Regular School Board Meeting

Carolyn Pitchesgood evening ladies and gentlemen tonight is monday march 2nd 2026 and this is the regular meeting of the city of fairfax school board will everybody please stand for the pledge of allegiance I

Amit Hickmanpledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands,

Carolyn Pitchesone nation, under God, indivisible,

Lauren Bartelmewith

Carolyn Pitchesliberty

Gordon Stokesstaffand

Lauren Bartelmejustice for all.

Carolyn PitchesOkay, we have no announcements to changes in the agenda, but we do have quite a few people here that I need to announce. Oh, goodness. Okay. We have Andrew Pratt, principal at Providence. Ms. Banig is here. I saw her. And Gordon and Chad are here from Region 5. Georgina, Dr. A is here, and Mr. Smith. I'm just going to say welcome to everybody from all the schools. So thank you all for coming this evening. Oh, yeah, and Ms. Mullins, I'm sorry. I don't want to forget you because you are, you know, a very important principal at Daniels Run. Okay. Our first item is the adoption of the agenda. May I have a motion, please?

Sarah KelseyMadam Chair. Ms. Kelsey. ADOPT THE AGENDA AS WRITTEN AND DISTRIBUTED. I MAY HAVE A SECOND.

Carolyn PitchesSECOND. ALL THOSE IN FAVOR, SIGNIFY BY SAYING AYE. AYE. NONE OPPOSED. THE MOTION PASSES UNANIMOUSLY. WE WILL BEGIN WITH CITIZEN PARTICIPATION OF WHICH WE HAVE NO ONE SIGNED UP FOR THIS EVENING. I'M GOING TO GO ON TO THE STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE REPORT. MS. LUCAS.

StudentGOOD EVENING AND HAPPY MARCH. As we continue 2026 with fresh energy and new beginnings, Fairfax City Schools continue to thrive with enthusiasm, learning, and community connection. Here's a recap of some of the highlights and key events from February 2026 across our schools. At Fairfax High School, winter sports concluded their 2025 and 2026 seasons with state finals in swim and dive, indoor track, and wrestling. The boys' and girls' basketball teams competed in the regional tournament, with the boys' basketball teams sadly losing to Woodson in the regional quarterfinals 38-45. DECA students competed in Virginia Beach for the state leadership conference this past weekend. Spring sports held trials the week of February 22nd for baseball, softball, outdoor track,

boys' and girls' lacrosse, and soccer, and crew. Rising 9th grade course selection process ramped up in February, with parent coffee info sessions around February 9th at KJMS, but with Fairfax High School counselors involved. At Katherine Johnson, the ninth grade course selection activities continued into February, updated parent coffee at KJMS to discuss freshman classes for 2026-2027 school year. Other February items included the student experience survey and virtual parent academies and social media, and a theater field trip highlighting student wellness, family engagement, and the arts opportunities. At Daniel's Run in Providence, the cultural celebration night will be held at Daniel's Run on March 12th,

and both schools held bingo nights courtesy of the PTA to their families and community for a fun night, wishing everyone a warm spring and a continued success and the new quarter in a bright path in 2026.

Carolyn PitchesThank you, Ms. Lucas. Does anybody have questions for Ms. Lucas? Okay. Thank you very much. Next item on the agenda is the FCPS Region 5 State of the Schools Report. We have Ms. Behnick here this evening. Dr. Wright, would you like to say a few words?

Dr. WrightstaffAbsolutely. Thank you, Chair Pitches, and good evening to everyone. Here in the City of Fairback Schools, we often talk about the really wonderful and unique partnership that we have with Fairfax County Public Schools to support Daniels run Providence Catherine Johnson and Fairfax High School We talked about it as a school services agreement between the two institutions, but I really think of it as a partnership and one where we're working together to make great things happen for every single student and family and staff member that attends these schools And I think one of the best examples of that partnership is the relationship between the City of Hervec schools team and the Region 5 team.

And you're going to be able to hear some of the results of the wonderful work that this Region 5 team does to support our four schools this evening. You're going to hear about their leadership, their guidance and support for our principals and teachers, but also the academic, the operational and the professional development support that they provide each and every day in ways big and small to help our schools be wonderful places for our students. of Region 5 Assistant Superintendent Becky Boehning and their Executive Principals Chad Lehman and Gordon Stokes we're very grateful for that partnership and we look forward to hearing from you tonight so with that I'll turn it over to Miss Becky Boehning

Rebecca Baenigstaffgood evening and welcome it's so wonderful to be here to deliver this annual tradition of the state of the schools it truly is a special process that we get to go through every year in partnership with you so good evening members of the school board, Dr. Wright, Mr. Phillips, and city staff and our amazing students. It's great to be here. So what makes this special also, I mean tonight is like, I feel like it's a city of Fairfax Palooza because we have all of our school leaders here behind us too. So we always appreciate alongside us, alongside Mr. Stokes, Mr. Lehman and I for this presentation are our four city principals, Dr. A, Mr. Smith, Ms. Mullen and Mr. Pratt. Tonight we have the good fortune of

even having our administrative teams from the elementary schools. So we look forward to a very informative evening with you. So we'd be remiss to start this presentation. I feel like every year there's some change that has occurred. And in this case, it's your city superintendent. So we'd like to officially welcome you, Dr. Wright, to this role. I've had the good fortune of working with Dr. Wright in numerous ways over a long period of time. and I would say he has proven to be in multiple roles a very strategic, focused, and relational leader, and I think the future is very bright for our city schools under his leadership. Tonight we'll endeavor to cover four main objectives in our presentation.

Of course, we always like to start with just an overview of the region and the city schools, who we specifically serve, and also what our priorities are across the four city schools. This is also a great opportunity for us to provide you with an update on how our schools are doing in our progress around our strategic plan goals. And also some of the areas we have to continue to grow across all of our schools. And as part of that, we'll certainly provide contextual information that helps make meaning of the data you're going to see tonight. And then, as I said, there's always change, and we have a new framework for our accountability with BDOE. So we thought, I think we had forecasted this to you last January, but thought it would be a good time to dig into that framework a little bit more and show you the excellent performance of the four city schools applied to that framework.

So first and starting, you know, who do we serve? Certainly in the region and then in our city schools. As you know, Region 5 does encompass five high school pyramids within the division. and we serve a total of 43 schools, about 38,000, but of course we have a special love for the little over 5,000 that are here in these four city schools. It really is such a joy to work in this partnership and support our schools. And we do geographically cover quite a lot of ground, from the Marshall Pyramid all the way west to the Westfield Pyramid. This data was as of September 30th on our membership day. So in Region 5, our work for numerous years now, this is not new information to you, has been driven really around two core priorities.

So we just wanted to take a moment because truly everything that we're going to talk about tonight, when you consider our work with our students to ensure they learn at high levels, is really grounded in these key structures about how we work together in schools. So the first is really maximizing our capacity in each of our schools to function as a professional learning community. And really that is grounded in the idea that we believe strongly there is not one single individual that has all the talent, all of the experience, all the knowledge to meet the varied needs of all of our learners. So it really calls on us to work collaboratively so that our students benefit from that collective knowledge and experience.

So really our work around building these PLCs has been starting with building a strong guiding coalition. So you'll see a graphic there with multiple rings. And that outer ring represents what is the work of the guiding coalition. And this is really the leadership team that drives the PLC process in a school. we like to think of it as like the engine of the PLC process. So that outer ring creates the systems, the expectations for teaching and learning, and really focuses on building capacity of our collaborative teams across our schools to really grapple with, which is the next ring, those four critical questions. What do students need to learn? How will we know they've learned it? And what are we going to do if they need more time and support,

if they struggle or if they excel? So we really believe that if our teams are high functioning and have high impact around those four questions, we get to the center of the circle, which is why we're here in the first place. And that is to make sure we are building learners in our classrooms who are motivated, who feel a great deal of ownership around their work, and feel a great deal of efficacy. So you'll see in those center questions, it's students being able to answer, what do I need to learn? What do I do if I struggle? What do I do if I excel? So really this whole PLC process is focused largely on the adult work, but in service to our students having that ownership. And I'm really proud of the work that the four city schools have done to build that.

So that's been the last three years of our work. And the second priority you see up there, you see the book Behavior Solutions. And we hired the guru into Providence and Katie Boxer on our region team supporting the implementation of this work across all of our schools. So we're really lucky to have her leading the work in the city. But the behavior solutions really was a response to noticing our students needed more from us post-COVID, that they weren't necessarily coming back to school with the academic and social behavior skills that we know are really necessary for their success. So what do you do when you see a need? You build a system, right? the last four years. So largely the first few years we were focused on those tier one

practices. And you see evidence of it every time you walk in one of the schools. You see the expectations on the wall. You see kids getting rewarded for demonstrating those expectations. And a lot of our schools are seeing teachers being recognized by students for showing those traits. So really making sure everybody knows what's expected. Teachers know what they're handling in the classroom. They know what the administrators are going to come in and support. and in the last year, this year in particular, we've been really focused on those tier two practices. So just like we see sometimes with academic students needing more time and support, the same is true with these behaviors. And so we continue to work with Jessica Hannigan, the author of the book.

She came for a two-day session in September and worked with our schools on building out some of those tier two supports, and we're really proud. You'll hear the language in many of the schools of academies. You know, what's an example of one? Hands-off Academy, Executive Function Academy, Technology Academy, so really helping kids right when we see what the data is telling us, being very responsive. All right, so that's sort of setting the plate of Region 5, and now Chad's going to get us started looking at the strategic plan.

Carolyn PitchesIt's like church.

Chad LehmanstaffGood evening, everybody. It's good to be with you. As Becky mentioned, we're going to transition into the rest of the presentation, and the presentation I'm moving forward is really framed around the FCPS strategic plan and the goals that are laid out in there. We know that the strategic plan centered on excellence, equity, and opportunity is our chart forward in Fairfax County Public Schools and of course also in Fairfax City Schools through the year 2030. And so there we go just as a reminder I know that this you know plan has been placed in place now for a period of time and so you all are familiar with it but just as a quick review it's organized around five student-centered goals these goals are really the outcomes we want for each

students in Fairfax County Public Schools and in Fairfax City Schools as well. Each of these goals has a set of measures which is how we monitor our progress and make necessary operational adjustments to stay on course. Every goal has an equity commitment. This is the promise we make to each and every student to support them in attaining their goals. And there's a set of four operational pillars that support the entire strategic plan. These are the principles on which we organize and structure our work to achieve the goals. for the purposes of this evening we are going to focus our energies around six of the 11 priority measures there are 11 priority measures in the strategic plan however to take a closer look

tonight we want to really focus in on six of those that's multilingual learners meeting expected growth in goal one for goal two we're going to take a closer look at chronic absenteeism as a In goal three, reading by third grade, algebra one by eighth grade, and advanced coursework progress at the high school level. And then in goal five, graduation equity, including students on track for graduation. So we're going to hone in on these six areas. And of course, as you know, each school has a school improvement plan. and those school improvement plans are very tightly aligned with the strategic plan and what you'll see here in this slide are the school improvement plan goals for Daniel's run and for Providence you'll see some similarities

and some subtle differences because even though the school improvement plans are aligned with the strategic plan schools do have some flexibility some choice they also have some areas that they may be asked to develop a goal based upon the performance of their data, you know, and what trends they're seeing and what areas they may want to improve. So both schools have a reading by grade three goal, and here you're seeing where schools want to not only grow their SOL results, but also we have, you know, growth screeners that we utilize and VALS assessments where Providence in particular is looking to really see the number of low-risk students increase meaning that they have a lower risk of not meeting the reading expectations by third grade and really you know see that

students continue to make that progress there for math as well you'll see both schools have that math goal of course students schools are required to have a reading goal and a math goal Daniels run chronic absenteeism this is of course is for all of the schools, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But Daniel's run wanting to reduce chronic absenteeism rate to 12% or less, continuing to make steady progress from the past several years, as well as ML progress. Both schools have an ML progress goal. This is an area of focus not only for Fairfax City schools, but all across the county because we know that that is a student group that we need to pay close attention to and continue to put measures in place

to make sure that our multilingual learners are making adequate progress. they have an additional goal around SEL wellness again all of the schools do have goals in these areas but you know putting that additional goal as an optional goal in your school improvement plan just means that you are taking an even more targeted approach to seeing progress in that particular area as we move forward to Katherine Johnson and Fairfax High School you'll see Katherine Johnson at the middle school level they're also required to have a reading You can see that in reading they have a specific focus on students with disabilities, again another subgroup that we want to pay particularly close attention to, making sure that students

with IEPs, students with disabilities are making strides in of course reading and math performance. Both schools have a chronic absenteeism goal, which again we're going to talk about in a little bit so I don't want to spend too much time on that, and then science performance goals as well and you can see schools are making strides they put together action plans to help make sure that they're meeting growth you know throughout the school year and monitoring quarterly the progress that they're making with these school improvement plan expectations now we'll turn it over to my colleague mr. Stokes

Gordon StokesstaffThank you. All right. Good evening, everyone. So I think we can all agree that establishing a strong foundation for a student from an early age will set them up for success as they progress through the entirety of their education. So I'm going to get us started thinking about goal one, which is around a strong start. As Mr. Lehman mentioned, there are several measures that are part of goal one. This evening I'm going to be focusing on the success for our multilingual learners or ML students just for the abbreviation. FCPS is a wonderfully diverse school division along with Northern Virginia and approximately 26% of students in FCPS are multilingual learners. They have that designation. These students come to school with wonderful skills

and also particular sets of needs that warrant consistent and ongoing support. And improved success for MLs will enhance our ability across the entirety of the strategic plan to achieve the different goals and measures that have been set forth for 2030. So we're going to dive a little bit deeper into what that really looks like for our students. So upon enrollment in FCPS, if a student has a home language other than English, they are screened to determine if they require ESOL services or ML services as a student once they're enrolled. And if they are determined as a multilingual student, students are assessed annually via the WIDA access assessment. assessment. And they're assessing four domains, reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

Dr. WrightstaffSo from year to year, students take the WIDA,

Gordon Stokesstaffand we certainly want to see growth in their WIDA progress score in that assessment, showing that they're continuing to develop and attain those domains of language. And certainly, students may progress in one domain quicker than another, but overall we want to see overall growth from year to year. So overall growth in the WIDA will show their progress. Ultimately, we want to see students achieve proficiency. When they've met all the requirements for all four domains, they then are able to exit from ESOL services. They still will be in a monitor status, but ultimately they're no longer required to take the required English language development course that is associated with being a multilingual learner.

So once they exit from those services, that has major implications for their opportunities moving forward in their education in terms of access to a larger variety of course offerings. The table here shows WIDA progress for City of Fairfax schools over a three-year period. FCPS continues to be ahead of the Commonwealth of Virginia in terms of WIDA progress for students and our city of Fairfax schools are equivalent with our FCPS progress. This next chart, this next table shows WIDA proficiency. This is the percentage of students who are meeting their proficiency mark and therefore ESOL or ML services and in all cases City of Fairfax schools improve their proficiency rates from year to year and they exceed the proficiency rate for

FCPS as a whole the next two tables underscore the importance of students development in their WIDA levels over time and if you look at the column on the far right this shows the pass percentage of ML students on the reading SOL in grades 3 through 8 and as you can see students in level 1 and 2 pass at a much lower rate than students in 3, 4 and then ultimately those who exit from ESOL services so again the ongoing implications for student proficiency not just from a WIDA sense but an overall reading standpoint and the important over time. And this table is for FCPS as a whole. The table you see here are for our city of Fairfax schools, and the same results are comparable to the county as a whole.

