set a 20/30 target of 80% pre-k for our students and what we didn't do last year was map out

[00:39:20] the year-over-year change that needed to happen from the baseline so you have the growth lines what you're gonna see and it's not just this data point you'll see it in some of our other data points is sometimes when we exceed our growth target for a year we're just getting ahead of the growth curve right so we've expanded we've gone beyond the target which is not a bad thing it just means we may either hit the target sooner the 2030 target sooner but we're on track so we don't go back and adjust those growth lines year over year it's just meant to be illustrative to show the border we on track or not on track with where we need to be by 2030.

[00:39:54] Thank you for that explanation. I don't think we have the same approach with school SIP plans. Can you speak to that, or do we? Well, our school improvement plans have historically been just a one-year look. And so, no, they wouldn't be setting growth targets because they've got to get there by the end of the year versus a seven-year look.

[00:40:14] But I understand that's changed for this year. I appreciate the explanation. I just really disagree because I'm a strong believer of we need to hone in from where we are because it just doesn't seem to be in alignment to me.

[00:40:32] The last small thing I will say here is I would love for us to go back to the practice of on the slides to add the accompanying page number in the report. We've lost that, and it's very helpful to make that connection. Yes, ma'am.

[00:40:49] Thank you. I'm going to take a turn. First of all, I want to thank the team all the work you've done I mean this was a very robust report with a lot of information and I know that it took a lot of work so thank you for bringing us this work one of the questions that I want to go back to you is when we're talking about the growth and expanding pre-k and and having universal pre-k which I firmly believe in but I do want you to address what the I don't want to say barriers but how facilities and space limitations impact how quickly and how

[00:41:25] we can expand it and not just for general pre-k services but also how we integrate inclusion and the different models and how the space limitations dictate what we can and can't do yeah thank you for the question I think on the inclusion piece first I would say the biggest barrier to inclusive preschool is how we historically cited programs right so we've had special education preschool classes historically in general education

[00:42:00] preschool classes and those programs were not always in the same school you can't do inclusion if you don't have the students necessary to include right so that's been a really big jigsaw puzzle to figure out how we can promote more inclusion so where we have co-located programs now those students in all those schools are in inclusive settings if the families are selecting that the challenge now is to co-locate some of those historical programs that have been at different sites so the facilities team and mr. Gordon is here and is he's just been phenomenal to work with and his team to really try to help us map

[00:42:37] out over the next three years are we able to maybe move some of the sites around so that we could co-locate SPED special education and general education together we think we've got around 17 sites where that might be possible over the next three years but then to your general question like other factors come into play similar to what dr. Anderson was talking about we don't want to move a program so far away that it's that you know little our littlest learners are gonna be on a bus for a long time right so we have to take those factors into consideration so it's ongoing work and it's really is a large jigsaw puzzle but

[00:43:13] again different departments are working on this on a regular basis and and we're making I think really good progress which we see moving from a few years ago you know again less than 10 inclusive classrooms to over 160 now so we're continuing to chip away on this thank you and the other question I want to ask is I know I know that a lot of the students that do participate in hippie were captured by the fact that they could not qualify for a head start so do

[00:43:46] we have those numbers of how many of those students we do I'm gonna see I tried to I've got a document that I'm gonna pull up here and I can share some of those numbers with you if I can find the right tab so to your point which I really appreciate is we're not serving all students universally right now so what we've tried to do is provide supplemental services to families that can't access the full-time services so the hippie program last year we had over 200 students that participated in that that's and again most of these programs are a joint partnership now with the community engagement office and the

[00:44:26] early childhood office so that's home instruction for parents of preschool youth so the parents get a lot of support in terms of how to work with their students materials that they can use to bolster academic and social readiness then our bridge to kindergarten program has been the historical program that we've offered for quite a while now for families that can't access our preschool program it's a summer based program and the students get an opportunity to participate in some school readiness activities and work together on academics as well as social emotional readiness for the school

[00:45:03] year to start so we funded last year in our summer learning program slots for about 575 students which was great and that was an increase over past year so we devoted we didn't have a bigger summer budget we just devoted more in the summer learning budget to that and then we've got other programs like the early literacy program that provides some school-like activities we had 425 students participate in that it looks like 155 in our family literacy program last year and then we have all ages read together program partnership with the county government we had over a hundred students participate in that so quite a

[00:45:41] few students and families are taking advantage of those supplemental opportunities so I don't know if you're able to speak to the cultural competency of the programs like family lit early lit and hippie mm-hmm well in terms of cultural competency I think the biggest piece there is trying to make sure that all of our students and families understand the opportunities to participate in these and that we're providing you know multilingual learner access and family access with translations and supports and that's again where our multilingual learner office also provides support to some of these initiatives yeah I'm just familiar with those programs and know the people

[00:46:21] that try to implement them and know that specifically the people that are selected to help participate and teach are teaching in the areas where there's a language a significant language minority and if it's Spanish if it's Korean if it's Urdu then those are the people that are teaching in those communities and particularly with early learning and being the first introduction to a lot of immigrant families the fact that those are the teachers that they're first seen is a huge benefit for them to gain that trust

[00:46:57] for when the children will eventually enter into school so I just I just want to highlight because I know the work that that office does and wanted to highlight the importance of that I will before I go to mr. McElveen I just want to say that you know universal pre-k is critical I know my predecessor that was one of her passion projects that is of mine and of a state like New Mexico which is one of the poorest states in our Union can initiate universal pre-k there's reason that a state like ours can't so thank you again for all the work that

[00:47:33] you've done. Mr. McElveen for his first turn. Well thank you thank you so much for the presentation and obviously this is work we've been engaged in for several decades now and we've gotten somewhere. I wouldn't say we've gotten to where we need to be and I think many of us were hoping as opposed to just incremental growth we would eventually start to see exponential growth but it hasn't gotten to that point nonetheless we are seeing several hundred added per year which which is an accomplishment so I think the you know we've talked a

[00:48:10] lot about the six million I do have a question for mr. Norton which is and just going back to the jigsaw puzzle analogy it may not be possible to come up with this number but what have we estimated what it would take to get to 100% enrollment of all the folks on the wait list that's something we would need to do some research on for you okay well I can submit a budget question to that point and again it may not be something we can come to readily just given the the challenge of this but I think what you hear around the table is a

[00:48:45] commitment from all of us to bring this weightless down as much as we can thank you so in the interest of time we're not going to do go backs because we have to do the other presentation but feel free to hold your question for after the second presentation for the second part of our work session will yes okay for the second part of our work session we will discuss our multilingual learners

[00:49:23] progress towards English language proficiency as a reminder we serve approximately one in four multilingual learners in Virginia we're going to start with some context about our multilingual learners our multilingual learners are students who are working towards academic and social English language proficiency or ELP the percent of multilingual learners at each ELP level is shown on the screen and this is for last school year each year multilingual learners English language skills are assessed through the WIDA assessment which evaluates skills in reading writing listening and speaking

[00:50:01] the state sets expectation for multilingual learners to make regular progress towards English language proficiency each year with the ultimate goal for our students to successfully exit our services we are focused on this data as part of our strategic plan because we see that students with higher levels of language proficiency are more successful in other academic assessments.

[00:50:25] This chart looks at the percent of students who passed both reading and math SOLs in third and eighth grade by their ELP level. Students with higher languages higher levels of language proficiency are much more likely to pass these assessments. Students who recently gained proficiency in exited services, the last column, have rates above the division average.

[00:50:51] We continue to see strong gains overall across student groups on this measure. The data on this slide is all of our intersectionality data as it presents multilingual learner data by student group. All student groups have improved from baseline.

[00:51:08] Economically disadvantaged students and Hispanic students showed the largest gains, 17 and 16 percentage points respectively. Because of these gains, we are seeing a slight closing of the gap between student groups. We continue to focus our multilingual learners with disabilities who have made progress, but remain further away from our 2030 goals.

[00:51:32] We also look at progress by ELP level. We have seen large increases across the board, in particular for students assessed at ELP Level 3, up 19 percentage points, and Level 4, up 17 percentage points from baseline.

[00:51:50] Last year, 17% of our multilingual learners demonstrated proficiency and exited multilingual learner services. The rate has increased by 7 percentage points since baseline. This is not a data point we would expect to see close to 100%, as we don't expect students to exit when they are just beginning to acquire English language skills.

[00:52:16] Students generally exit services from higher ELP levels. Last year, 24% of students assessed at Level 3 and 53% of students assessed at Level 4 were able to exit services.

[00:52:32] This slide shows FCPS rates of progress and proficiency from the 24-25 school year, the most recently available year we have with comparable data, and the context of the state average and other large divisions in Northern Virginia.

[00:52:50] Our rate of progress exceeded the state average and all other divisions in Northern Virginia. Our rate of proficiency, or students exiting services, exceeded the state average in the majority of the divisions in Northern Virginia.

[00:53:05] While individual data for divisions has not yet to be released for last year, we anticipate that FCPS will continue to outperform the state on both proficiency and progress. We are pursuing four core strategies this school year to support multilingual learners' study language acquisition.

[00:53:26] Let's take a look at each one now. Our first strategy considers how we support all multilingual learners' core English language development. We have purchased basal resources at all levels to provide explicit ELD instruction.

[00:53:41] Teachers and school leaders receive clear instructional expectations and targeted professional development to support implementation. This past year, we launched walkthrough tools to help division leaders monitor and adjust implementation of ELD programming and strategies.

[00:53:59] We also provided schools with supports to ensure students are scheduled to maximize language acquisition. Finally, we now require system-wide ELD common assessments in speaking and writing that supports teachers with adjusting instruction for our students.

[00:54:17] Our second strategy is to reinforce English language skills throughout the school day. We continue to support classroom and content area teachers with effective strategies to support our multilingual learners. Last year, we had over 700 teachers receive professional development in Project GLAD, a research-based program where teachers learn how to tailor their instruction to provide explicit linguistic support.

[00:54:42] Last year, we also began offering educators the opportunity to earn a multilingual learner micro-credential. Our third strategy is to support students and schools in not making expected progress.

[00:54:59] Our multi-tiered systems of support is a structure to address the needs of students who are not making academic progress. We are providing targeted learning opportunities for our educators to support our multilingual learners with disabilities. We are intentionally focused in this area given the gaps we are seeing.

[00:55:18] We also continue to require schools not meeting WIDA progress expectations to develop an associated SIP goal. Some of these schools also receive support through Project Momentum, which provides additional monitoring and professional development through the year.

[00:55:36] This work is paying off. We are seeing gains in the percent of students who are making WIDA progress. Our final strategy is to partner with students and families in English language acquisition.

[00:55:51] This year, we began posting score reports for WIDA and the Alternative Access Assessment in CIS ParentVUE. We also initiated a number of changes to make documents in CIS more language accessible for our families.

[00:56:06] And finally, we have provided guidance to schools to increase language accessibility at parent and family large school events. Our key findings can be found on the screen.

[00:56:21] We know how critical language skills are as our students progress through FCPS. Last year, 60% of multilingual learners met state standards for language acquisition, up 15 percentage points from baseline, and 17% of our students reached full English language proficiency.

[00:56:43] And this concludes our presentation of highlights from our goal one report, and I will turn the meeting back over to our meeting managers. - Thank you, at this point we invite members to ask questions, beginning with Mr. Dunn.

[00:57:00] - Thank you, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the analysis that goes into the services, the support services that you provide to multilingual learners, and whether there's been an assessment or evaluation similar to the audit that was done of the advanced academics program and the special education program several years ago, just to make sure that we are taking account best practices lessons learned latest research so that we're delivering the best most evidence-based program that provides holistic support to multilingual learners that's a great question so the short answer is we have

[00:57:39] not commissioned an external program evaluation I can't even I wouldn't recall the last year we would have done that but recently that has not happened what I would say internally though is we do a lot of program review work so we have a set of program standards that we follow in terms of services for students and that includes everything related to correct curriculum that we want to use the instructional practices that we want to use the assessment practices the professional development that we're providing so that is updated on an annual

[00:58:15] basis based on any emerging research in terms of program improvements that we could make to our program standards so our internal multilingual learner office goes through that kind of review process on an annualized basis and that's similar to what we do in other content areas in the chief academic office as well so that information is really important in terms of making sure that we have the most updated you know research-based program standards but we obviously also look at the data and look for trends and gaps like where are we making improvement where do we see places where maybe we're not making the growth that we would like to make as fast as we would like to make it we look