So with that as context, there is a lot of strategic work going on in our schools to help students attain those four domains of language and certainly show their growth from that WIDA assessment standpoint and ultimately hit that proficiency mark. First and foremost, all students who are designated as a multilingual learner, they receive appropriate English language development ELD instruction. And that means that students are involved in specific ELD courses or sections throughout their school day. In the elementary setting, there is Benchmark Express. So you're probably aware of Benchmark Advance, which is the reading curriculum, the basal materials for elementary students. There is a companion set of curriculum for multilingual learners called Benchmark Express.

So in small groups, students receive this companion curriculum, which really mirrors a lot of what they engage in in their general class setting and benchmark advance. So it's just giving students a little bit more access, a little bit smaller group support, so they have more access in those English language arts classes. Schools, as Mr. Lehman pointed out, schools that have not seen the same rate of WIDA progress have been tasked with a multilingual learner goal in their school improvement plan. That is something that we work with from a region standpoint in conjunction with those schools to continue that ongoing development. In addition, we continue to provide professional learning. The FCPS as a whole provides a variety of different professional learning opportunities for teachers

and school teams to go and learn about best practices that support multilingual learners. within the region we've offered professional development that we've coined the term the secret sauce where we've used some of our schools as examples within the region of best practices that have yielded positive results for our multilingual learners in terms of their WIDA progress and at the session that we offered earlier this year Fairfax High School was was one of our exemplars for their wonderful work specific to preparing students for the WIDA assessment that we're in the midst of right now. In addition, as I mentioned, there's the ongoing professional learning for teachers around best practices to support multilingual learners, and certainly the building of a collective responsibility.

We want schools to understand that the progress of multilingual learners doesn't just fall in the domain of ESOL teachers. It really is a school-wide collective responsibility for everyone to provide enhanced experience for students across the board, especially as students move up in their WIDA levels and then ultimately exit. We still want for teachers to employ best practices that will benefit both multilingual learners and students across the board. In addition, there are a series of common assessments that schools employ to track progress over the school year, and they use that data to continue to adjust their instruction. And within the Fairfax Pyramid, and collaboration to again focus on multilingual learners.

The principals in the Fairfax Pyramid set a goal for their development and their achievement this school year to increase reading and math SOL scores for multilingual learner students and for students with disabilities. So principals engage in monthly dialogue and ongoing professional learning so that they can provide that leadership back at their schools around focus support for multilingual learners. teachers from across the Fairfax Pyramid who meet on a regular basis quarterly in conjunction with the FCPS ESOL department to engage in more professional learning that they can then turn around back to their schools and bring back to teachers in their building, again, to build that collective responsibility and that collective work to support our multilingual learners.

So I know that was a very rapid sort of overview of the work, but there's a lot of very targeted in strategic work happening. And as you can see, there's positive results of that work over time. At this point, I'm going to turn things back over to Mr. Lehman, who's going to lead us into discussion of strategic plan goal number two.

Chad LehmanstaffOkay, so moving into strategic plan goal two, we are going to really hone in on that chronic absenteeism metric it's one of the key metrics that we utilize to kind of help measure you know how students are feeling included empowered in school we know that there's a direct connection between students obviously regular attendance at school and their success and their level of engagement so we're going to hone in on that as one of our key metrics and highlight that for our Fairfax City schools today. Chronic absenteeism is if a student misses, they're considered chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of the school year. There we go. If they miss 10% or more of the school year for any reason. So we always like

unexcused and excused absences. So if a family takes a trip for example and they miss three weeks of school because they've been out of the country for probably a very good reason, you know making a trip abroad, but they that student may still be considered then chronically absent because even though some of those absences may be excused they would still have missed more than 10% of the school year. And so it's really important that schools not only are looking at unexcused absences but they do need to remind families and work with families to try to minimize the time spent away from school during the school year so that students are not missing that quality instruction. We know that attendance is linked to school

engagement, stronger relationships and academic success. Missing even a few days of school can have negative effects on students. We know how quickly they can fall behind if they miss their coursework and so when you look over the course of the year you're talking only about 18 days of school and that can pop up very very quickly for many families when you think about illnesses when you think about doctors appointments when you think about the long weekend trip and things like that and so schools do need to monitor this very very closely and with in the Fairfax City Schools all four schools have made progress in the past several years in reducing the level of chronic absenteeism. And this chart was put together some time ago when this meeting was

originally scheduled, which was closer to day 89 of the school year. So this is a little comparison that you can see where the school stood on day 89. However, we are now on day 108. And coming to you with some updated, fresh data, I can tell you that Daniel's Run now sits at 8.1%. Providence at 12.5%, Catherine Johnson at 14%, and Fairfax High School at 16.1%. And so the good news with that is that they've continued to dip down even since day 89, and there can be some cycling up and down throughout the course of the year around different time periods and with the weather and things like that. But the other good news is when you compare where each of the schools were on day 108 last year, four better than where they were at on day 108 in the previous year and I'd

really like to highlight Daniel's run because Daniel's run has has really made some significant strides you know reducing from I think it was about I don't have the number written down but if I remember off the top of my head it was over 15% last year at this time and now they're down to 8.1% and I know that the school staff there is really proud of the work they've been doing to really hone in on chronic absenteeism. So just to highlight some practices, I think, you know, chronic absenteeism is one of those things that you have to put systems in place to make sure that you're very closely monitoring it. And all of the schools have put those systems in place to really keep tabs and keep track of the data to really address very quickly when students get off track

and when and when families need that notification so they've enhanced the communication that happens I know that communications go out pretty routinely including things like attendance report cards so that families are kept up to date with how many absences their students are having they continue to strengthen their entire attendance team so developing groups of staff within the building that are responsible for this that have a that a primary charge is to kind of upkeep that data and to monitor it and to make sure that interventions are in place and attendance conferences are happening when they need to. Putting targeted personalized interventions in place I think is probably the key strategy because we know that with chronic absenteeism

each case can be unique and so this work often requires student by student and family by family conversations and really kind of working with that family to see what may be going on, why the student is missing school, and then developing a personalized plan for them. That's the kind of work that it takes, but that's also time-consuming work. And so those teams that the schools have put in place and those systems that they put into place are really important. The schools have also put in additional things such as Saturday School, Fairfax High School does that. They do a lot of after-school programming with additional And this allows them often to earn back some time as well through in-person flexible instructional time,

which is something that the state does allow for schools to have students essentially earn back some of that instruction and earn back some of the time they may have missed. And our Fairfax City schools are doing a nice job of utilizing that as an opportunity for intervention with students. Also, I'd like to just highlight that the schools have really, and I think Becky may have mentioned this before, but have really put in some really nice positive incentive programs. And so it's not just where you're, you know, constantly trying to, you know, coming at someone with sort of a negative approach. This is like we're figuring out what are the positive ways that we can reinforce and really message our entire staff, got our staff behind this,

and really partnering with students and with families to make sure that they're in school. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Becky to dig into goal three.

Rebecca BaenigstaffAll right. So we thought this might be a good pause point and see if based on goals one and two, if you all might have any clarifying questions for us.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Barlmay? I'm good. Thank you. Ms. Kelsey?

Sarah KelseyNot right now.

Carolyn PitchesOkay. Maybe this wasn't the right pause point. Yeah. I do actually have a question. What strategies have you employed at Daniel's Run specifically that have helped with chronic absenteeism? Sorry, Susan. Okay. Sure.

Rebecca BaenigstaffSo

Susan Mullenstaffwe went in this year knowing that we wanted to improve chronic absenteeism, that we also just wanted to make school more fun and engaging for students overall. So we really started a new PBIS positive incentive program, and we coined a new acronym SOAR, which many of the schools have like SOAR and ROAR and things like that. But the acronym SOAR stands for, the S is for show up. And for show up, for us, that meant come to school, come prepared, be ready. work of chronic absenteeism. And so a couple of the things that went really well were just recognizing kids and giving them stickers on days that their whole class was there. And we did emphasize, don't come if you're sick. But we did want to make kids aware of the importance

of attendance. And elementary kids, as you know, they don't have any choice whether they come to school or not. It's through their parents. But when they go home with those stickers on, and we're super proud. I think that made a big difference. And then go on with all the other things you did. You did like a million things this year.

Speaker 14Our attendance team is meeting just about bi-weekly to like look at our attendance data and just put any plans in place. And so part of that was we started off using our early release Wednesdays for IPFIT program. Our attendance rate without the if it would be 10.4 today so i looked it up before we came um and so we've we've really reduced it just from that even um and so the first one i really leaned into like making personalized phone calls to families too um because i think that that helped i think families um when you're looking at the um what constitutes chronic absenteeism a lot of families don't understand that excused absences are part of that so those conversations with families have been really powerful the utilizing it fit and then continuing we

really honed in on show up the first quarter but then we've kept it going classes get little certificates when their whole class shows up and then stickers yeah we really really so I think that really helped it like the kids get excited when everybody is there I think at first there was worry over you know if if they weren't getting it and there are some classes that had it less but they've all had it at some point and so it's been a real celebration and it's really helped at the tier one level where the IPFIT and the conferences and all of the phone calls have been more of that tier two and tier three

Carolyn Pitchesthank you and we appreciate everything all four schools are doing to reduce our chronic absenteeism so thank you

Speaker 14yeah thank you

Rebecca Baenigstaffso actually a nice transition point right because we know if our students are in school they will be learning which takes us right into our academic goals of goal 3 so as mr. layman shared in the beginning we're gonna really hone in on three of the strategic priorities within goal 3 reading by third grade algebra by eighth grade and then advanced coursework at the high school. But we thought we'd at least provide you with like an overview of how are we doing? Because this goal really is about increasing academic achievement and mastery for all of our students. So this slide here provides a summary of, you can see, FCPS data, the city schools, and then our neighboring jurisdictions when we look at reading achievement on these different measures.

So you can see for our reading SOL pass rate, our city of Fairfax schools exceeded the state average and are within range of our neighboring school division. The VAP is listed there that is an alternative assessment for our students on adaptive curriculum. You can see for the city of Fairfax schools there's a little notation there and that's because we have fewer than 10 students in the city schools on that which just says that most of our students are accessing the SOL standards of learning. Then you can see our advanced pass rate because our goal is not just mastery. We want to keep pushing our students to higher level of achievement and you can again see there that the city of Fairfax schools exceed the state and several of our neighboring school

divisions. When you look at our high school or AP exam pass rates, certainly a bright spot for Fairfax who's done a phenomenal job not only increasing access and you'll hear more about that later but students are succeeding at very high levels there. Unfortunately for that in the SAT data we don't have that at this point for our neighboring jurisdictions but looking at last year's data, Fairfax High School and FCPS as a whole were definitely in alignment with our neighboring districts And you have the WIDA progress there, which we took a look at earlier. I really see looking at the city WIDA progress, city schools at 48%. I think we're going to see a major jump in that data due to the intentional work you heard about earlier.

That's not only happening within the schools, but happening across the schools with all of the collaboration across the pyramid.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Bainig, does this include TJ in the data of CPS data? That's a

Rebecca Baenigstaffgreat question.

Carolyn PitchesWell, I have to say it's actually Ms. Cessary's question, so

Susan MullenstaffI have to give her

Rebecca Baenigstaffcredit where credit's due. I'll get clarification. I mean, I would think they would be at least, you know, I would think they would go back to, you might know the answer to this from your strategic plan work. I would think they'd go back to the jurisdiction that they're from. Is that how it works, Dr. Wright? I don't know if you know from your strategic plan work.

Dr. WrightstaffYeah, absolutely. Typically, when you have students that go to TJ that are coming from multiple jurisdictions, the test scores go back to their original jurisdiction. So an Arlington student who attends TJ would be going there. We'd have to really clarify whether the City of Fairfax students that are attending TJ are in that second column or the first column. My assumption is they're probably in that first column, but it would definitely go back to their jurisdiction.

Rebecca BaenigstaffYeah. Thank you for the question. All right. grade reading, one of our key strategic priorities. Reading by third grade is linked to truly all of the other strategic plan measures, such as a persistence in advanced coursework and on-time graduation. The national research is very clear in this area that there are several factors that contribute to reading by third grade. You'll see those reflected here on the slide of some of the things that we are really focused on as the school identifying and intervening with our students who are demonstrating that they are at risk in reading and using evidence-based literacy instruction. Because simply put, the stakes are too high when you really look at the left

side of that slide. There's nothing more important than really make sure our students are ready. So now looking at some of our data for third grade reading. So for third grade reading, we have three key accountability metrics that you see here on this slide. The first is our third grade pass rate, which you can see there for the district as a whole, and then for our city schools. Then we also are looking at our students making expected progress using our universal screener. So that second metric is looking at expected progress using IREADY, and we look at the 40th percentile because the 40th percentile is highly correlated with a pass on our SOL assessment. So there you can see, again, the data for the city schools and the county.

And then the last is just looking at IREADY from the percent of students who are close, you know, at grade level expectation or near grade level expectation, which you can see is very, very similar to the 40th percentile. So the Virginia Literacy Act has really driven a lot of the great work that's happening in our school division and across our city schools as it relates to literacy. So this is our second year of the VLA. And there were two significant changes. We brought forward all the great work that was done last year. But then we've really begun to scale up the work. Last year, we started really focusing on early literacy. So pre-K to second grade to third grade. And then this year, we're really have shifted to fourth through eighth grade.

And that will just continue. So what that means is we continue to use our diagnostic assessment, the VALS, for fourth through eighth grade. So the VALS in our primary grade serves as our screener. In three through eight, we use iReady, and then we use the VALS as a diagnostic. So if the iReady flags that a student is below that 40th percentile, then we're really digging in with the VALS to figure out what might that learner need so that we can design a reading plan that addresses that. So all of the students who are screened and show that they're high risk, those students are given a reading plan. So this year we saw that. Now through eighth grade we have reading plans and intervention. And then this is our second year of using, as Gordon talked about earlier,

our benchmark advanced curriculum, our core curriculum. So now I'm going to shift to some of the key strategies that we have been focused on to achieve this goal of ensuring all of our students are reading by third grade. That includes supporting our schools, our teachers, our students, and our families. So you'll see the five strategies here this evening. I'm really going to address one, two, four, and five. strategy three refers to the work we're doing to provide additional resources and to support to schools with high levels of need so in the same way we look at what students might need additional time and support in reading we also look at that as a division from a school lens so that that support at

strategy three is with schools that have been identified to participate in project momentum which is our improvement our improvement framework and none of the city schools have been identified so they're not receiving those strategy three supports so we'll take a look at the other strategies so the first really is foundational right it's that tier one instruction so our first strategy that been really focused on with our core curriculum is ensuring that each and every student gets high quality reading instruction and we are committed as a with consistent evidence-based literacy instruction, and that includes using Benchmark and using Lexia. And to bring this to life in every single one of our classrooms,

we have invested heavily in our teachers, training them in what I'll refer to as EBLIs, that's Evidence-Based Literacy Instruction, and that has been an ongoing commitment, providing them with tools and resources and our principals and their school teams have done a phenomenal job really monitoring the work and supporting the work with regular classroom walkthroughs. It's been a huge lever for us. We've also provided training, as you heard earlier, to teachers on tailoring their instruction for our multilingual learners and our students with disabilities. And this year it's been really exciting because we opened up an opportunity for more teachers to earn a micro-credential for working with multilingual learners.