[00:58:52] at qualitative information that we get from our teachers and we get from our administrators about program services generally we collect information after professional development about the utility that those participants found and what they got and whether or not it met their needs and was going to be something that they could turn around and use in their practice so all of that is part of that internal process but we haven't commissioned an external review recently do you feel like that would be a benefit to test CPS I think you know those are always very costly and they're very time-consuming I think we probably

[00:59:30] would want to consider what the board's requests were in terms of priorities and scope and see if we could maybe meet those internally before incurring that cost and provide you with information about kind of the pros and cons of different approaches internal versus external can you share what what is the average age or is there you know a chart because I didn't see in the presentation when most multilingual learners are arriving in our schools so they mostly arriving at kind of at the elementary level at the middle school level high school level so you know mr. Polio's here I don't know that he would have that information off the top of his head they arrive at all ages right I

[01:00:10] think Washington DC area is also somewhat unique because we get a lot of resettlements just in terms of where we're located so immigrant resettlements that are supported but you know by the federal government so sometimes we'll see waves you know probably one of the more recent waves was a lot of Afghan students refugees that were resettled here in terms of the breakdown I don't know rich do you have data off the top of your head on that I do not have that I will say that a large percentage of our multilingual learners are are born

[01:00:47] here certainly in the United States and so kindergarten is the number one grade level where the multilingual learners enter ninth grade is another a great level that has a high percentage but I can get that information hey rich and I were talking about at the high school level recently and we're looking at some data and it's around at the high school level right now recently arrived so those are students that are coming to us at the high school age recently arrived in the country across the division we had roughly around 500 students currently enrolled this the school year that were more recently arrived at the ninth grade level no 9 through 12 across the entire school division okay and

[01:01:26] that's last year's data because we don't have this year's data so yeah and and and so do the approaches differ when I mean obviously it must differ because when you're receiving a ninth grade student right I mean there's a certain amount of learning that you're assuming that they have acquired in their own country whatever that was but or it may have been nothing at all right so how do you how do you support those high school students as much as you can someone who's entering at the kindergarten level yeah so that's another great question I'll start and then Rich can jump in and add anything as well so we talk about SLIFE students so students that might come to us with limited or interrupted

[01:02:03] formal education so that is like the target population that has the most need so we could have a student who recently arrived but is on track there's no disruption to their educational experience we just need to support their language acquisition needs and access to the core classes that they need for you know a regular four-year graduation pathway if they came in at ninth grade and that's typically what we see and what we do for students with interrupted formal education though we have to really look and diagnose where is that student at so some of those students are going to need additional intervention services and they're going to need more basic introductory coursework before that

[01:02:43] they can be working on grade level but again when we looked at our data recently around this we only had like a dozen students that needed to have intensive remediation and intervention before they were able to access immediately core academic classes so it depends on the grade level it depends on how significant their interruption to their education was again I'm you know those 11 students we're talking about kids that haven't been in school some ever or for you know many many years thank you yeah miss Marin yes I

[01:03:20] appreciate seeing all that data I think we should celebrate that and congratulations it's huge if we could just have slide 33 up please madam clerk deputy clerks I just wanted to review so so these strategies you know the basal resources caught my attention because we're having this whole discussion about Lexia and buying an additional resource and it was said here we bought these basal resources so again I am hard-pressed to understand why we continue to use Lexia that we bought before this before benchmark advanced

[01:03:59] this seems to be working and you know if Lexia is as profound as it said to be or it is helping to this it should have been part of this so I just want to underscore that I don't see how Lexia is needed for this set of basal resources but look I I need to speak to something that's been very adamant or very noticeable in the last few first few weeks of school I've heard from many many parents and teachers that they did not start the school year with a teacher in their classroom and while we know that that's sometimes there's you know

[01:04:38] challenges this rebalancing approach of not hiring external teachers did damage and you know I asked the superintendent about this a week before the end December to September 30th and was told it's being figured out and then we were told on Friday that it's being figured out well over the weekend a staff member contacted me.

[01:04:59] And this is what this staff member said. They said, I'm an ESOL teacher at an elementary school, was told on February 1 that they were de-staffed. The option was to become a first grade teacher at another school based on the licensure.

[01:05:16] But the person said, it's not the position I applied for. And now I'm being forced into this other position. I worked so hard to get an endorsement in ESOL. And now I'm looking at other school districts for employment. So if we really mean this, we can't be not putting teachers in classrooms until the sixth and seventh week of school.

[01:05:39] The quarter ends at the end of the month. So I said that I would be doing this, and I will. I want to bring a motion so that we can have our teachers starting in school to meet this strategy one from the get go. So to encourage this conversation, I'm proposing this motion, which is allowable to do under a work session that I move the school board direct the superintendent to conclude rebalancing of staffing and fill vacant instructional positions including by

[01:06:05] initiating hire of external candidates no later than October 9th. Dr. Anderson?

[01:06:24] Thank you. Ms. Marin has made a motion. I will second the motion so we can have the conversation but I thought it was Thursday. No, given the urgency I you know I shared last week with my colleagues that we need to act on this now because it's clear that for some sort of budgetary approach that either substitute teachers are being used I've heard all sorts of issues in one of my schools a credentialed teacher was being paid as a substitute for six weeks instead of being hired because she was outside the system in another elementary school a

[01:07:02] teacher was given a verbal offer to work but was not hired in another school the teacher left and a rotating group of subs went through because the preferred candidate because the preferred candidate I'm sorry what time that was your time that was your time oh what's the time to speak to emotion I think I'm not sure if we had budgeted for that but we'll make sure why don't you wrap up your sentence and we'll make sure we circle back I will say too it's hard to concentrate when there are literally three or four people talking to my side I would appreciate if you could please no it distracts me if you could please

[01:07:38] honor me honor that for me that is all we will circle back to this after we've completed with the speakers sure so you are next dr. Anderson just very quickly I'll just take a minute or so just to speak to this point before I get to my questions on this this is what I want to speak to the Germaness of this because it came up during the side conversation it is speaking to strategies that are going to impact a strong start to the schools so I do think it is germane so I wanted to raise that secondarily I do know that this has been an ongoing issue with the schools that I represent in the Mason district where the rebalancing

[01:08:17] has been a concern a question since pretty much May and I definitely understand May June July all throughout the summer we need to do that because we need to tighten up where we've lost students but it is still going on right now and it is causing a gap for students who haven't that regular teacher in front of them so one of the things that to read that I understood from when my principal days in Loudoun County where there would be a date in October by which if you did not have a full-time teacher in place you couldn't hire a full-time

[01:08:51] teacher you literally had to finish the year with a with a substitute do we have the same kind of approach yes ma'am we have a date certain for several topics one our de-staffing and rebalancing was centered on enrollment patterns across the school division so that we began seeing really as Miss Marin pointed out last year so we've been working on rebalancing our staffing really for over

[01:09:28] a year and I really think people staff principals educators our HR team our region offices for how hard they've been working on this to make sure that we have the best staff in front of our students most experienced staff I do know that at the beginning of every year our enrollment tends to tick up over time so we look at the end of the end of September which was last week for those numbers because in some cases enrollment grows in some areas and in some schools declines depending on enrollment patterns so last week there

[01:10:04] was a meeting to determine the staffing and I believe our regions and HR team and principals have worked through those situations I believe mr. Solomon's January if we have an opening to dr. Anderson's point that we don't fill with a full-time person after that but could you comment on what that date is and that we do have a substitute after that time absolutely it's in the January February timeframe and it's a pretty standard practice and process not only in Northern Virginia school systems, but in school systems throughout the region, just because of the point in time that you're at in that year? I think one of the things that's made this year

[01:10:42] seem more challenging is that when I arrived in July of 2022, we had over 1,300 vacant teaching positions for a start of school, which was six weeks away. So we were scrambling like every other division across the country to find staff recall that and so as we worked really hard to hire teachers we didn't have areas where we were overstaffed in areas we were understaffed because we were looking for staff in every position honestly so over time in these last several years we've gone from a

[01:11:17] situation where finding the most qualified effective teachers has been really challenging to a situation this year where as we've retained for the first time in several years several consecutive years of over 90% retention rate we haven't lost as many educators and therefore in our enrollment has been declining therefore we don't have as much of a need to hire new staff when we have staff that are staying and fewer students so what we wanted to make sure sure we did and I really applaud the team for taking just a pause and making

[01:11:54] sure that somebody was credentialed or had the certification to be able to be placed in a different position in the county because we wanted to keep our most experienced people in the county as you know there were several divisions around us in Montgomery County that ended up doing a riff last year and we really don't want that level of disruption which is why the team worked so very hard to try to place staff members but yes there are dates certain both September 30th for the rebalancing or that used to be called de-staffing I think and then the January February for substitute hiring it seems to be a

[01:12:31] little bit more generous than what I experienced in London County having said that when do we expect the rebalancing to be complete because I know that's been a frustration for some principals sure mr. Solomon you want to comment on that I know you and Miss Roman have been leading that work absolutely and dr.

[01:12:48] Anderson thank you very much for the question that rebalancing work is complete after the September 30th date passed and our enrollment patterns really stabilized across the division and across our schools we were able to look across any remaining vacancies fewer than a hundred throughout the division and make those determinations did we have a qualified staff member who could be considered excess in other words there weren't enough students at one school versus there were enough students at another school who could potentially be reassigned were we in a situation where the position was vacant and not needed at that school and could potentially be recaptured did we need to go ahead and advance someone who was serving in a long-term substitute

[01:13:25] capacity or whose name had previously been advanced human resources and now we're in a position to be able to hire them do we need to post the position for external recruitment because we don't have another qualified person or able person who can be reassigned into that position in FCPS all of those different things so what I think I'm hearing is that the rebalancing work is complete so if a principal happens to have a vacancy then they can fill that with candidates since that part of the work has been finished with internal staff I want to clarify we have been hiring for unique positions all along we had a

[01:14:01] chemistry position at one of our high schools and the scan that the region offices and HR did as we had no one teaching chemistry that was in an over staffed situation so we did hire from outside so we were hiring but each position was really looked at strategically did we have an internal experienced educator and if not then we of course moved to hire from outside so mr. Solomon do you want to respond to the more specific question about in terms of this being somewhat if a principal has a position I think they're

[01:14:37] still gonna work with the region office in HR but certainly they're able to hire if we need a position at this point yes ma'am and the answer is yes for those positions classroom teachers instructional assistants really most of them we've reached our pencils down moment because student enrollment patterns have relatively stabilized I do want to flag there are certain position categories that of course we're going to have to monitor and be mindful of because as dr. Reed shared we don't want to find ourselves in that rip situation or having to what really happened to be in that situation but for those position categories classroom teachers instructional assistants coaches etc

[01:15:12] moving forward very good thank you yes so I mean in summary the biggest impact honestly for this work was enrollment pattern shifting miss Anderson I just have a few questions related to the motion specifically first can we clarify whether or not this was actually a hiring freeze because I think that it's from what I'm hearing it doesn't sound like one but I was looking at it more like a pause just to make sure that we weren't hiring for particular positions and then having to let other people go is that an accurate representation of

[01:15:51] what happened that's exactly right we were in a situation where we needed to pause and potentially reassign or rebalance staff members okay and how many staff across across the division how many staff like what percentage of our staff did this impact over the course of the start I think since the start of the school year I believe it was around a hundred do you want to clarify that mr. Solomon absolutely it was a just over a hundred so under one percent of our teaching workforce of 16,000 educators gotcha and then this approach about how much did this approach save the division overall because I assume that the part of the reason that we're doing this is there's

[01:16:28] a significant cost savings and also a protection of staff to mean that we're not riffing people that have been backfilled by a new teacher despite the fact that we had some place to move them so I would imagine many of them while maybe they may be frustrated that they have to move to a different position many of them are probably still happy that they have a job so I'm just wondering about how much money did this save the decision to take this approach I think we can get back to you on that and calculate the it was close to you know there were a number of positions last year that we shared as part of our budget documents and I want to make sure we separate those from this situation

[01:17:04] but I know since July we've had roughly it was close to 300 positions we've had to rebalance so but we can get you some exact numbers for that miss Anderson I would really appreciate that because what I would like to say here is that while I understand that this is this has made us for particular spots around the County this has made could be a difficult start for some folks overall I think that this is this was a strong approach to consider related to how we can protect our workforce and at the same time provide the highest level of teacher possible the other thing that I want to say is Eric clarify is I want to

[01:17:44] make sure that we're not putting out into the ethos that we didn't have a teacher in classrooms because I do not think that that's an accurate presentation so I just want to clarify that as well I will respond that that in fact was critically important to us that we have licensed highly qualified educators in classrooms when the school year started and actually this year we've been really pleased we had so many highly qualified educators at job fairs and also interviewing and fundamentally I want to say even though you know fewer than 1% of the positions since the school year were impacted I know each one of those was it's challenging because it's real for the