We have a lot of staff taking advantage of that because we know with how much our county has changed, the large percentage of multilingual learners that we're serving, the more teachers that have that knowledge, that understanding, that credential, the better we will be serving our students. Also, at the central office level, a lot of work was done to support teachers with implementing the curriculum. benchmark playbook that provides a common pacing calendar, implementation guides for every grade level unit, and expectations and guidelines for them to make those instructional decisions in the classroom. And our schools maintain their literacy core teams that's made up of school and teacher leaders to monitor

and respond to the implementation. They're looking at the walkthrough data. They're looking at the student achievement data and making those shifts in their practice and determining what professional learning teachers might need. And as you saw earlier, our schools have very focused goals around third grade reading. And then the last part of the strategy, not only making sure we're delivering, that we're planning and teaching the core curriculum, but making sure we're assessing it. So all of our schools also have division-wide common assessments they give at the end of every unit. So that's making sure that we have the core in place. And then some students need more than the core. And so while we've been very committed to the tier one instruction, we recognize that some students will need that extra support to be proficient with reading.

So we continue to use our reading plans and our interventions to address where students need additional support. And you can see on this chart our efforts are paying off. This is really exciting to see. So this chart is showing the percent of students in the fall of 2024 and fall of 2025 that were high risk. So you can see whether you're looking at the region as a whole, the division, and certainly within our city schools, we have fewer students this fall that were at risk than the previous year, whether you're looking last year's kindergartners to this year's kindergartners, or even if you take a look at cohorts, kindergartners that are now first graders, first graders that are now second graders.

this is just such a wonderful highlight that reinforces the power of early intervention and a strong core curriculum and i'm sure if we were to ask the principals and we've looked at some of the charts we have these fun charts that show where kids were in the fall and how they've moved to mid-year kids are coming out of risk this is the fall data and i imagine we have quite a large percentage fewer at risk here in the mid-year. As part of our work to provide this additional time support for our students, all of our elementary schools were required to have a walk-to-intervention model. So students are receiving whatever additional support and which evidence-based program they might need to address that.

So those systems have been in place and strong. Next, you heard earlier how important it is make sure we're providing targeted curriculum also to our multilingual learners to ensure that they're coming into the Tier 1 lesson in the classroom with some background knowledge and can have more confidence and engagement in that curriculum and also providing that support after. So we do that through our benchmark express curriculum. And so our multilingual learners, we have very tight expectations around schedules. we ensure that they get the tier one instruction and then during the intervention or the small group time they're receiving their benchmark express lessons and you heard a lot about how earlier about how we are

ensuring we're looking at student progress over time where schools are with ML progress and then having those SIP goals to really make sure we're we're focused on improving that data point I talked about walkthroughs as a strategy we also do walkthroughs of benchmark express lessons and other interventions as well our last strategy is really we don't do this work alone we do this side by side and partnering with our families and we learned in previous years especially in the first year of implementing this curriculum that our communication our engagement with families varied largely across our schools and so we have committed this year to ensuring we're informing families about the units what are the core skills that students are learning

in the unit what's conceptually what are the units about and then making sure we're communicating how our students doing on each of those units so a lot of materials have been provided to the schools to stay in touch and provide that information with families and they are all having literacy engagement events to make sure we're bringing parents in and offering some professional learning side by side with their children so that truly they're equipped to support those efforts at home. All right, now we're going to look at algebra.

Gordon StokesstaffAll right, so yes, we're going to shift gears to talk about another important measure, which is students' successful completion of algebra by the end of eighth grade. and there are certainly many large implications for this shift in our accounting and this particular goal certainly the impact on both elementary and middle school math education teaching and learning and but ultimately the doors that are open for students if they successfully complete algebra by eighth grade for high school so the table that you see here represents both Fairfax City Schools performance on different math assessments both at the state level and a few national indicators and in both the standard assessments as well as some of the advanced assessments both FCPS and City

of Fairfax students outperform their counterparts in our in the state and our neighboring divisions so there's a lot of currently there's a lot of positive math progress and achievement for students within the city of Fairfax. But when we hone back in on why it matters that students successfully complete algebra by eighth grade, certainly the access to advanced coursework at a younger age for students introduces another level of rigor for students which is certainly beneficial to their overall learning experience. There's a certain persistence that is developed when students positively engage in a more rigorous course or set of courses. And ultimately, that successful completion of algebra by eighth grade by the time they finish middle school,

it opens up a series of course pathways when students go to ninth grade in high school. And we certainly want for students to have as many opportunities at their fingertips as possible. So in order to achieve this goal of algebra by eighth grade, there's a lot of intentional planning and a lot of intentional moves that are currently occurring to enable for that to happen so we want to highlight three different strategies that are currently going on to help us move closer towards this goal by 2030. Strategy number one is certainly preparing students to be able to take on algebra by the time they're in eighth grade or in earlier, in many cases, for students. So there's a multi-year plan that is adjusting the curriculum

going back to third grade to provide access to more advanced concepts and skills for students at a younger age. In addition to that, schools are continuously monitoring the progress of their students through different screener assessments, not just to guide instructions so that students hitting different targets according to this adjusted curriculum, but also to monitor for interventions. What supports would be beneficial to help students either build different basic skills or stay on track with this adjusted curriculum that is taking place. The second strategy is ultimately just increasing enrollment in algebra ultimately by middle school. So for a long time, there was a few more barriers that were in place that restricted access to algebra for students in middle school.

There's definitely a different mindset around that now. We're really looking at expanding enrollment and more of an open enrollment opportunity for families. So that certainly involves a lot of family outreach and information about really what is algebra in middle school or maybe even younger. What are the benefits of this opportunity for students? in that process when they go through academic advising and that course selection point in the school year. There's also a need to build teacher capacity. A teacher needs to have an algebra endorsement in order to effectively teach this course. So there are efforts in place to enhance or increase the number of teachers that have the algebra endorsement so they can provide that instruction.

And there is an algebra access network improvement community where schools gather together on a regular basis with instructional services to really examine their practices at the school level on how they're implementing all this to increase algebra access. So this has been in place for several years, this network community, and over time more and more schools have joined to be part of this cohort of conversation and ultimate strategic action planning. Schools also have opportunity to look at student progress. Maybe a student currently hadn't been what we would in the past call on track to take algebra by eighth grade, but all the measures show that this student has demonstrated high proficiency in their different math courses.

So this idea of a light bulb student, we can identify based on all these different measures. Hey, the student right here, maybe they're not in the current prerequisite, but all their data shows that they are ready for algebra. So that's schools at the middle school level have been able to really use that data to increase the number of kids that are now enrolled in algebra by eighth grade. So here this table shows from Catherine Johnson Middle School the increase of students completing or enrolled in algebra by eighth grade. Now this table, as Mr. Lehman mentioned, this was from data from a few weeks ago. So the division target for next school year is that 75% of eighth graders are enrolled in algebra next year.

Currently, according to the Algebra Readiness Dashboard, 87% of Katherine Johnson Middle School eighth graders are slated to be enrolled in algebra for next school year. So props to Katherine Johnson for all the hard work that they've done to allow that, as well as our feeder elementary schools for really getting kids prepared for that opportunity. And certainly last but not least, we want to make sure that once a student's enrolled in algebra that they successfully complete the course. So there are some additional supports that are in place to help make sure that kids are ready to successfully jump into algebra. There are some opportunities in the summer for maybe a student who currently is in a math 7 course

support over the summer if they're making that kind of that grade level leap into algebra, as well as resources for our multilingual learners and other technologies that are going to be valuable to just enhance the opportunity for students. I do want to add that at Daniels Run Elementary School, we do have the first year of algebra in sixth grade at Daniels Run. This is being offered virtually to a group of seven sixth graders, and they've been enrolled in the course school year they continue to engage effectively in the course and we we know that the opportunity is going to expand to more students as we move forward in time so it's exciting to see that there are opportunities at the elementary

school itself for students to engage in algebra and the table here represents students who have successfully completed algebra that's both passing the course and the related SOL test and as you can see these are numbers from Katherine comparatively to those of the division. So again, other markers of current success, we know that this is only going to improve over time as the curriculum at the younger grade levels is adjusted and students have access and engagement with those more rigorous skills and concepts over time. I'm going to hand the microphone back to Mr. Lehman to talk about advanced coursework.

Chad LehmanstaffThank you, Mr. Stokes. I'm really excited to talk about the advanced coursework primarily because, you know, Fairfax High School is just doing such a tremendous job in this area. As a former high school principal myself, I'm really inspired by the work that Dr. A and her team at Fairfax have done along with the feeder schools to really, really see an amazing increase in the students that are accessing advanced courses and this is a I think a key driver in the reason why Fairfax High School was able to achieve that distinguished recognition in the school performance framework overall because their triple E score you know is just just super high and really really proud of that work so on this slide here that you can see the comparisons with

comparing it to Fairfax High School in the percentage of students in the senior cohort who earned a C-minus or higher in at least one AP or dual enrollment course or earned a CTE finisher status before graduating. So again, you can see that Fairfax High School is outperforming the division in the most recent school year in the numbers of students that are accessing those advanced courses and finding success. I think this slide really says it all just look at those numbers of the increased enrollment in honors courses AP courses and dual enrollment courses over the last few years the Fairfax high school now has a full course offering an AP human geography in AP seminar they have grown from in AP seminar from four

sections to 13 sections of AP seminar from four sections to ten sections of AP geography and that course is primarily offered to freshmen and some sophomores and some upperclassmen as well but it is an advanced course that freshman level students can access as well as they've added a variety of different dual enrollment course options over the past few years and you can see that a lot well I also want to mention along with those increased sections for AP Hug and AP Seminar, they are offering them as a team-taught model as well. So now multilingual learners as well as special education students can access those advanced courses and get the necessary supports that they need to find success in an AP course.

So again, just really, really high-level work that's happening. along with that the school has school hosts a variety of curricular events and parent touch points where families can learn about the opportunities that they have available and I think really and I'm sure you've heard this before but they they have this term the passion push right at Fairfax which is where students and families are taught essentially and academically advised to find the area that they're passionate about and to seek the advanced course that aligns with that passion. And so all students are really, really encouraged to find that passion push and to reach to achieve in a higher advanced course. And what that's led to is moving from a bronze

honor roll to a gold honor roll, distinguishment by the college board. And in order to be gold, you have to have at least 65% of the graduation cohort take an AP exam. You have to have at least 35% of that cohort scoring a three or better on an AP exam. And you have to have 10% of that graduating cohort taking five or more AP exams. And so that increase, and I can't remember the exact numbers for the bronze level, but it's an uptick. And I think the really interesting part Even with the large increase in enrollment, some people might think that your performance would go down, but Fairfax has demonstrated that that's not the case. When you put the right supports in place, they continue to advance their status with

College Board despite having more and more students accessing those AP courses. So it just goes to show that the students can perform when they're given the opportunity to do so and the support. Okay. So, of course, we monitor our graduation rates across, well, pretty much everywhere, but certainly at Fairfax High School. And there are really two measures that we look at, our on-time graduation rate. On-time graduation rate is the rate that includes students who are in any of the three Virginia Board-recognized diplomas and provides additional times for students with disabilities and multilingual learners to achieve those diplomas. They're legally able to work through the age of 22. And the four-year FGI indicator is really, narrows that down to students who complete

a standard diploma or an advanced studies diploma really just within four years. So two different measures that we really kind of look closely at. here shows the on-time graduation rate as well as the dropout rate and again I think some pretty impressive numbers here for Fairfax High School in comparison to Virginia as well as FCPS where you where you can see that again Fairfax High School outperforming last class the on-time graduation rate of the division as well as has a lower dropout rate, again, than the state of Virginia and across FCPS. So that work means that Fairfax High School is really, really digging in student by student and making sure that they are on track for graduation, not only senior year,

but well before that to make sure that they graduate on time. And there are three strategies that the division, you know, really looks to implement, and Fairfax High School, I believe, has done all of these strategies really well and, in fact, exceeds, you know, expectation when it comes to monitoring their graduates. So providing multiple opportunities for students to earn credits towards graduation. Fairfax High School offers, you know, is willing to take a look at students on an individual level and see if something isn't quite meeting their need to find another option for them to be successful, whether that's through Edmentum or another programming option that will allow them to get their diploma

in a way that's going to best meet their needs and not being locked into a one size fits all approach they provide that flexibility and really look for a way for students to accrue credits and recover credits Fairfax High School is not staffed with an on-time graduation coordinator position but Dr. A has found a way to utilize her staffing strategically to put that on-time graduation coordinator in place who can very closely monitor students who may off track figure out ways and work with those families to get them back on track as well as to quickly identify and reach out to any student who may be struggling and may not be coming to school maybe in danger of graduation and so she's developed that team at Fairfax High School again to be very very much on

top of that data and to very quickly get students back on track when necessary as well as to find alternative programming options or unique ways as I mentioned team teaching courses that in some schools may not be team taught that allows multilingual learners and students with disabilities to access higher courses to not only earn a standard diploma but perhaps an advanced diploma as well. I believe I may have mentioned all of these already without advancing to the next slide. I did want to mention just a couple of other things that I think Fairfax you know does in a very unique way they do pair all of their seniors particularly seniors who are identified as potentially having some maybe concern

with not with not meeting some of their graduation requirements they partner them with the faculty mentor so that that faculty mentor can be very closely connected with that student and make sure they're staying on track to the And I think we're also really excited to see future years because of the implementation of the freshman academy approach That the school has taken I know dr. A will talk more about that in her presentation So I don't want to steal all of that glory from her But really really it starts with looking closely at your freshman coming in right because if they start to fall off track there their chances of graduating on time become much and much reduced or minimized and so really taken some unique approaches to making sure that their freshmen have the

the right transition plans coming in have the right support so that they do stay on track and exceed their graduation requirements and I'm going to turn it over to Miss Beatty to close us out

Rebecca Baenigstaffall right so our last part is really looking at our state accountability system. So what VDO has done is they've really separated schools accreditation from really looking at school performance. So this really shows the standards of quality that we have to meet to be accredited. So you'll see all different aspects around that wheel or how we're staffing, the safety of our facilities, our instructional programming, all of that, and we're pleased to say all County schools, including the four city schools, are fully accredited. We're really complying with those standards. Where we spend more time is really looking at our school's performance, so not asking are we meeting state laws and safety standards, but more are students learning

and are they graduating. That's really where we focus our time. So our new school performance and support framework, you'll see here how it is calculated at each level, and there are some So, there are three components, mastery, growth, and readiness. So you can see across all levels for mastery, we're really looking at that reading performance, math performance, our ML progress, and science performance. So sort of just our pass rates and our progress with MLs. So that is the same across all levels. And then for when we're looking at growth, it's really looking at student growth on the SOL for our elementary. middle schools. What is nice about our new system is it recognizes all growth. And so for all of these different pieces, schools earn a certain number of points

based on their data, and so the state does provide what I guess you could simply call partial credit. So you know as students are hitting different levels of proficiency on the SOL, we're getting differential points based on their level of mastery and we get credit as well for their growth which is great to see year to year because not only do we want them to be proficient and master the state standards but we want to see them continue growing our old system simply looked at pass rates right so if you had a student who is always past proficient on the SOLs we could be stretching them to pass advance and so this really is looking at that big picture which is really important to make sure each and every child is progressing and growing. Then for our

high schools you'll see that that growth looks a little bit different and is based on that what Chad just talked about in the FGI indicator which has been challenging for a lot of our high schools because as you heard we look at on-time graduation and we look at FGI and FGI expects all students to to graduate with a standard diploma in four years. Yet we also have a system in the state where our multilingual learners and our students with disabilities can stay to the age of 22. And so if they choose to do that, the state is penalizing us for that. So it's where there's still some tension that lies because we want to make sure that we are serving every student well. And that's not the same path for every child.