[01:18:23] people involved and I I don't want to diminish that in any way because it's difficult anytime we have to make a change and a number of staff have just I really want to thank them publicly for their grace and their ability to make those changes and also the schools that receive these staff have worked really hard to to be thoughtful about that so it's it's not ideal and it goes back to I've spoken to several folks who've been in the division for quite a while it's not an unusual situation over the many years and I think dr. Ivey you probably

[01:19:00] can speak to that history as well it's not history we've seen recently since kovat because we've had you know such a shortage of teachers but dr. Ivey I saw your placard up sure I was just going to add and what a difference this process compared to processes in the past for this process the region office the RAS all of the EPS miss vermin mr. Solomon worked very carefully with each of these

[01:19:34] circumstances to look at the the schools if we did what need to move a teacher where would be the best place to move oftentimes the principal was called on the spot and was a part of the conversation and so it was a very first the thoughtful discussion around it do we really do we need to make this change and what other circumstances should we consider and then what is the best location for the teacher to transfer based on their skills the need of the

[01:20:10] school the distance you know proximity to the employee like everything was considered so which was very different from the past when I was here three years ago so I in no way want to diminish the impact that this may have on certain families or certain classrooms or certain staff members that had had to move to a different position than what they were expecting one of the things that I will say that I did hear last year is that some of these moves were made very quickly particularly with some of our assistant principals and things like that are we giving staff a little bit more time to transition

[01:20:47] between two schools now absolutely thank you for the question that was one of the pieces of feedback that we heard as well last year that it was happening very quickly and very rapidly so the standard we're trying to hold to is a two-week transition time right in the same way that we would expect someone to give us two weeks notice when they're resigning we want to try and give them two weeks notice wherever possible and whenever possible to transition and of course if the person is comfortable with and wants to go earlier we're allowing that to happen wonderful okay thank you very much thank you and thank you for that last question because it was my first on my list because I was one of the people who advocated strongly for providing staff

[01:21:26] time to make the adjustments of moving schools and that's a huge importance so while they've all been reassigned they're not they haven't all arrived yet and I also want to say as a former employee you know when I first got hired at Ferris County Public Schools I remember Betsy Goodman coming to me as my principal and she approached me not long after I had been hired with full disclosure that I had been an added position because enrollment had increased and had by year's end enrollment declined that I would be lost but hopefully picked up at another school and she reminded me that I signed

[01:22:05] a contract with Fairfax County Public Schools and not with Marshall High School so I did that I was fortunate that did not happen because we continued to actually increase enrollment because we had transitioned to the IB program and that sort of uplifted that building but there is the saying in the county the last hire first fired and thank goodness we're not pink slipping people we're reassigning them I can't think I don't think there's been a time in my tenure where really fired anybody this is the beauty of a big system is that we can relocate them I think also when I first got hired on the school board I was asking

[01:22:43] questions about where folks credentialing was housed and so for a long time in the system if you were multiple credentialed but you didn't tell your administrator that then you could stay narrowly focused but with new hr technology i believe we've captured everybody's actual endorsements and while i might prefer to stay as a high school counselor i'm certified as elementary as well. I just want to put that out there, too. And I will say I mean, I think staff do a good job. I had I lost a counselor when I was at Chantilly and same thing. I went to that person who eventually left, went to

[01:23:23] South Lakes, went to Madison, went to Edison and came back to Chantilly and currently works at Chantilly as they made their way back home again. But they were de-staffed. So and the last thing I'm going to say is, you know, HR is the only department, they're the only ones who can make offers. So just so we're clear, When I was an administrator and I wanted to hire someone as a performing arts teacher or someone in support or a counselor, I would basically call that person and say, if HR were to offer you a position, would you accept?

[01:23:54] And then explain to them, I'm going to send them an email that says that, that I will then forward to HR so HR knows that they are interested. But I do not offer you a job. And if we need a refresher for our administrators around the county that that is the case, then we will make sure that happens. But we do not offer jobs to anybody.

[01:24:12] And again, I want to say I'm grateful it's less than 1%. There's nothing worse than being transferred and finding yourself in this situation. But I am grateful to all of the tenderness with which this is approached to support people in that transition.

[01:24:30] And I'm incredibly grateful for, I believe, the millions of dollars we have saved in this process. So I obviously will not be able to support this motion, because I think it's moot. - Mr. Moon?

[01:24:53] - Actually, I raised my hand earlier to ask a question on the report itself. But now since we're in the motion, could I ask the maker of the motion, or I guess Madam Clerk, to post a motion so that we can all see the exact language?

[01:25:13] Everybody could see the exact language? - Well, did the clerks post the motion so that he could see it? Will the clerks... Entire work to consider... The clerks will post...

[01:25:28] ...see the motion. So you could see it, Mr. Moon. Can you see it?

[01:25:45] It's posted. It's up there now. Okay, let me... Okay, no later than October 9th. So let me ask the superintendent, if this motion passes, are we asking you to do something that you are unable to do?

[01:26:10] I apologize, Mr. Moon. I'm struggling just a bit because of the echo. What was the question specifically? Please, please read the motion. Okay. If this motion passes, if the motion passes, are we then asking you to do something you are unable to perform, unable to accomplish?

[01:26:39] Yes, we can. Yes, sir. We can do what the motion says. I think we're already doing that. But yes, we could. Yes, sir. Initiating hire of external candidates no later than October 9th.

[01:26:55] And you can do that. We are currently-- let me reread it again. Let's see. Let me defer to Mr. Solomon. There are always going to be vacant positions, so I don't want to get caught in this motion, right?

[01:27:13] Like, there could be, and there likely will be, staff members that go out next week, or have a leave of absence, or have a spouse transferred, or something happens in these teaching positions, which Then after October 9th, and there may or may not be somebody that we-- I don't want to-- I want to be clear that there still has to be flexibility in hiring.

[01:27:39] So I want to make sure that that's understood, that there isn't-- like, once we start the year, everyone's in class, and they're going to stay in those positions till the end of the year, because that doesn't necessarily happen. So Mr. Solomon? Absolutely. In reading the motion, it seems like it's written in a more flexible way.

[01:27:56] I'm looking at the fifth line that says including by initiating hire of external candidates for instructional positions I'm correct so in most instances at this point for our instructional positions our teaching positions I is etc yes we will be able to hire external candidates and at the same time it's important to flag we may find ourselves in certain situations where it doesn't make sense to hire an external candidate so to give you one example we may have an overage in an assistant principal position and it might make more sense to collapse that or the same for counseling positions but we review those in lockstep with Miss

[01:28:31] Roman's office on a case-by-case basis mr. Solomon the way I read I read this motion is we are directing the superintendent school board is school board is directing the superintendent higher fear all the instructional positions no later than October 9 which is this is Friday is that is that and and that be accomplished. That's my question. I think that's a good question. Thank you. I think to Dr. Reed's point there will always be some circumstance happening. There may be someone out

[01:29:11] on leave through FMLA. There may be someone who resigns that we had no knowledge of. So in a large system like ours there will always be a vacancy for one of those reasons. I would also say we won't always hire external candidates we also have our scale-up what is our for our underemployed staff where we have staff who've been going through credentialing programs who are internal staff even instructional assistants and other operational employees that would be internal candidates and I I read this

[01:29:48] to initiate the hiring of specifically external and I think in many cases we're going to have internal candidates that qualify so I want to make sure we have the flexibility to hire either internal or external. We just, we want the best candidate and the, you know, the best educator in front of our students.

[01:30:10] Okay. With those responses, I certainly do understand the urgency of the actions being needed and we need to fill a vacant instructional positions as soon as possible. But by putting a date of October 9th. I feel that that is asking that is a directing superintendent to accomplish something that I do not think she can promise to deliver. So with that, I don't want to direct the superintendent to do something that she's unable to deliver. So I'm not going to be able

[01:30:48] to support this motion. But I appreciate Ms. Mehran to bring this to our attention.

[01:30:55] Thank you, Mr. Moon. I'm going to take a quick turn. We've kind of time-wise, we've derailed. We'll have one more go back, but I do want to take a quick turn from someone that has worked in the school system for a long time. First of all, I want to celebrate that this is actually a success story of what HR has done. We were at such a deficit that we were scrambling. The fact that we're in this position means that we have enough staff and enrollment factors from one school to the other have impacted where teachers could be.

[01:31:28] And what we did first was we went to take care of the teachers that we already have so that we did not have to lay them off. If you worked at General Motors and they closed down a plant in Ohio, you could keep your job, but you may have to move to Texas.

[01:31:47] You're just moving from one school to the other. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. But you're still offered the opportunity to keep your job. If you don't want to keep your job, then you make that choice. As a colleague said, FCPS employs you, not the school.

[01:32:05] And you also have credentials which allow you to work in different areas. I have worked in a school system where we were fully staffed before, and this has happened consistently. This is not an anomaly. It was an anomaly after COVID.

[01:32:21] I think that this is the first time I've seen the care and consideration taken to make sure that teachers are placed appropriately. Most of this is settled by principals at the school level, and they do a great job. But the fact that we have this situation means that we already have teachers that we're not out there scrambling to find teachers.

[01:32:44] So I want to, number one, say that this is a success story. The percentage of teachers less than 1% is pretty remarkable with an organization our size. The fact that we have not had to lay anybody off that this has also translated into a savings is really important I think that's the message that we have to look at as a school system I feel that this motion is a motion that is putting too much on by what has been said by ours by

[01:33:19] our chief of HR by our superintendent this is something that has happened before we've worked on it we can be doing it yes there are going to be some people that are not happy with this I've worked in the system for 25 years there are people that sometimes we're not happy with what happened but at the end of the day they had the choice to take that different position or to not take that position and right now there are teachers in every classroom I just want to address one more question in terms of our substitutes and what it looks like for our substitutes that do want to do you want a full-time job I do know that

[01:33:56] there are a lot of substitutes that are highly qualified and they want to remain substitutes so of those substitutes that wanted to be employed have we been able to address some of that mr. Solomon yes ma'am of the substitutes who wanted to be contracted where we had a vacancy we were able to miss Roman and I were able to address that with our teams last week and for our substitutes that wanted to remain substitutes we were able to allow that to move forward as well thank you miss Marin for go back yeah look the reason this motion is needed is because the superintendent hasn't been clear about the impact of the situation on employees on students and on the budget despite at least my asking about it but

[01:34:34] the board should have been kept current about it I hear a lot of evasiveness and I have questions if FCPS has a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards teachers then it should be clearer and does the board need to approve that approach was this this was described to the board as a budget saving strategy and yet the superintendent today said this was in response to changes in enrollment patterns well which one is it there's a lot of very general and positive sounding language rebalance reassign placing internal candidates hiring pause in other words a hiring freeze so that no new employees would be hired even when an external candidate was there and ready to start teaching let's not split hairs about this okay and being paid wages of a sub when

[01:35:14] they're actually qualified teachers is is that how we had the budget savings this doesn't bode well for retaining teachers you know the superintendent also said this avoided a reduction in force or a riff that's one way to look at the data and we want to have low data on that but what if people are essentially self riffing okay because the ESOL teacher who wrote me she's self riffing and going to look another door in other school districts and a teacher I'm elsewhere I'm aware elsewhere in the county they self riffed you know I used to pride myself when when the superintendent would show would say at the start of the year what our fill rate was but now I understand that it's

[01:35:52] really not not full in its capture I thought this was about the budget how much was saved that's to be determined where did the cost savings come from was it not having to pay for onboarding was it not having to pay for full-time compensation we heard 300 positions we heard 100 positions I would like to know how many teachers were given more than two weeks notice and if they weren't who was given 13 12 11 10 days because I have a teacher at my school who got five days notice before school started that she left one high school to come and teach at my kids school maybe she's the only one but I'd like to know what the

[01:36:28] norm is because a lot of people are saying this year was not the norm um so the motion is on the table we will now take a vote all those in favor miss Marin miss dr. Anderson all those opposed mr. moon mr. McElveen miss lady miss Anderson and myself the motion fails and we will pick up with our

[01:37:07] report thank you for being patient I know we're eager to hear more about our multilingual learners miss Anderson thank you I just had a quick question it's actually not about the multilingual learners I want to slip back to something and I if I missed it that it was on the last report I'm or the last part of the report I apologize so the state vows numbers for K through third grade I know that we have data related to the state that I can get to but we

[01:37:44] don't have any data that the board has been given as far as I understand unless I missed it somewhere which is possible about what our vows numbers are our pass rates are for all the other grades we get kindergarten every year but we don't get some of the other grades and so I am just interested to see some of the other information so if I missed that and it was actually attached to the last one I apologize but I'm just interested because it's part of the conversation that we're having related to some of the other intervention techniques and so I think it would be really helpful for us to understand just how many kids we're talking about in each grade and if I if I could ask a

[01:38:20] clarifying question third grade that is specifically for kiddos that have just moved into the division correct am I understanding that correctly no it's it's still for all students yeah the data in the report is just kindergarten data but we can get you disaggregated by grade level okay it would be helpful to figure out who's taking the tests at which levels because I know that there's also other information that's coming across the state yeah the VALS data is still for any student that's at risk and then the I ready phases in it at grade

[01:38:56] three for students that aren't part of the state reading initiative okay perfect Thank you so much. Mr. Moon.