Then when you look at readiness, you heard a lot tonight about chronic absenteeism, so that is, that's looked at across all levels. And then at the middle school, it's looking at that advanced coursework, and that's included at the high school as well. It's just part of the 3E readiness, which includes enlistment, employment, so looking at our CTEs, and then also looking at enrollment in advanced courses. and that also includes for the high school the six-year expanded FGI. So all of that receives point values, which then ultimately gives the school a final calculation. This just shows you where across the division in the state schools fell based on spring 25 data. And then if we look specifically at the city schools,

I know there's a lot of information here, but you can see under each of those criteria for mastery, growth, and for readiness. You can see the total number of points that each school earned out of the total points. So this really provides the school with a great roadmap of where their opportunities are to focus in the current year. And I want to applaud our schools because this was a lot last fall to wrap our heads around this new system. and we're so fortunate to have really talented data folks in the division that took spring 24 data, applied it to this framework, and showed schools last fall where they would have been, which really allowed for some strategic moves. And three out of four of the city schools saw growth from those predictions in the fall

to where they landed in the spring. One caveat I give to that, it's a little harder to move, I think, in elementary. and middle in some ways because you're focusing on mastery and growth, which there were some other ways at the high school to know for sure you're going to hit the mark in some of those areas. But I do want to highlight Fairfax High School, who was ranked number three across all schools in Fairfax for the greatest growth from last fall to spring, and they grew 11.8%, which hit that distinguished category, which is amazing. like on the edge of on track and off track, and they're distinguished. And that was from very strategic work using this data and making some decisions, which isn't easy once the school year has started

because you already have a master schedule. Kids are enrolled in classes, right? But it was the right thing to do for kids, and it definitely paid off. But we're so proud of the efforts across all four schools to be on track. Katherine Johnson is like a hair from being distinguished. We had some schools miss it by like .2%, but we know that our students are going to continue to grow and learn at high levels under the leadership of our school teams in the four city schools and with your support. So we thank you so much for your time this evening, and I know with your patience, with our very comprehensive presentation, we'd be happy to take any questions that you have.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Sessori.

Kristina CecereI may have a go pack. Just a clarifying question, and my question is mainly focused around algebra one by eighth grade, which is quite an ambitious strategic goal given some of the literature around that goal in other districts and states. Oftentimes it's fantastic because we open the door for a large number of students to have access to something that's advanced. But oftentimes that success is not carried out in later years. And so I have a clarifying question. When you talk about standards being updated by school year, that's essentially following those students from, I think I saw the 23, 24 year, on the way up as they go through by the time they hit in theory eighth grade math by the 28, 29 school year.

recall that slide correctly I

Rebecca Baenigstaffthink so what we did was we've read the math office has completely restructured the pacing guides and so currently I believe it's third and fourth grade yeah I have the new pacing guide next year be 3 4 5 right so you know right now we have some gap filling we're having to do is students access these courses or I think it's what you're probably getting at the implications later on right in high school it may not be something we see right away but it could be something we see later and so I think these curriculum changes are going to provide our students with a great greater foundation to have the readiness I think a lot of I think there are a lot of people this is a definitely a highly debated move right there we have teachers who highly

supported and families and some that have concerns and I think seeing how it is over time will be important and but to you know I think we want to give our kids an opportunity and consider what do we have to do differently to make sure they are successful

Kristina Cecereabsolutely I think I think the biggest curiosity I would have over the next you know as we see this goal evolve is you know the kids who are taking out for one by eighth grade are they maintaining that course Essentially, the intent is for them to take advanced math courses by senior year. That's really why we have that goal. And so seeing what that success looks like as they carry through. So I

Rebecca Baenigstaffwill pass my time on. Well, I just, if it's okay to comment on that, I really thank you for raising that because it's about so much more than completion of this course. And, you know, there's so much that's happening that's great work right now. And one of the pieces that I think is a good complement to our algebra goal and hits many others is the work we're doing with ABL on course taking patterns. And so we're really looking at, and you raised a big one, we have a lot of students who are not taking four years of high school math in high school. And they're often dropping in their senior year wanting to take a lighter load and we know from these experts the impact that has for college admissions and for

their future. And so I think you know anytime you're you're going after something if you're doing it in isolation not looking at the bigger picture, some opportunities so i think this work combined um is really going to help us set our kids up for success long beyond the time they're with us

Carolyn Pitchesokay i

Amit Hickmanhave a question and then i would love to go back okay um i actually had a somewhat similar question but kind of coming at it from a different perspective in terms of the social emotional support or longitudinal study of the children who are taking what is a high school course especially now you know in sixth grade and is that something that's being tracked and also is there preparation for the fact that those sixth and seventh graders are taking a course that that grade you know forget the master of the grade two will follow them throughout their entire high school career and is that something that's being tracked and observed from both the academic side but honestly my question is coming more from that

emotional side and sure of taking a high

Rebecca Baenigstaffschool level course right i think you raise a great point it's the whole child right it's not just pushing them for more academically rare rigorous opportunities certainly we aren't actively looking at the cross-section of those two things but i think we could easily we have our cell screener that we give multiple times a year right it'd be a way that we could look at these two data points and see are we noticing any any differences um You know, I think our teachers are pretty attuned who are directly teaching the students, and especially among sixth grade. You know, we've had a really strong retention rate across the division in our pilot schools, which Daniel's run being one, and kids being successful in the course.

So while it does have huge repercussions as a high school level course, I think a lot of the wonders, maybe fears that we had, we're not seeing come to fruition at this time. encouraged and next year we will offer it to every kid that is ready in sixth grade. So we're going to have a continue with a lot of different delivery models because the pilot has been so successful.

Dr. WrightstaffAnd if I may, I would just chime in real quick on both of those topics, whether it's the eighth grade algebra or the pilots that we were just talking about in sixth grade. I think one of the biggest purposes of these goals was to allow the access and break down and the barriers that have traditionally been there when we've said well this group of students they're not ready for algebra by eighth grade potentially but some of that is just based on tradition or how he's always done things and so a goal like this I think builds into the fact that is this the right match for a hundred percent of our students absolutely not I don't think there's a single educator that would that would state that but is it a right match for

some students that might not have had that access before I think a hundred Same thing with the sixth grade by algebra. You'll hear the superintendent in Fairfax County public schools say often, for some kids, math is their Friday night lights, right? And we don't know. Some of these issues, it's just the adults who aren't ready, right? The kids can be ready. And so that's something I think that's really important, that these give us the opportunity to see how is it going to work. Is this possible in a school setting? And to monitor it closely and track it and provide those supports. be really critical in this segment to see what what's happening throughout the next few years and and necessary over the coursework what actually happens when those students get to 11th and 12th

grade and i think there's some structures in place that will support that

Rebecca Baenigstaffyeah i think will be important i mean we've talked to a lot of our students who are in algebra as a sixth grader and like they light up because they feel so good that they are accessing what they know is a rigorous class and that they're having success. So you think about the success that that will breed for those students, the confidence that they'll go into their further studies with.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Calce.

Sarah KelseyI'm gonna switch over to reading. On slide 35 it was strategy 2.

Rebecca BaenigstaffThe intervention?

Sarah KelseyYeah.

Rebecca BaenigstaffI

Sarah Kelseyjust kind of want clarification on this And the reason I'm asking is, is this that they have the improvement? Is it like if I look at Providence for kindergarten, it's 52% or 52.5% improved? Or is it that's how many are at high risk?

Rebecca BaenigstaffThat's how many are at high risk. So in this particular cohort, as compared to last year's kindergarten cohort,

Kristina Ceceremore kids in the fall came in at that high risk.

Rebecca Baenigstaffreally fast. We have seen over the years, so I imagine if we asked Mr. Pratt, not going to put him on the spot, but that we have many fewer kindergartners still in that high-risk category.

Sarah KelseyOkay, that's what I was understanding it as, because I guess part of my confusion, I guess, is why Providence's numbers are almost double to what, like, is that because there's more multilingual learners is it like what would cause them to be that much higher because the numbers aren't that much different in the schools is what I'm so I'm just curious yeah

Rebecca BaenigstaffI mean I think we can unpack it I think there are a lot of other metrics we could look at such as readiness for school right how many of those kindergartners coming in at our respective schools had a preschool experience which is within goal one that strong start so I think you know among these strategic plan goal data points, it's important to also look at them. We looked at them very discreetly today, but I think if we looked at that for Providence, my hunch would be fewer kids are coming in with that preschool experience, which could impact where they're coming in.

Sarah KelseyI was just looking, because first grade's about, it's

Rebecca Baenigstaffgot that higher number,

Sarah Kelseybut then second grade, it's almost exactly

Rebecca Baenigstaffthe same. So that's why I'm

Sarah Kelseykind of curious why those two.

Rebecca BaenigstaffCertainly Providence serves a larger percent of multilingual learners, right? So you have a lot more students who are building their language and their literacy skills. I don't know, Mr. Pratt, do you have other hunches?

Andrew PrattstaffNo, I think that speaks to it.

Rebecca BaenigstaffI

Andrew Prattstaffthink, you know, in a 12-month one, I think we did see a lot in our mid-year, the mid-year kind of checkpoint of considerable growth. So it's a reduction of students who found that high risk, I think,

Dr. Wrightstaffespecially

Andrew Prattstaffat Cunningham. I think, right, when we were kindergarteners, they're ours for the first time, which I think is a real testament of all that we're doing around reading instruction, reading instruction having an immediate impact, right, and also seeing that continue to be the case over the first couple of years, which are so essential, especially as we get to that third grade, which is really central to the division of strategic time.

Carolyn PitchesI will also say that historically the city students who do not receive preschool services are heavily they enroll heavily more

Dr. Wrightstaffin at Providence than they do at Daniel's run

Carolyn Pitchesso Providence sees more of the kids who haven't had any preschool services yeah

Rebecca BaenigstaffI mean and these cohorts are different groups right they're different cohorts of kid I mean what we the language you'll hear this school team say a lot is we want to grow the green and shrink the red right and so while this is fall to fall right really what we're looking at fall to winter to spring and we want to see that green growing and that red shrinking

Dr. Wrightstaffbut to that point and i would echo everything that you just heard i love to look at these charts diagonally so when you look at the 48.9 of providence students in 2024 in kindergarten those are the 36.6 in first grade in 2025 and that includes the summer where there's you know you could have potentials those impacts that you heard from Ms. Pratt and Ms. Bain about what's happening once they arrive at our school. We want to look at where students start the year and then we want to ensure that they have a minimum of a year or more growth. I think you're starting to see some of that in the numbers right there.

Sarah KelseyOh, yeah. Like, I was looking at the diagonal, too. I was just, it was such a big jump that it kind of threw me off first.

Rebecca BaenigstaffAnd one nugget I'll give you, we were recently at Katherine Johnson, for instance, they hosted instructional rounds with and hosted two other middle schools and they all were showing their And over the last several years in our middle schools, we see our students are coming in not with solid foundations around phonics and phonemic awareness. And when Mr. Smith put up the KJ data, like, it was green. And so both Mr. Pratt and Ms. Mullen need to know that. Like, the work that we're doing is making a difference. So now what can they focus on in their English department? Comprehension and vocabulary, which is really what we should be doing at that level. So the work's paying off, and I think every year that goes, we're going to see kids continuing to grow.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Barlmay.

Lauren BartelmeI also have a reading question. So with the Virginia Literacy Act focusing on K-8, I guess I was wondering what's happening at the high school grade levels for literacy intervention for those kids who have not gotten some of the benefits of benchmarks and the newer initiatives.

Rebecca BaenigstaffI'll defer to Dr. Ann in a minute, but it's funny you should ask. I was in, Mr. Lehman, Mr. Stokes and I were in a instructional leadership team meeting this morning and we were talking about potentially putting together a literacy symposium this summer to provide some professional learning. And we talked about reading plans, potentially moving to ninth grade next year and just making sure, right, we'd be providing the support for our high school teachers and other pieces. Our high school teachers don't have a depth of training how to teach foundational reading, right? So we were talking about the need to really scale up the work we've done with elementary and middle to high. But Dr. A, would you know anything else?

Speaker 9Yeah, there's- On intervention? Yeah, there's several things that we're doing. So we use the maps assessments. So we are using the literacy data to identify students that are falling into that red or that high risk intervention area. So students that are falling into that score indicator actually have been moved into strategic line times. the first two, Liantime A and B, so they actually are with two literacy team experts that are kind of drilling into their data and their skill needs. And then we also have a special education section of that and a multilingual learner section of that as well. I think the one biggest thing that we have done is we've made all of our staff, just we've made the literacy data accessible to every content area because

more than likely if you're seeing challenges in performance they linked back to literacy. I've always been, I'm a former English teacher, but I say literacy changes lives and it saves lives. It's the one thing. If you can't read, then you don't have access to anything else, whether that's basic life skills or content knowledge and post-secondary education opportunities. And so we've been using a lot of that even in our CTE programs, our academy programs, like unpacking their modules and their manuals assessments like really young vocabulary rich strategies and I think one of the nice things about our freshman Academy is is they have adopted common strategies that they're using across all content areas that we want to take to scale

like in other areas as well but we've used that math data to say okay so they need vocabulary they need common annotation they need common writing formulas to use so it doesn't look different everywhere everywhere it's just really good strategy practice and we started that this year and have seen a lot better performance and product from that class of 2029 that we hope to take full scale and then we also offer we we have phased out we are phasing out strategies for success and that's becoming avid now because there's a more prescriptive curriculum that is strategy based but also talks about the big picture of college access for kids as well right versus just basic strategies so melding the two together to actually support students in that

learning but a lot of the students that we found enrolling in that course for students with disabilities and some of our multilingual learners as well that needed something in addition to so we have ESOL sections and students with disability sections we sent those teachers to get trained and those practices as well to bring in of course that has like maybe I would just say more intentionality in the outcome of where they will end up in that class and And then we offer four reading intervention courses in our special education department with four different programs depending on where students are at. Whether it is still the phenomes and the phonemic awareness or if it's the fluency and the vocabulary, they're almost coupled together.

And then we have the opportunity to make students transient as they hit growth goals within those programs.

Rebecca BaenigstaffI think they're ready for the reading plans at Fairfax High School. I think they're already doing them.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Lucas, do you have a question?

StudentI have more of a comment. So I was a middle schooler in the COVID years, so obviously my math skills were underdeveloped, but I went through the Algebra I in eighth grade, that kind of thing, and I had an A in that class. And then I got to high school, and my math grades dropped significantly. I went from basically barely passing all my math classes and being an advanced student until this year when I did a project-based math instead. So what I'm wondering is basically how are we going to plan to have high school courses in middle school and make sure the kids are prepared to go to high school and still have an ability to pass and get A's and B's in their math classes because not everybody is a mathematician.