[01:39:16] I lost my screen. Where am I? Okay, thank you. Thank you. It is about 2.30 in the morning in Seoul, Korea. So I'm going to ask my question quickly, and then hopefully you would let me be excused from this room.

[01:39:41] I can get very excited about discussing this particular topic. You probably know why. Let me just ask Dr. Presidio or Dr. Reed to provide us with some data related to how our English language learners are doing in various different state assessments compared to the ELLs

[01:40:14] for the rest of the commonwealth based upon my a cursory review of some of the data there are areas we do better than the rest of the state but there are also many areas we not do as well am i am i being fair thank you mr moon i'm going to have dr presidio answer in a moment i i think that it's also for those uh community members watching important to note that we in fairfax county public schools serve 25% or one-fourth of all the multilingual learners in the

[01:40:54] Commonwealth of Virginia so we have the opportunity to educate and amplify the strengths of our multilingual learners both who are new to country and new to school as well as those who are with us for a number of years so Dr. Presidio do you want to elaborate on the areas where I guess glows and grows right the areas we're doing particularly well in and those areas where the state or the Commonwealth is actually doing better and we could learn some things well I think first of all I appreciate dr. Reed's comments about the majority well

[01:41:32] the the large percentage of the state students that we educate in Fairfax and similar to some of the questions that mr. Dunn was asking we do have a again a relatively larger percentage of students that might have interrupted or formal education than other places in the state as well. So I think, Mr. Mann, what I would say is page 31-- or excuse me, slide 31-- is the information that we've provided in today's report, where we're looking at the progress and the proficiency levels of our multilingual learner students.

[01:42:00] And you can see that we're exceeding state targets in both areas and really leading all peer school divisions. The additional information, I think, that you would be asking about in terms of how our multilingual learner students are doing on SOL tests, for example, or other standardized tests, that's going to be in our Goal 3 report.

[01:42:22] So we don't have that data available today, but we are still in the process of compiling that for a future report. So when you do that, Dr. Presidio, would you be able to, because as you stated earlier that our ELL is about 25% of the entire Commonwealth, is it possible for you to extract our ELLs from the rest of the state so that we could compare our students versus the rest of the state rather than statewide?

[01:42:57] I think it's a great question. We'll have to look into that because it's going to require us to have the source data from the state, but we've got that on our to-do list to see if we're able to pull that. I mean, I would really appreciate if, you know, at least if I could get that data.

[01:43:14] I mean, that's a, that's going to really give us meaningful comparison. Yeah, as long as we can get the source file from the state, we can do the analysis. Would you, would you make a request? We, we've, we put that right on our to-do list. So we, we will definitely do that.

[01:43:32] Okay. Thank you so much. With that, I will say, I will say goodbye from Seoul, Korea. Mr. Moon, as you say good night, I wanted to say, I appreciate you noting that the state data, a fourth of which is ours, right? So that's part of the reason I mentioned that.

[01:43:49] It's a unique contradiction in some ways. But, yes, thank you for bringing that up. And have a good night. Thank you. Good night. Miss Lady. Thank you.

[01:44:04] And thank you for the report. I just would like to just celebrate Slides 26 and 28 and just acknowledge the great work that's happening around our system. I also want to give a shout-out to our former chief of schools, Dr. Ponce, as he did a lot of tremendous work when it came to our multi-language learners.

[01:44:23] I know that when I worked in a previous school, I never understood why kids would not progress but would get A's in their multi language learning courses. I'm like they got an A, but they're in the same level again. Doesn't mean they're moving. Okay?

[01:44:42] Accountability. I appreciate the accountability. I appreciate what's happening around the system. And you know, it's, I'm also just want to uplift the efforts and energy around legislative work to enable our multi-language learners to test content in their native languages because unfortunately a lot of our SOL testing reflects English acquisition and not mathematical knowledge not chemical chemistry knowledge not history not any of the things just because it's a language barrier but the young people actually are very skilled I know that when we would get students from overseas throughout my tenure as a school

[01:45:20] counselor and a director it was very frustrating for some of these students to be sitting in chemistry when they already had chemistry, but it was a language barrier that was a problem. So hopefully we'll continue with that lobbying effort and just make it a fair playing field and equitable for our multi-language learners.

[01:45:40] So that was all. I just wanted to uplift the goodness of all that's going on in our system, and thank you all for your hard work on the report. So I really appreciate that. If I could just make a couple of comments in response. So thank you for recognizing the work we've been doing as a school division.

[01:45:55] There's a tremendous partnership with the region office, and Ms. Roman's been incredible as well. Last year, Rich's team-- and I want to recognize Rich and his team for all the work that they're doing-- did 150 different site visitations with members from the region team to go through walkthroughs and work with schools and coach schools on their practices.

[01:46:16] They provided over 200 in-school consultations for students to develop support plans for students that maybe weren't making the progress that we'd like them to make. And one really important data point that I want to share, and we've talked about this in previous discussions, the national and international research on language acquisition says that on average, it takes a student five to seven years to become proficient in the academic language that they need.

[01:46:42] So sometimes we hear students that have social language, right, and they can communicate well. But that's the emerging language development. To get to the academic and then the technical academic language takes five to seven years. And in Fairfax, 80% of our students reach full academic language proficiency in five or fewer years.

[01:47:02] The national average is around 50%. So we're doing great work. Our teachers are doing great work in the schools. And I just think we need to remind ourselves that, yes, we still have a lot more work to do. But our students are really progressing quite rapidly here in Fairfax.

[01:47:19] Thank you. Dr. Anderson. Thank you. Just kind of picking up from that, just really wanted to underscore the need for the native language assessment. It's because of the new requirements that student proficiency now needs to be acquired in 270 days in lieu of the previous five and a half years.