Math is hard. and it just it shows on report cards that math can be a big layer to dropping your GPA restricting you from maybe getting different going into different schools for college and different stuff because of being so far behind in math that's basically what I'm

Rebecca BaenigstaffWell, I appreciate you sharing your story. And certainly, every student has a different experience, right? So I think you're really raising the importance for us to really understand kids who have taken different pathways and how it's worked, right, so that we can be more responsive. I mean, one way you heard us talking tonight is we're making sure that we're doing a lot of work before middle school, right? So a student like you kind of made that jump right for eighth grade without what kids today in elementary school are benefiting from. So we really hope that by starting young and providing kids and a stronger curriculum, they'll be more ready. But I think you raised something we need to watch very carefully is what is happening beyond eighth grade.

And I know Mr. Smith and Dr. A talk about that a lot. and what gaps do we need to fill or what additional supports. We don't want students to not like math. We don't want students to feel unsuccessful in math. We want you to achieve every hope and dream that you've set up for your future. I appreciate you sharing that. I think we have to keep talking to our students about their experience. Thank you.

Carolyn PitchesI'm going to sort of piggyback on that because my question was, really excited to see how this progresses and how it transforms the math pathway. Students who maybe earn a C, C plus, C minus in algebra one, they're likely going to struggle a little bit with algebra two and pre-calc just because their foundation isn't quite hasn't cooked enough. So if we have students in sixth grade who haven't quite mastered the Algebra 1 content, will there be any supports for them, say, you know, over the summer as they sort of move on so that, you know, it addresses some of the challenges that they incurred in the program?

Rebecca BaenigstaffI think that's a great question. I mean, we talked a little bit about some of the summer work we do for algebra readiness. So I think, you know, this being the first year with sixth graders in the course, I think we're going to have to really study that at the end of the year. And I imagine, and I don't know if it's already started as part of the transition conversations, right? But really seeing, I know that jumping kids from math seven to algebra, right, as we've kind of closed that gap, and that's why the enrollment's gone up at the middle school, we've had to be very thoughtful about how the curriculum changes, right, to provide the additional supports for what kids might have missed in that jump.

And I think we'll have to do the same for our algebra. Why I think we're better positioned to do that now is we actually use the same math assessment from kindergarten through 12th grade, which we haven't, right? using that really helps us see over time and it gives everybody a common measure which i know just from being at johnson recently it's going to make these transitions a lot easier because the teachers will know how to interpret that data and how to differentiate their instruction for each learner if

Carolyn Pitchesa student or a family wanted to retake the algebra one course for a student who took it in sixth grade are they going to be able to have that option or will that just what you have to move

Rebecca Baenigstaffforward. I imagine they would because they do now, you know, seventh graders have that option. So certainly if they want to, what do we call it when they take the sponge? Thank you. The word wasn't coming to me. If they want to expunge and retake the class because, you know, and we have kids decide to do that even though they've had relative success because they just don't feel like it's really, like you said, fully cooked yet. So, you know, we want kids to feel confident proceeding on their math journey.

Carolyn PitchesYeah. Thank you. That helps a lot.

Rebecca BaenigstaffI think a lot will remain to be seen. Yeah,

Carolyn Pitchessure. But it is nice. It's just like when they opened up AP classes. Right. Because I'm sure those of you who went to high school in the 80s knew there were very few AP course offerings and very few people who were able to take them. And now how much it's changed is amazing. So the curriculum changes and the math curriculum changes. Will that be published somewhere to sort of see? It's more part of

Rebecca Baenigstaffour pacing

Carolyn Pitchesguides, like our

Amit Hickmaninternal

Rebecca Baenigstaffdocuments, but we are looking to adopt a basal for next year, which I think will really help us have that core curriculum at the elementary level. So we're excited about that. So I think all of these things working in concert with one another will set us up for success.

Carolyn PitchesOkay, great. Does anybody go? Ms. Sessori, you got to go back?

Kristina CecereI do. I missed my chance here. I hate bringing in personal experiences into this role, but I have to share. So as a parent of a 10th grader, rising 11th grader, we're considering dual enrollment versus AP. And I've heard from a number of people, teachers, even the dual enrollment coordinator that's come in, actually I know her personally, the principal and whatnot. I even called one of the universities, my son's considering and said, Which one should he take? Because there's a lot of courses that you offer for FCPS that is both AP and dual enrollment. And which one's better? Which one looks better to schools? And I got the answer of, oh, your district offers both. So I'm curious, like, what's the, in FCPS, as I understand,

it's to diversify opportunity. Because college board AP courses may not be what kids want because of how high stakes that one test can be in that credit versus you have access through a dual enrollment course connected to Nova or sometimes James Madison because we have a wonderful geospatial course at Fairfax. And that provides an automatic course right there. But I'm curious like what FCPS sees, like the difference between the two and just if you're advising students or parents to consider both. because I will say like this is not the I'm not the only parent a number of my neighbors and friends have come up to me like what's the difference and I have to tell them like I thought I knew and I like many other people are also feeling

that same way so I would love to hear from you possible yeah

Rebecca BaenigstaffI don't know that I'm prepared to answer that question I'd probably want to consult with some of my colleagues in central offices I'm not directly involved in curriculum advising I think you know our goal is to provide students with as many opportunities as Dr. A, I don't know if you would want to add anything

Speaker 9about... We have about 40 options for AP and dual enrollment. And part of that is the passion push is, I think, where do you see yourself post-secondary, right? And so we have several students that are going to Nova or going to Mason, that will accept the dual enrollment classes, right? Especially being a direct partner and direct acceptance school to Mason, right? is that the opportunity? We also have some kids who at their senior year we added dual enrollment, US history, and world history this year as well. That it's their first class and AP seems a little bit more intimidating to them because of the high stakes testing or a child that will share with us, I'm not a great tester. Like the idea of everything I do in this class,

riding on one test terrifies me. will say okay there's a dual enrollment opportunity for you to actually still receive that rigorous coursework to have that that opportunity and still be earning that college level that college level opportunity I think also some some classes only offer you so we have dual enrollment now in in fashion we have dual enrollment in music technology you know we have dual enrollment in both of our theater programs in both academy and in baseball right so sometimes there's not even an AP opportunity for that entry point so I do I do think sometimes like how do you feel about testing like how do you feel about assessment and how do you feel about high stakes tests right your teachers gonna prepare you for

those high stakes tests but like if that's something that you you know suffer from test anxiety or that's something that you know that's a lot of pressure for you especially if it's the first class you're taking then maybe lean into a dual enrollment opportunity where you can still kind of become comfortable with that thank

Kristina Cecereyou I

Amit Hickmando but I think I'm just gonna keep emailing you guys different things sorry I'm like sending all my questions to prolong and then maybe you can get it to the right people to ask

Dr. Wrightstaffabsolutely

Carolyn Pitchesmiss Kelsey okay well thank you so much thank you so much that was a great report Our next presentation is the state of the schools report with Daniel's run principal Ms. Mullen and Providence principal Mr. Pratt.

Susan MullenstaffThank you. We appreciate being here. I think this is our third scheduled night. So Andrew and I were going to come rain, snow, sleet, whatever. I did want to start tonight by just acknowledging a few groups that we want to thank. Since our assistant principals all made their way over here, I'd like them to stand up first. I've got from Daniel's Run, Danelle Alibi, and Brandi O'Brien. and our third AP is at home sick tonight and from Providence we have Katie Boxer Sarah Van Alth and Megan Keller and I can't go without saying there we can't do what we do without such amazing teams and support and I know that we both feel super supported by our admin teams we also need to make sure to thank the school staffs in case they're still watching

and I know you're going to tell your mom I said thank you.

Dr. WrightstaffShe's here tonight.

Sarah KelseyWhere are

Susan Mullenstaffyou, Zoya?

Sarah KelseyOh, my gosh.

Susan MullenstaffPopped right. She's a mom. She just popped right in. Well, we want to thank them for all they do because, again, we can't do what we do without our incredible staff. And also we want to thank this group and this group because I think Andrew and I have the best of both worlds two exceptional groups, and then lastly, we want to thank our PTAs, because beyond just holding events, they've been our partners in our mission in providing us essential classroom support and advocating for students. And again, our schools wouldn't be what they are without those groups. So tonight, our presentation is going to provide a snapshot of some strategic practices, some goals with some school improvement goals, and also we want to highlight some

community partnerships and ways that the city of Fairfax supports Daniel's run and Providence elementary. I guess I was supposed to change this. I'm pointing at it. I got it backwards. Thank you. So we're going to start with Daniel's run which is one more. There we go. At Daniel's Run, we currently have are enrolled at 768 students pre-K to sixth grade. And this is a decrease from last year, but it's largely been driven by a dip in kindergarten enrollment, which mirrors state and local trends. Our school mission has remained steadfast at Daniel's Run. We empower every student to be a lifelong learner, a resilient risk taker and impactful collaborator and we achieved this by engaging them in meaningful

experiences that support their social emotional and academic growth. This submission is supported by the city of Fairfax in some very tangible ways. This past summer we were able to use city funds to invite our teachers back into the building for dedicated planning and collaboration and it also allowed us to hit the ground running on day one with clear goals and a unified SUCCESS. THAT VISION COMES TO LIFE THROUGH OUR COMMUNITY TRADITIONS, MANY OF WHICH BEGIN LONG BEFORE THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. THANKS TO THE SUPPORT OF CITY FUNDS, WE WERE ABLE TO HOST A JUMP START KINDERGARTEN PROGRAM TO MAKE SURE OUR YOUNGEST DRAGONS FEEL AT HOME BEFORE THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL. WE BUILT ON THAT MOMENTUM THROUGH SUMMER PLAY DATES WITH OUR KINDERGARTEN STUDENTS

AND OUR SIGNATURE WELCOME WALK WHERE THE STAFF VISITS THE HOME OF EVERY STUDENT six. These traditions allow us to build vital early connections and welcome our families into the Daniels Run community before the school year even starts. And once the school year is officially underway, that sense of community only grows. We lean into traditions that bring us together and celebrate our community, such as back to school night and family picnics, our Dragon Day, fall and spring book fairs, bingo, our first ever SOAR assemblies, and joyful moments like Thanksgiving luncheons, Friday morning dance parties, field days, string and band and chorus concerts. And looking ahead, our calendar remains full with more concerts.

And this week we just kicked off our Read Across America week. So we are doing a different book theme each day. AND WE HAVE GUEST READERS VISITING CLASSROOMS THROUGHOUT THE WEEK. NEXT WEEK, WE'RE EXCITED TO HOST OUR FIRST EVER INTERNATIONAL WEEK. EACH DAY WE'LL FEATURE A UNIQUE THEME, AND DURING THE STUDENT SPECIALS BLOCK, THEY'RE GOING TO PARTICIPATE IN LESSONS HIGHLIGHTING COUNTRIES AND CULTURES FROM AROUND THE WORLD. AND THE WHOLE WEEK CULMINATES ON OUR THIS IS US INTERNATIONAL NIGHT, AND DURING THIS SPECIAL EVENT, FAMILIES WILL SHARE CULTURE THROUGH FOOD. students participating in dance and other performances, and their families will be doing presentations. We also will have literacy in the library where students can hear stories in their home

languages and we have literacy resources for those families as well. And of course, gearing up for our annual sporting events against Providence this year, which IS I BELIEVE WE'RE GOING TO BE HAVING A VOLLEYBALL GAME ONCE AGAIN AND THAT WAS A LOT OF FUN WAY IT WAS A REALLY FUN WAY TO BRING OUR COMMUNITIES TOGETHER LAST YEAR. ANOTHER WAY THAT WE BRING OUR SCHOOLS MISSION TO LIFE IS BY PROVIDING MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES THAT SUPPORT STUDENTS SOCIAL, EMOTIONAL, AND ACADEMIC GROWTH. WE'RE COMMITTED TO FOSTERING LEADERSHIP IN OUR STUDENTS AND SO WE'RE PROVIDING THEM WITH A NUMBER OF LEADERSHIP EXPERIENCES. WE HAVE A MORNING NEWS TEAM, A TECH TEAM, A LIBRARY TEAM, WE HAVE SAFETY PATROLS, STUDENT LEADERSHIP COUNCIL, AND A GREEN TEAM.

AND THIS YEAR WE'RE PROUD TO OFFER SOME NEW LEADERSHIP OPPORTUNITIES UNDER THE GUIDANCE OF OUR SCHOOL COUNCILOR, MR. GALE. WE NOW HAVE STUDENT AMBASSADORS WHO ARE WARMLY WELCOMING NEW STUDENTS TO OUR SCHOOL AND STUDENT MENTORS WHO ARE WORKING WITH YOUNGER STUDENTS ACROSS THE GRADE LEVELS AND and volunteering in the classrooms. As part of our work towards the No Place for Hate certification, we have launched a No Place for Hate student equity team that's led by our AAP teacher, Danny James. And this group empowers students to provide inclusivity, it's getting late, equity and belonging in our school community. Beyond the school day, we have been trying to expand our after school offerings. With support from the city of Fairfax,

A DECADED AFTER SCHOOL COORDINATOR, OUR PARENT LIAISON, STEFANIA CASTRO, AND SHE OVERSEES THE GROWTH OF OUR PROGRAM. AS A RESULT, WE NOW OFFER A WIDE RANGE OF AFTER SCHOOL PROGRAMS, INCLUDING A SCIENCE OLYMPIAD TEAM, A SCHOOL KARATE CLUB, A CROWCHET CLUB, AN ARTS AND CRAFTS CLUB, RUN BY FAIRFACTS CITY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS AND CARRIE. AND WE HAVE SCIENCE CLUBS THAT FOCUS ON DIFFERENT THEMES such as slime and bubbles, warrior kids yoga, pottery classes, and girls on the run. And this list just continues to grow each session. These programs do ensure that our students have safe, engaging, and enriching opportunities to learn and grow long after the school day ends. And this leads into the next piece, which is we wanted to talk a little bit tonight

about community partnerships because a goal for both of us has been to grow our community partnerships. So while we take great pride in our internal program, it really does take a village and our community partners have been instrumental in addressing the essential needs of a lot of our students. Through these partnerships we've managed a weekend food program that currently serves 150 students. We do this through bi-weekly donations from the Korean United Methodist Church and we supplement the in-between weeks with food purchased by the school using grant money and also money from our very generous PTA. Our next-door neighbors, the First Church of Christ Science, have been incredibly generous with us providing funds for

food and clothing this past fall for families experiencing hardships from the We were also supported by Ferris Subaru who welcomed each of our new teachers with $500 in classroom grants and school supply kits. We have a new partnership this year with Blankenship and Keith Law Firm who have stepped up to provide mentoring, tutoring, and essential items for our students. We are always grateful for the City Rotary Club for giving each student, each third grader dictionary and we are committed to being good stewards of our environment and we are incredibly grateful for our partnership with Land and Waters who partner with us and maintain our school grounds and to ensure that our outdoor spaces are not only beautiful but serve as a living classroom where all our

students can learn the importance of protecting our ecosystem. We also place a high value on the mentorship and showing our students what leadership looks like lot of partnerships with Fairfax High School. We're proud of our ongoing collaboration with the Fairfax High School's teachers of tomorrow. We had another group of Fairfax High School students come to our upper elementary schools to share messages about the power of our words which was very inspiring to our younger students. Our partnership with George Mason University remains a cornerstone of our community engagement and we're especially grateful for their student teachers who come each year. Our students have benefited greatly from the

mentorship of the GMU baseball team who not only help at big events but also come and assist in the classroom. And we also have people coming in from the community all the time. We had a second grade community helpers project this past December where we had a federal judge, the Fairfax Police Department, the City Council, representatives from the Creation and the City Librarian all came to talk to our second graders, and many of those same people are coming to read to the students this week for Read Across America, and will return again on our Career Day. So, again, we're very grateful for your support and seeing all of you at our school functions. And now, we'll let Mr. Pratt share.

Andrew PrattstaffAll right. Welcome. It's good to be here this evening. You know, I continue to be incredibly grateful in this role that I take on as principal of this incredible school community, Providence. And I wanted to just kind of echo what Susan already said, that I have such amazing admin teammates who are here this evening. They have been so instrumental in the success we have felt this year, and I can't thank them enough for all that they've done to help support our school. and to each of you in this room too I think as we look around this school around this around this room here this evening our school has been benefited from everyone in this in this in this room unique ways and I think we hopefully will be able to kind of articulate that a little bit more

tonight but it feels really good to be here in the city of Fairfax and I think it's sometimes it's hard to explain that to our colleagues on the other side of the division all that it means but I think in an evening like this it's quite amazing to kind of really articulate all that we have that we wouldn't have elsewhere. And so we would not be the school that we are without the support. So appreciate everything that you all provide. So Providence, our current enrollment, is 933 students, which is a slight decrease year-to-year from last year. Our demographics largely remain the same. And our school team continues with the day-to-day focus of our work and our long-term goals are centered around our mission,

which is that Providence is an inclusive and collaborative community dedicated to fostering success in all students. And I think everything that we're going to talk about really kind of comes underneath that mission, our vision and beliefs. Our incredible team work hard through collaboration and collective responsibility to meet the diverse needs of our students and families. We talk often that this work is not ever an individual endeavor, as we just spoke to. I think certainly as everyone here in this room can kind of attest to, the partnership that we have in this community. It comes through collective, success is found through collective responsibility. And this is something we talk about often at Providence.

And it's a lot more fun when we're doing it together, as we'll speak to tonight too. And to that point at Providence, I feel incredibly lucky and grateful every day to have the opportunity to work alongside such a tremendous group of professionals. I'm in awe each day when I'm able to be inside classrooms to see the work of our teachers with our students and all of our staff. It's amazing work, and I feel honored to be able to be in this position to help lead it. So an essential aspect of serving our mission is our collaboration and relationship with our families, right? Our teachers and staff work hard to keep them informed and to enlist their help when we need it, and they consistently share how much warmth and love they feel from our school community.

And I believe that's especially felt being here in the city of Fairfax. And so we continue to make it a priority to find opportunities to bring them in and to celebrate our students' work and learning and to strengthen our partnership. Of course, this begins right at the beginning of the school year with our back-to-school events, you know, and then it continues on with our Thanksgiving luncheon, which is so large. We have two days of our Thanksgiving lunch and our turkey trot and many other showcases of learning. And that's continued with other tentpole family events like our math night in the fall. We kind of have this new tradition of our Providence Book Festival, which is just here in January.

We have our upcoming steam night in a couple weeks. Hopefully some of you can be able to come to attend. And then just last week at our second annual history fair, which was like a student-led idea into something unbelievable. And we partnered this year with Daniel's run. And then we have our community connection night coming up in the spring. We'll have more than 40 community organizations present to kind of help bring resources to the people who really benefit from most. And then, of course, we do look forward to our volleyball match. It's something that's very... We all have a little bit of competitiveness, but it's always in good fun here in the city. And we, too, at Providence, proud of all the leadership opportunities that we provide for our students, which includes

our student ambassadors, which were great as we welcome people in today for our Read Across America initiative. And we have our peer mentors. We also have our Eco Panthers, who help to kind of keep us be good stewards of our environment, both locally and beyond. We have our math and science Olympiad. We also have a volleyball program for our students. and of course our pounders led by our bucket drumming group led by teacher Courtney Buchanan, and many more, of course. And I think we are fortunate tonight to have all the information shared from our region leadership. I think we are highly aligned with the goals of the Region 5 leadership team, which is centered around our professional learning communities

as well as our work around behavior solutions, and we'll kind of speak more to that this evening. And I think that really does align with our work that we do, our belief that we believe our strength comes through our teamwork, and that's reflected in all that we do. So we also wanted to take time to kind of highlight many of the community partnerships that we have in Providence, and we have some pictures to help kind of speak to that a little bit, because, again, without their support and collaboration we would not be able to meet the needs of our community. And in many ways, they are what transform our school to be the school we strive to be through our mission and vision. And I think one thing in particular, kind of much like Daniel's run,

we have a weekend food program kind of led by our social workers, Claudia DePaz, who's amazing, in partnership with our family liaison, Piedad Dwyer, who does so many amazing things at Providence. and through our partnership with the Western Fairfax Church Ministries as well as volunteers from the Christ Presbyterian Church right here in the city of Fairfax we're able to kind of serve over 150 students on a weekly basis with not only non-perishable but perishable food items each week and that's because we have a donated refrigerator by the Western Fairfax Church Ministry that really helps to kind of have that be much more than just going home each week. We also have been adopted, I would say, from Expectation Church, our school.

They provide a full like wraparound support, not only for our students, but for our staff. They've helped to provide staff breakfasts. They've also provided meals at holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas time, as well as providing opportunities to provide gifts for students and donations which helps to kind of provide support for students throughout the year. In addition, we have a picture here of the class that is led by EduFuturo, which is a group that really does a lot of work to partner with schools to help host parent classes. And again, PDAD has helped to facilitate that this year. We've had classes on technology, as well as how to best you support your child And of course, much like Daniel's run, we really benefit from our partnership with the City Rotary Club.

Not only do they continue to support annual recognition of the Teacher of the Year program here in the city, they've also provided hundreds of new books for students at Providence, particularly at K1 and 2 over this past couple of years. And of course, they have their dictionaries, which they presented. They came on a day when I happened to be wearing a turkey costume.

Dr. WrightstaffIt

Andrew Prattstaffwas near Thanksgiving, so that was good. And so that was a lot of fun. And then we also have a really strong relationship with George Mason. George Mason came and basketball came recently and they played basketball, which of course is a huge highlight for a lot of our students. But we also really have a number of student interns from George Mason's education program. Some of them have been at our school for over the past year or plus and they really are much a strong part of our school community, as well as with other sports teams coming and volunteering at some of our events. And then, of course, much like Daniel's Run, we really are strengthened through our partnership with our city schools, and we have the Teachers of Tomorrow's program as well.

We also have the leadership class coming from Fairfax High School to help mentor some students from our school. We also helped with our Lego League team. And then also like at Daniel's Run, we had a group from Fairfax High School come and teach a lesson to our older students around the power of words and what it means to be an upstander. And I think that had a real impact hearing that from a high school student. And we also partner with our across the street friends at KJ who come over every couple of weeks as mentors for our Young Scholars Program and other many ways that we kind of work within to. And then so this truly is a unique place to be and it does create a unique sense of community that is strengthened through each of your support. Okay so

kind of moving along we wanted to kind of structure the rest of our time around how we as schools support our students through our multi-tiered systems of support. And just this kind of an anchor to this we wanted to provide this visual. I mean it's really kind of all that we do right thinking about what we're doing at tier one for all students You know it's that high quality tier one instruction that we speak to the differentiated instruction and then what we're doing at Tier two for some students identified through our progress monitoring Oftentimes that's reteaching and again this encompasses beyond just that academics includes behavior and wellness as well And then in Tier 3, it's what are we doing for those very few who require the most intensive levels of support

in the reinforcement of foundational skills. And I think kind of echoing back to the Region 5 presentation, this work is really led by our guiding coalition, like our leadership team, who really looks closely at the work at each of these tiers and thinks about what are the pieces in place that help us to do all that we need to be doing. What does the data tell us around Tier 1 instruction? How do we need to reconfigure our intervention system to be better towards meeting our goals? And so this is really kind of all that we're doing in the framework to kind of help talk us through the rest of our slides this evening. Okay, so I'm going to let Susan speak a little bit about our language

Susan Mullenstaffarts school. All right. So you've already heard our language arts goals, but there it is again for you. Lucky for us tonight that the region went first to cover a lot of the high level and statistics. So we appreciate that. Thank you very much. So for language arts, we're working on building from the Virginia Linderacy Act in the past couple of years. And the new benchmark, which was new last year and we're in our second year, it's kind of amazing because our teachers have really mastered the curriculum and it's fun to go in now and see what they're doing with it. As you know from the presentation, there's also a separate benchmark called Benchmark Express that we use with our multilingual learners.

and conversely we didn't speak about this but our students that require extra challenges we've been implementing the advanced academic supplemental guide for benchmark and that's with our AAP and our higher students and that has been really great about providing that extra deep cognitive complexity that those students need and as you know high level of instruction needs high level of SPORT. SO OUR ACADEMIC PRACTICES ARE GROUNDED IN THE MULTITIAR SYSTEM OF SUPPORT. BUT WE ALSO KNOW THAT ONE SIZE DOESN'T FIT ALL. SO THROUGH A COMBINATION OF SCPS FUNDING AND CITY SUPPLEMENTAL FUNDS, WE ARE ABLE TO MAINTAIN A SPECIALIZED READING TEAM. IT'S KIND OF LIKE THE ENGINE OF OUR LITERACY PROGRAM. WE HAVE A READINGS TEACHER, A HALFTIME

reading teacher and then that half-time reading teacher is also a half-time hip ‑‑ I think you can't remember the acronym. Pardon?

Sarah KelseyHigh

Susan MullenstaffImpact Tutor. There we go. See, at 8 o'clock in the morning, I would have known that. But who also does that half-time and then we have a full-time high impact tutor. And those are the people that see the people with the most ‑‑ or the students with the most significant needs. Simultaneously, our advanced learning lead, Danny James, has been instrumental in helping our teachers to elevate their core instructions using those higher level strategies. With the multilingual learners, they comprise about a third of our students at Daniel's Run. And so we believe that what's good for our ML students is good for everyone. So we have ensured that our ML teachers are assigned to every grade level. assigned to each grade level to support teacher planning and collaboration. Our ML

team also shares their deep expertise with the wider staff. They most recently led an early release Wednesday PD about the WIDA assessment because although we've heard a lot about it tonight, our classroom teachers never really see that test. So we wanted to make sure they knew what it looked like so that we can align our instructional practices. Also, with our ESAU teachers have done a great job of helping us to use the scaffolds that they use all the time in their small groups in our classrooms every day. Because even if the ESAU teacher is able to pull out a student for 30 minutes of the day, they spend the rest of the time in the classroom. So we're trying to use those good instructional strategies

all day long. AND FINALLY, WE DON'T LEAVE THAT GROWTH UP TO CHANCE. WE DO SCREEN STUDENTS THREE TIMES A YEAR, AS BECKY SPOKE, USING IREADY EVALS. AND WE'VE TRIED TO IDENTIFY GAPS EARLY WHEN THE DATA INDICATES A STRUGGLE. OUR LITERACY TEAM MATCHES THAT STUDENT WITH EVIDENCE-BASED PRACTICES WITH INTERVENTIONS LIKE UFLY OR OTHER LITERACY-BASED PROGRAMS. SO BY PAIRING THE MOST QUALIFIED EXPERTS, USING THE resources, we ensure every student has the tools to become a lifelong learner. And I'll let you talk a little bit more about reading.

Andrew PrattstaffYes, so we kind of spent some time earlier reviewing our goal, and this really is our marching orders, right, and that we look at closely as a guiding coalition, and I think more closely our reading team, our grade level teams to think through how can we move students from that high risk to low risk, right, and all that we kind of really make sure that we're extending students' learning who are demonstrating mastery or proficiency right away. So I think again, echoing much of what Susan has already said, here in the second year of implementation of the Virginia Literacy Act, that really has provided a lot of helpful external accountabilities. I think it also affirmed a lot of the work that we already had in place.

and I think that again teams you know unpacking the curriculum spending more time with that we've really been able to have a greater impact on student learning we've kind of eaten a lot of the learning curve around up our new curriculum and this year has been a lot more about hitting the ground running as Susan said I think at the high level I want to think about who is really at the center of our work it's our reading team and we can thinking about that framework around our MTSS for reading. Our reading team trains, supports, and works closely with our classroom teachers who deliver tier one instruction of our students every day. And who've also been instrumental in helping to support our teacher teams, including modeling

and co-teaching in the classrooms. And then I think in addition, they really help those grade level teams through data dialogues, through the screening tools that we've spoken to, help identify students who greatest in need. And we have like a really robust and strong intervention system at Providence, which is comprised of our reading team, as well as, as Susan said, high impact tutors. I think this is a real area where the city has been instrumental in helping us maintain the same level of support year to year. The division through, because of the diminishing dollars from the state grant, the All in Virginia grant, there's been fewer dollars available for the high impact tutors. And so as a result, we were able to kind of leverage dollars from the city, the school

innovation fund or funding, to help to kind of maintain the same level this year as we did last year. Now, it'll be faced with a new challenge next year because that money is kind of coming to the Sun setting the grant from the state and so kind of you know like we are each year trying to think about how to kind of make sure we're maintaining the the same level of support so that'll be kind of something we consider as we planning for next school year but in terms of this year because of city funding we've been able to maintain that same level of support for for our students in the intervention and as I'd also kind of want to really highlight what Susan said because we're doing really similar work at Providence through the advanced

academic supplemental guide that the work of the division has provided for teams. Our advanced academics resource teacher, Nicole Hanton, has been instrumental in helping teams to really utilize that. I mean, I think we're very resource rich in Fairfax County, but sometimes it feels like too much and so we need people to help navigate and kind of really spotlight resources and Nicole has really been able to do that for us she's present at our grade level team collaborative team meetings in language arts and so hey let's do this let's come back together next week and talk about it how did it work let's look at the student work and really kind of making sure that we're providing advanced academic access for all students this

isn't something that's available to few this is something that we want to make ensure that again it kind of kind of seeing a through line to some of what we to algebra in eighth grade we want to get to AP classes it really starts with making sure we have access to advanced academics at the earlier stages at the elementary school level again another real essential and important part of our our school improvement plan is the work that we're doing for a multi-lingual language learners right we want to kind of something that we've said is we want to make sure that those these students in the work of the ESOL teachers is not It's very much at the heart of what we do. It's something that we really celebrate,

having students who speak many different languages, families that come from all over the world. It's a huge celebration for us. So we want to make sure that we're doing everything that we need to be doing to reach our goals, measure progress along the way, make sure that we're kind of, those students are able to gain access again, thinking about the divisions go around third grade, reading by third grade. It's such a critical point. you really do change a life trajectory through literacy instruction. And again, echoing what Susan spoke to, we're kind of giving more opportunities for ESOL teachers to share strategies during our collaborative team meetings, as well as providing direct English language development instruction for students

and progress monitoring. We are fortunate to be able to leverage a tool that's being funded through Title I called the K-12 Summit. It's an online tool that really helps to provide, it kind of really mirrors a lot of what students are expected to do on the WIDA assessment. It also gives teacher teams real-time progress of like, are students making progress towards their goal in WIDA through the platforms? Students are also able to take that home and encourage to do so to kind of allow for additional progress in the development of English language, their English language development. And again, kind of as spoken to earlier, this is also something that we've really committed to as a pyramid. This is such central work, right?