[01:47:37] So we have truncated the time that the state has now has allowed students to acquire that language, especially given the research that you've just shared, Dr. Presidio. So it just has become more important, more than ever, to have another avenue for students who have the academic chops to be able to go wade through the language obstacles in order to really show what they have.

[01:48:05] I had a couple of questions. And I wanted to start with-- to go back to page 15 in the main report. And it's the first part, the kindergarten readiness. I want to better understand how to read this chart in context.

[01:48:20] because this speaks to academic and self-regulation data in the spring. Do we have a comparison to the fall? I'm trying to understand how to put this in context.

[01:48:37] So the report does provide both the fall kindergarten readiness and the spring kindergarten readiness. Dr. Presidio can talk a little bit more about these assessments. We're looking across the three different areas. assessment has different indicators of student readiness and we've looked at students who are taking all three and been successful on all three areas I think I'm speaking mostly and I'm so sorry because I know we're short on time it's the benchmark for academic and self-regulation in the spring it's figure 11 is there an academic and self-regulation chart that I missed for

[01:49:15] the fall in the report there is a fall one and I will find that page okay if you could just tell me that then I don't need to ask any further questions the other piece that I wanted to ask this is around the language acquisition I know the data shows up in a lot of different places but I'm trying to figure out just to get a comprehensive context is there a way for you to identify that we have X number of students who are multilingual who are in multilingual programs and we have the chart that speaks to their ELP levels we have the chart that speaks to their WIDA levels and we have the chart that speaks to

[01:49:55] their SOL levels I'm trying to figure out the the through line between our students and their ELP levels their proficiency levels as well as their SOL levels are these consistent activities and I know we know that it is in terms of ELP level and SOL performance but I don't see it here because we kind of have separate charts I'm hoping for that one place I don't even know if it's possible for you to represent the data in that way for it to be easily seen

[01:50:29] that the ELP levels the number of the WIDA proficiency and the SOL passing rates all have a relationship they do have a relationship and obviously they're measuring different things right so we could work to try to organize the data a little bit differently currently the way that we have it is on slide 26 we we have the SOL pass rates for particular grade levels by ELP level and you can see ELP level six when students reach proficiency they're outperforming

[01:51:04] the division averages but again that's passing both reading and math so we need to probably separate that out to really get at the question that you're asking and then on slide 28 we've got the progress standards on the WIDA by level and obviously you can see progress increases just like SOL scores do when students have more time to develop the academic language and technical academic language. So I think to really get at what you're at we would need to put this data together in a different chart. Thank you because I'd like to kind of better see the relationship particularly between exiting WIDA and having WIDA

[01:51:41] proficiency with SOL performance. I'd like to better understand that relationship another question that I had this is on the report page 18 that was three minutes oh geez Louise it surely does when we're talking about on page 18 where you showed some of the information regarding student participation in a number of things a few years ago refresh my memory dr. Presidio did we not

[01:52:16] reduce bridge to kindergarten we did and that was due to financial limitations right and we didn't within our summer learning program budget overall and remember we had lost some grant funding and some other things that caused us to have to make that reduction so what we did last year is tried to prioritize bridge decay in the summer learning program to rebuild that program because you know obviously as you can see in the numbers there's a large demand for that there is so are we back at pre cut levels yes I think you know we still haven't developed our budget for summer 2027 so that's something that we'll need

[01:52:55] to keep an eye on thank you because I want to make sure that we are making decisions that make sense for the things we want to advance and from all of the conversations here reducing bridge to kindergarten doesn't seem to be the most strategic move in order to achieve the things that we'd like to last question also noticed in some of these strategies the advancement of GLAAD has SIOP falling out of favor as a primary support for EL students and EL / ML students no there's a really large overlap if you had a Venn diagram of

[01:53:32] SIOP strategies and GLAAD strategies it's all around scaffolds for learning so really working with teachers on those strategies that help them pre-teach academic vocabulary right so that students aren't hindered by that and their studies to provide visuals to provide graphic organizers with the notes and the most important ideas to make sure that they're centering student academic talk and giving the ability students to talk in class and asking them questions right so having content and language objectives together having students work in peers and collaborative learning groups right like it's all the same things the project GLAAD is a structure that we're leaning into because they have a really good professional development mechanism where

[01:54:11] we have developed our own internal GLAAD trainers and we can use their PD materials with our teachers so thank you I'll save the rest of my questions for Thursday um I would like to I do have one question in terms of where we are in our micro credentialing for general ed teachers for multi language learning credentials so we had about 68 teachers last year who completed the micro credential and then we'll be reopening up that process again for this year okay Thank you.

[01:54:46] I just really want to thank Dr. Polio in your office. I happen to know a lot of your staffers, and I happen to know what they're doing and how they go out and support-- when people talk about central office and what they do, I don't think people recognize how much time central office employees actually spend in schools to go in and not just support our teaching staff, our administrators, and our students.

[01:55:10] And I happen to run into them all the time when I'm in schools. I'll walk into the school, and I'm like, oh, here you are. so I just want to say that you know thank you for well thank them for all the work they do because I know from your office and and as well as Lisa your office the work that they do is amazing and I know our staff appreciates that support so thank you obviously multilingual learners are you know a large part of our the fabric of our schools that really bring a lot of enrichment and interestingly enough way back when when and I don't know if any

[01:55:45] of you were here when Francisco Millett was the ESOL director but he would say tell me wherever there's a war and I will tell you those are the those are the I'm gonna have to start looking for translators for that for that language because they what you were saying earlier they land in the DMV area he said whenever there's conflict I know we're gonna start getting students from there and so we are a microcosm of seeing all of that and a lot of us are a lot of you guys in central office start seeing those trends and saying okay we're

[01:56:21] gonna need you know interpreters for this we're gonna these are the pop it this is a population we're gonna have to serve and I think that we are just in a situation not only just in Virginia but in the country where we're uniquely situated which is why we do service a quarter of the multilingual learners in the Commonwealth be interesting to see you know in the nation what our percentages are because we have that a large percentage to service and I commend the work that you've done and I commend the richness that those families bring to our fan to our communities so thank you for your work okay back to the

[01:57:00] script very glad to say that now barring any other questions since we have 10 more minutes. Seeing none, this work session is now adjourned as of 1:50 PM. Thank you all.

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