And so really having opportunities for our ESOL leads and teams as well as like our literacy leaders to come together, I think very recently at Fairfax High School to kind of, because I think we realize this is not something that's going to be able to, this work is too important for us to be kind of only thinking about it in our own buildings, right? We want to kind of make sure that the work we're doing in our really across the division, but most centrally as a pyramid, is aligned. And I think also just knowing that you have someone that, a colleague at the level who kind of is facing similar challenges and also kind of can celebrate together the progress that's being made K-12. So lots of good stuff happening in the pyramid around that work.

Okay, now we want to kind of move into math. thinking about our MTSS framework. We've articulated our math goal, I think, spoken to earlier, around increasing performance in the SOL. And again, I think, like, we think about what's really at the heart of the work around our math goal. It's our grade-level teams and the conversations they're having at the collaborative level weekly, and that's led by our math resource teachers, Tracy and Cicero who again are able to have such a robust math resource team which is in addition to Mr. Kingsbury. We also have our high impact tutors and that's through of course division staffing but also through Title I and supplementally through our city of Fairfax staffing that comes with

our program. and I think what they do on a weekly basis is really kind of unpack standards with our teams and really think through how to best leverage those county developed resources on a weekly basis with the teachers and the instruction. Something that's really been an emphasis for us is really having more opportunities for student work to be at the center of our conversations and that's something that we have here, a picture. and I think something that has been really an area for us the last couple years is shifting how we use our questioning as teachers to shift from looking for the correct answer to looking at student thinking how can we help because I think we know the person who's doing

the thinking, the speaking is the person who's doing the learning but how can we as questions to help promote that thinking. And something that we've really done to really to help amplify that is through what we call math lab sites led by our math resource teachers. And again, this is something that would not be possible without the funding of the city where the money is really literally helping to provide the sub coverage for teacher teams to be able to come together, do some learning together, actually go into the classroom, observe one another, do some reflection about best practice, refining it. And I think that's the kind of work that helps those weekly conversations to be even better. And it helps the kind of team development, it kind of meets a lot of parallel goals,

but I think most specifically it helps to kind of work towards our goal of how can we help promote better and more flexible thinking in math for our students. And we talked through earlier around some of the assessments we're doing, including the new assessment, the measures of academic progress, or the MAP. That's really been a helpful tool this year. I mean, it's been kind of a learning curve, as any time we have a new assessment to kind of understand. But our teams, through the leadership of our mass resource teachers, have really kind of figured out how to kind of best leverage that to think through, okay, who needs what? and when and in what areas as we kind of develop our systems of intervention

that's been really helpful and again like much like the high impact tutors and literacy we also have high impact tutors and math and they really helped to have us provide the intervention that we know our students require to make progress and so and again that comes that we're able to kind of maintain what we were able to last year through that supplemental funding from the city I'll

Dr. Wrightstafflet Susan

Andrew Prattstaffspeak a little bit towards math.

Susan MullenstaffSo as Andrew shared, we do follow the same MTSS roadmap and math as we do in reading. We have a math resource teacher. Her name is Mel Bradley. Her position is supported by city funds. So we're very grateful to have a math lead at our school. Her job, she leads collaborative learning teams and unpacking every unit and of course we are using the CRA model. And just as we do in literacy, we are intentional about keeping those scaffoldings in place for our multilingual learners. We ensure that language isn't a barrier to the mathematical thinking. As Andrew shared, we use math as our universal screener. And I wasn't supposed TO TALK ABOUT DATA BUT I AM ANYWAY. OUR WINTER MAP DATA FOR MATH WAS INCREDIBLY ENCOURAGING.

IT MADE MY HEART VERY HAPPY TO SEE IT. WE SAW A SUPER EXCITING TREND IN A GROUP THAT'S TRADITIONALLY KIND OF DIFFICULT TO MOVE ON THEIR CONDITIONAL GROWTH AND THAT IS OUR HIGHEST ACHIEVING MATH STUDENTS. WE SAW TREMENDOUS GROWTH WITH THAT GROUP WHICH CONFIRMS THAT OUR advanced math strategies are working and while we believe that every student deserves one year of growth at least, we have been focusing on our bottom 40th percentile making sure that they make even more than a year's worth of growth because we want to close that achievement gap. So to ensure that our academic growth is met, we have been relying on precise and data-driven support following our formal assessments, our teams conduct data dialogues to specifically

pinpoint which students require additional tier 2 and tier 3 interventions. As you know in math those may be different based on what unit that they are on. Our math resource teacher, she is the backbone of this process and a highlight of collaboration IN OUR SCHOOL IS CALLED OUR MATH WITH MEL SESSIONS WHICH TAKE PLACE DURING OUR CLT TIME. OUR STAFF REALLY ENJOYS JUST HAVING THIS DEDICATED TIME WHERE MEL MATH, THERE'S A LOT OF M'S HERE, WHERE MEL MODELS HIGH LEVEL MATH PEDAGOGY AND LEADS THE TEAM IN ANALYZING STUDENT WORK. AND THIS COACHING ALLOWS OUR TEACHERS TO DIVE DEEP INTO BEST PRACTICES AND REFINE THEIR strategies before they head back to the classroom. It's been a powerful way to ensure that our students' needs

are, as our student needs evolve, that our teachers' expertise is going right along with them. And beyond that human support, we also use the program ST Math, which teachers are able to differentiate the assignments to meet each student's specific need, whether it's a student catching up or a student who's racing ahead, the teachers are progress every step of the way and our most recent winter map data shows this tiered approach is paying off. And we are really proud of our academic gains but we also know that students can't learn if they don't feel safe and seen and supported so this leads us into the very next pillar which is wellness. Did I never get to my math? There it is. Okay. So let me flip it over. While our academic

goals are ambitious, our philosophy at Daniel's Run is grounded in the simple belief that students learn best when their basic needs are met first. Academic excellence can only flourish when a child feels safe, valued, and supported. For that reason, our social emotional learning has not been treated as an extra add-on, but as a foundational pillar woven into our daily curriculum and the heart of our school community. At the tier one level, we build cohesive community through a hybrid approach, including responsive classroom practices such as greetings at the door and structured morning meetings. We also have transitioned step curriculum as our primary curriculum to provide explicit school-wide instruction.

This common language is anchored in our Dragon SOAR, which I mentioned earlier, which is the SOAR stands for show up, own your actions, act with kindness, and reach for excellence. And in the first quarter, you know, we talked a little bit about what showing up meant. And then in the second quarter, we acted with kindness, which meant focusing on the cafeteria. and acting kind in the cafeteria. And now we are, I'm sorry, owning your actions in the cafeteria. And now we're doing kindness. And we've celebrated these through some new SOAR pep rallies. So we have pep rallies for the kids once a quarter. And we come in and we just make sure to celebrate all the success going on in the school. We treat wellness with the same rigor as academics as well.

and our behavior solutions leadership team engages in data triangulation analyzing attendance, behavior referrals and SEL screener data to identify trends. For students requiring more intensive support, our behavior solutions leadership team coordinates a robust menu of interventions. That's a lot about what Becky was talking about with those tier two academies. So we view behavior as a lagging skill rather than a character flaw. So we do try and teach those skills. And Brandy and Sara Forgione is our behavior specialist who is also employed by the city. So thank you again. And they have worked really hard on those behavior academies. We're also incredibly excited about a new partnership with the Heartleaf Counseling

that you are also, right? And in coordination with Fairfax Public Schools, they are able to offer individual play therapy sessions during the school day for our students. This initiative is funded by the City of Fairfax grant and it's a huge step forward in equity. It removes any financial barriers that prevent families from accessing high-quality mental health and we've been really excited to implement that. We also have our No Place for Hate student equity team who meets regularly and they bring forward concerns and perspectives gathered from their peers and then they work collaboratively to problem solve and to promote a more inclusive school environment. They were so inspired by the impactful work of our Fairfax City

high school students who came with the power of the words. Presentations were done for fifth and sixth graders. So now our fifth and sixth graders are preparing presentations for our third and fourth graders. And this high level of support is only possible because of an incredibly talented student support team of two counselors, Joe Gale, Ashley Fisher, our school psychologist, our social worker Emily Carlton and our behavior resource teacher Sarah Fogione. Becky spoke to it but I also wanted to acknowledge that region five and their behavior solutions structure they provided that staff development for ten teachers which was amazing. It was two days and we each got to send two teachers and that was instrumental

in getting us started on our tier two practices. So by weaving those two things together I say that our dragons are going to soar.

Andrew PrattstaffOkay. I think this is another area where there's tremendous alignment with Daniel's run as a providence. I think much credit to the work of the region to help kind of ensure that is the case. I think we are proud to share that we continue to focus on building a culture of engagement and belonging for all of our students and families. To kind of echo what the same rigor to behavior and wellness as we do our academics. And when we think about our three tiers of multi-tiered systems of support. And I think, you know, again, like we have really emboldened our behavior solutions team to be the leaders around this work. Again, Sarah Forgione, kind of who we share with Daniels Ron, has really been instrumental in this work.

And again, without the support of the city, we wouldn't be able to kind of have that position. And again, it's essential to what we're doing. And so that team, the behavior solutions team, has really helped us to ensure that we have that time dedicated in our day to support SEL competency for all students. We use our second step curriculum. We've also done a lot around responsive classroom practices. our common language around what we call the Panther Way, be kind, safe, and responsible, which helps to define common expectations. Again, that kind of, that tier one across the entire school. It also is a way to celebrate students who are following the Panther Way, and we, some of the most fun moments of the week are when we get to take a picture with our students who've

earned the Panther Way, acknowledge them on the news, and we share that picture on our staff newsletter or community newsletter each week. I think something else that has really grown considerably, and I think as highlighted by Becky earlier, we're really proud with the addition to our team of Katie Boxer around the work of our behavior solutions team to really take a look at the data that's coming in, whether on behavior referrals, our SEL screener, attendance data, and really kind of using a targeted plan, developing a targeted plan of action and then sharing that with our staff on our early release Wednesdays, kind of sharing the data, this is why, doing some professional development and then setting up a plan and really kind of laying out who's

doing what. So, for example, in November we found that we saw a number of instances across the school around unkind language and our behavior referrals within the classroom. developed a kindness challenge. We had students write down on a note something kind about someone else and share it as part of a community circle in the morning. And then we had them outside of our door. I think this might be Ms. Bowman. She had an especially long kindness chain. And then we brought all of our kindness. This was a real visual celebration and acknowledgement of what we were focusing on. And then we kind of brought all of those kindness chains and created one huge kindness chain in our cafeteria. And I think again it was a real tangible thing and a real

it'll provide focus for the for the work and we saw an impact on the the data around that area so those really important and I think all this is done in tandem with other things right the work we've done with Fairfax High School around having them come and and speak to the power of our words and similar to Daniel's one we've been able to extend that to all of our students through other read-alouds and so there's been really an amplifying work through of our behavior solutions team in the leadership that they provide and I think again Sarah has been really instrumental in that and I think again you know beyond tier one we've right a tier two and tier three supports identifying students who really kind of need the more intensive levels of support whether

it be through evidence-based programs again also we've benefited from the partnership with the Hartleaf counseling center with those play therapy sessions happening within our building. So a lot of really good and important stuff that's coming through this work, and we're really proud of it, and we've seen an impact in our data. Kind of moving along, we wanted to also share some update around the work that we've done around AVID. Similar to Sarah, we share an AVID resource teacher, Tanya Dedham, which is funded through the city. AVID, which stands for Advancement It is a college readiness program designed to help students develop the skills they need to be successful in college and beyond. I think oftentimes AVID is thought of as an elective in the middle school and high school,

but really it's a school-wide implementation model at the elementary level. And we have really seen the impact of AVID really take hold, especially this last year, I think both city schools. and I think it's another instance where the city has really been at the forefront of this. I think the division has really made it a goal, an initiative to implement AVID at all Title I schools and we with several kind of years ahead of the game have been really seen as an exemplar for other schools. We've had principals, other building leaders come to Providence and I imagine Daniel's run too to showcase the work. In fact, we're looking forward to hosting a showcase for principals in partnership with the AVID program itself in May 1st, I believe, at Providence.

And it's something really exciting. And as part of that, they're going to have an opportunity to go into classrooms and see the work around it. And it's become like a really important through line around what we're doing around project-based learning, Portsuit or graduate, advanced academics, and it's been exciting to see its implementation. And I think perhaps most importantly, especially as we kind of think about that transition from elementary school to middle school, it's really helped to promote executive functioning skills like through the work of binders and planners and note-taking to help our students to become, again, future graduates and beyond. So a lot of exciting work around AVID and I think

we've really taken a you can see the snowballing effect around it particularly this school year.

Susan MullenstaffAnd just some updates on safety and security. We are grateful for the city's continued support of funding dedicated safety and security position at each of our schools. Destiny Juarez at Daniel's Run and Charles Phillips at Providence. They both become just indispensable parts of our staff and their impact is felt from the second that the students arrive. And also thanks to your investment we have also seen a significant leap forward in our security infrastructure. And this includes our comprehensive of surveillance. We've updated our camera systems to include both interior and exterior cameras. This provides us with full situational awareness which has been really nice. Secure vestibules, Daniel's run has finished our secure vestibule in the fall. I know that

Providence is getting theirs next summer. This has been huge as far as managing people coming in and out of the building. FCPS is now introducing a Raptor system, and that is a program where the teachers will have the badges and allows them to get immediate calls for assistance, which is just a game changer when you think about teachers' peace of mind. So, and beyond just the hardware, our security specialists also act as mentors for our students, their trusted faces, and they just remind us that security is built on that foundation of trust, of everyone's having vigilance, and just that community support. So I'm very happy with the growth that we've seen in the past year.

Andrew PrattstaffAnd in closing, we'll finish with our kindergartners. I think echoing kind of what was spoken to earlier by Gordon around the importance of strong start. I think this is something we know. Division has identified it as an essential part of a strategic plan. And it's certainly true for the students at our schools to have that strong start. And last summer, so last August, through the funding from the city, we were able to host both at Daniel's Run as well as Providence a jumpstart program, which we hope to and anticipate to be able to host again this summer. I think especially with the lapse of funding around the Bridge to Kindergarten program, which the division has had in the past been able to fund for many schools,

but just with the budget priorities, is no longer able to. So this Jumpstart program, which was open to all rising kindergartners, and it was four half days kind of in that week preceding the teacher work week, It allowed students and families to become familiar through tunes of school and allowed us to really hit the ground running. My joke is I think it's benefited students, maybe parents more. Makes that first day drop off a little bit easier because the students are familiar with the school and because it's just kindergarteners. When we're in the building, it's really kind of safe and easy. Also helps us provide kind of good insight. Four days is short, but also gets good insight on who these students are.

We had over 50 students attend last year of a class of about 110. And we had anecdotally great feedback from both teachers, families, and students, and they really appreciated this program and how impactful it was on the start of their child's elementary school experience. So again, another area we're really grateful for the support of the city, especially in a time when, you know, because of, again, project priorities, that there was just not the same level of funding present and filling in and allowing this to have that same continuity and opportunity and really expand on it as a result. So in closing, we just want to echo with what we started with is that this is a really unique place to be and special place to be, the partnership of each of you.

I think something, again, we at Providence talk a lot about the idea of collective responsibility, right? the exhale that can often come when you realize I'm not in on this on my own, right? And I think especially maybe in moments of challenge or crisis, I have personally benefited from the support of everyone in this room, and I think everyone else could probably say the same about each other. And I think in many ways, again, talking to colleagues who work, you know, not in the city of Fairfax, it's just not the same level of support, kind of that literal financial resources support. so that kind of unique sense of community and collaboration around, hey, we can figure this out. We have some things that come up, some challenges that we can kind of, and I

would speak to as recently as the snowstorm a few weeks ago, right? We were all kind of left with this new kind of precipitation, right? And snowcrete, right? Never heard of that until now. And I think like we had the city text chain from Dr. Wright, hey, I've checked in on the parking lots, things look okay, where do you need help, talking with Tom Wood and Dan, and then how can we be able to kind of get to what we need to have happen, our temperatures in the building where they need to be. And I think it was just a perfect representation of what it means to be here in the city. I think hopefully this evening, really being able to speak through all of the different things, because not only is this a place that we benefit

from kind of challenges and problem solving, things, but I think this is a place where it makes our celebrations even greater. We have so much to celebrate and we're able to really kind of experience what that means to a greater extent because we have the people around us and the partnerships, again, of all present in this room to help us to do that. So thank you for everything. We continue to kind of lead from a place of gratitude and appreciate all that you're doing. So thank you.

Carolyn PitchesThank you.

Andrew PrattstaffSo any questions we're here for?

Carolyn PitchesMs. Barlmay, do you have any questions?

Lauren BartelmeI don't have any questions, but I just wanted to say thank you. And it's really exciting to hear about all of the new things that happen every year. And I know they're just great places, and there's great stuff going on. Thank you.

Sarah KelseyMs. Kelsey. Yeah, I echo what Ms. Barlmay said. My other question is you guys have these resource teachers, math and reading, and they're both doing great things at both schools. Do your resource teachers have time to actually meet together from both schools and talk about ideas and bounce things off each other?

Andrew PrattstaffI like the idea of cross-city conversations. I would say, and Susan, jump in. I think, I would say the division has been really intentional around being able to bring literacy leaders and math leaders together on a more frequent basis. I would say sometimes we're not always, like, excited about meetings, right, because it takes

Dr. Wrightstaffus away

Andrew Prattstafffrom the building. I think, and I would say that because we do feel like time in the building is very precious. But I think having, we've had more, like, conversations and professional development together. region, regions, you know, Will Lokes to kind of talk through, okay, what are their priorities, right? Because there's a lot to kind of keep up with, right? Just from the Virginia Literacy Act alone, okay, what do we need to do and when, but then how are we doing all of that? And so that has provided an opportunity for kind of that cross-division conversation, which is inclusive of Daniel's run, of course, and oftentimes we'll be sitting at the same table, you know, and having those conversations together.

Sarah KelseyOkay, thank you. I was just wondering, has one and when you're the sole person sometimes you need someone else to bounce ideas off of.

Andrew PrattstaffSure because I think that would echo that same thing it's like the exhale that comes with knowing you're not in or alone at your own school but I think more so at other schools too that you know everyone's kind of you know swimming in the same sea.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Hickman.

Amit HickmanMy question is for Ms. Mullen. You touched on it briefly but the security vestibule is just curious without giving away away any safety information obviously uh any positives challenges how has that kind of been operationally making that transition with that it's

Susan Mullenstaffbeen seamless it was it is doing all the things that we hoped it would do the only i would say the only challenge that we've had is with um the um the morning program on the after school programs is there is a second separate buzzer so it's just kind of trying to figure out how to maneuver that but it's been wonderful you know again doing all the

Amit Hickmanthings that we hoped it would okay that's very helpful and actually helps with the renovation yeah conversation that we've been having and also before we get providence is up and running so thank you for that feedback yeah

Kristina Cecereno it's been great

Carolyn Pitchesuh miss history i

Kristina Cecerejust want to echo mr pratt's comments too and especially on the eve of our joint meeting with city council where we are going to do our budget presentation. I really want to thank you for highlighting where our city funds, our city grants support, basically elevating up the opportunities that FCPS offers and really filling in the specific needs of our city students. I really do appreciate you highlighting those. During Ms. Baining's presentation, I noticed that three of our city schools have science-related goals in their SIPP, confidence. And I recognize that it can be challenging to balance instructional time across all subject areas, especially if there's a heavier focus on reading and math. I'm curious

how you're thinking about supporting teachers in keeping science and social studies strong and engaging, especially in those non-SOL years, while still meeting literacy and math goals.

Andrew PrattstaffYeah. I mean, I think you're right. You speak to it. I think increasingly, as we've we were only going to the school the same amount of time, but we're being asked to have like a longer language arts block and, you know, math is what it is, right? So I think for us, it's, I mean, look, again, this is another instance where I think we have a lot in place because of our benefit of being here in the city. We have like a STEAM lab with like a science resource teacher as part of that. And so what we've done, so our students, every class goes to the STEAM lab for a whole week, every quarter. We've done more to make sure that those lessons that are provided in the STEAM lab are even better aligned to science standards at each grade level.

So Heather White and Sarah McConnell, who helped kind of support our STEAM lab, have done a lot of work around that to kind of make sure that it's like really kind of supplementing the instruction that they're getting in the classroom around science. Heather has helped to lead science collaborative team meetings with each grade level to kind of go through the standards of each unit, unpack them, kind of look at the assessment to make sure that we have a clear, that teachers have a clear understanding of what students need to know and then thinking through how will they know it and what are they doing if they don't know it already. So we've done a lot to really kind of make sure that that work is really a through line.

I think the only grade I've ever taught was fifth grade. There's a lot of spotlight around fifth grade because that's the SOL year in science. And I think that's something that we are really careful to make sure we say is that our science instruction at Providence is not sitting around fifth grade SOL scores. It's the work that's happening K to six. But I think you're right. It's trying to kind of make sure that we have it be a priority because it is. and we find ways to make sure that it's getting the

Dr. Wrightstaffsupport that it's required.

Andrew PrattstaffBecause it is. It's part of our SIP. It's really part of our marching orders. And there's a lot of strategies and actions, some of which I just spoke to, that really kind of underlie the work that we're doing.

Susan MullenstaffYeah, and we do. We have like a dedicated science resource teacher who's part of our master schedule. So students are getting that extra resource every week. The vocabulary in science and social studies is so important for our students works in general so we do emphasize the vocabulary piece our specialists I was just standing outside the PE room and they had erosion and they had all the different words because our specialists are actually working in conjunction with our classroom teachers to make sure that terms that can be used and you know across different classrooms are being used and just because that helps students right if we're all using the same vocabulary so we're very aware and Like, social studies and science is fun.

You could like it. It's part of our reading curriculum. So our new reading curriculum, every other unit is a nonfiction unit. So a lot of that aligns with science and social studies, and we can bring that in through project-based learning and library projects. So, you know, we are fighting to keep it alive, and we're also trying to make sure that we can kind of streamline and cross over where we can.

Carolyn PitchesFinal comments?

Dr. WrightstaffYes. Thank you, Chair Pitches. I would just start by sharing a big thank you to all of our administrators and region leaders who came out tonight to provide these wonderful presentations. But I would also use that as an opportunity, and I know they would agree with me, to thank their teachers, their instructional assistants, their counselors, their office staff, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians, and everyone who makes a contribution to the experience of the students. in our schools. I would just share too I really appreciate Ms. Cessirey pointing out the great job Mr. Pratt and Ms. Mullen did about highlighting the tremendous support that is provided by the city of Fairfax by the school board and by the city council for these schools. And I would just point out that when you have a school with a strong culture, strong instruction, strong programs, all the supplementary work that we do. Yes, it provides things like kindergarten

and jump starts and behavioral specialists but it accelerates everything that's happening in the building you know in schools like this the no dollar works alone right and so i think you see the strength of these programs radiating throughout the entire building and i think that's really powerful i have zero gardening ability so please give me patience with this gardening analogy but we're not watering a single single plant here we're nourishing the entire entire garden right And I think that's really powerful, and you heard great examples of that tonight. I would just, you know, fold in the presentation we heard from the region as well. If I were listening to tonight, I would hear tremendous depth to the work that's happening,

tremendous breadth that's happening, intentionality, and really, really strategic work that's happening. There is, you know, entire dissertations full of information that we heard tonight that show how much work is being done for our students and I think that's really impressive and I think it goes to show the I think the promise I think that we have here in the city of Fairfax for the best of both for our students you know this small town feel with the resources and the access of a world class division so I think that's really important and then the last thing is I would like to share how powerful I am all right because you guys have done such a great job I think you guys can sleep in tomorrow so I just yeah I

New superintendent, I just want to make sure you guys know. To be clear for the public, I was not involved in that, but I'm just going to take credit for it because that's also what you do. A kid today asked me if I could make that. I said I didn't make that. The answer is yes. The answer is yes. So thank you, Chair Pitches.

Carolyn PitchesWell, thank you. Thanks to everybody who came this evening and bearing with us until this late hour. So we will let you go home now. and yeah, well, the next presentation, in case you didn't want to go to sleep, is Dr. Wright's presentation on the renovation update. So you're welcome to stay, but we understand if you want to leave. Thank you. Thank you all. I appreciate it. Okay. Dr. Wright, are you ready?

Gordon StokesstaffAbsolutely.

Carolyn PitchesOkay. We were just discussing whether they should drive home now. We don't know what the roads look like.

Lauren BartelmeYou are more than welcome

Carolyn Pitchesto

Lauren Bartelmebefore it gets

Carolyn Pitchescolder.

Kristina CecereOKAY.

Carolyn PitchesTHANK YOU, DR. RIGHT.

Dr. WrightstaffTHANK YOU, CHAIR PITCHES. here for our next renovation update as we talked about beginning of last month we wanted to provide updates to not only this board but the public on a regular basis about the very exciting capital projects that are taking place here in the city of Fairfax to support our schools support our community and support our students so as we look at the next slide you will see that we are in a exciting phase of this process with renovations at both Daniels run and conceptual design phase. And I want to just take a few minutes to talk about what this is, because it's easy to misunderstand where we are and what this phase is. So conceptual designs are about big ideas and clear directions. So on the screen, you're going to see not specific blueprints,

but sketches, designs, pictures, images that help us determine, are we going in the right direction? is this it's not about the getting too far into the how it's it's getting into the why what do we want out of these spaces what do we want them to be able to do and how are we ensuring that it's meeting the goals of this board and this community it's also important to be clear about what this phase is not this is not about construction drawings they're not about final layouts and these decisions do not lock us into every single detail at this point room sizes finishes and specific features, they're going to evolve over time. The purpose here is to explore options, understand the trade-offs, and make smart decisions as

we move forward, not to finalize everything today. So we've been doing this with lots of different stakeholders, and we're going to tell you a little bit about this here in a few minutes. But it's been exciting to hear from our staff. It's been exciting to hear from our students about what they think the future of these buildings could look like. And I think the future of these buildings is really important to consider through this process because we're embarking on a process that will be finished in 2030, hopefully if we stay on our timelines, and then will be in place for the next 25 to 35 years after that. And that's a long time out. We want to make sure that we're ready for that. So we'll look at the next slide.

and you can see that we met with teams at both Daniel's Run and Providence last week to get input from them on what they think. They were able to meet with our architects and to hear from them about some of the specific designs and look at some options. And it was really exciting to hear from them. This follows up some work that was done right before the winter holidays with the staff at each school and the community. And then you'll hear about some next steps as well. lots of different students. When we look at the next slide, you'll see some examples of that. Where we were getting feedback from our key constituents. I talked to seven second graders in Ms. Horn's class, third graders in Mr. Talbot's class. We talked to sixth graders in a couple

different classes to get their Ms. May's class at Providence to get their feedback about what they think? What do they like best about their buildings? What do they think are some things that can make it even better? And what do they think we need in the future? And it was fascinating to hear all of this. And we got some really great suggestions. I will highlight just a few of them. Dr. Wright, we love the dance parties, right? So I cannot design a building or help design a building that encourages dance parties. What I can do is make sure that there are really great audio-visual systems in a building great dance parties, right? So we got lots of good feedback, but one of the ways that we got some

good feedback, and I will just do a brief example for you, is we did, and I don't know that a superintendent from this podium has ever done a read aloud, but I'm going to try it real quick. I was able to read to them a really great book that's called If I Built a School, and I'm going to give the author, Chris Van Dusen, some credit. I'm going to read you just two pages because I think it's important for all of you and for the public to be in the right mindset as we're trying to make these decisions. So let's hear about a classroom, okay? Now come see your classroom. Isn't it grand? That free-floating platform is where you would stand. And using a stylus, you write in the air. No blackboard, no whiteboard, no nothing is there.

Your words don't just appear and they magically glow. Don't ask me how this works because I don't really know. And then let's look at another spot from a classroom. In my kind of class, we wouldn't have tests. I'd liven things up with some hologram guess. Here are some samples of what I've been thinking. You might meet a T-Rex or Abraham Lincoln. So hologram classrooms, words that appear in the air. Dustin, this is fiction. This is a kid's book. They're just dreaming about the future. But they also referenced smart boards and black boards. And so I think all of us can think through our educational journeys of things, overhead projectors, going to smart boards. That might have seemed futuristic from a time frame that this building and this renovation is going to be around.

So I think it brings up really good ideas of how we can be prepared, how we can design that building to be future-proof and to be ready for the T-Rex hologram blackboards or the floating invisible ink. It's going to be exciting, and we want to be ready for it. I want to share a few themes that we've heard from our students and from our staff, and we'll continue to get these themes. So on the next slide, you'll see them. And what you'll see is both staff and students were talking about safety. We want to make sure everybody feels safe and secure in our buildings. We heard about buildings to be efficient. Make sure our buildings are there to teach our students. Our buildings are there to support our teachers and our staff.

And we want to make sure that they have all the things that are really important and really clear. but we also need storage space. We need places for people to collaborate, but we also need bathroom space that are around the building. Those things matter in the life of the adults and the students in the building. The innovation, the technology that we were just talking about I think is really important. And then just this idea, inspirational is the way we put it. You want to walk into a building and go, wow, this place is great. Wow, you want to welcome people into your building and say, hey, this is where I get to go to school every day. And I think that's what we're going to be shooting for.

And I have great confidence in the architectural and design partners that they're going to be able to help us get there. So the last thing we talked about and we want to share with everybody is a round of community meetings. And there will be two meetings on each day. There will be one at the school that any staff member at each school can attend. And then there will be evening meetings that any member of the public can attend, whether you are connected to the school or not if you have feedback suggestions we want to hear from you and at that time the architects will be presenting some of the final conceptual drawings and then that will get us to a spot as a board and a school division where we can make some decisions about how we move

forward so that chair pitches is the renovation update I'm happy to answer any questions

Carolyn Pitchesokay thank you miss Sussery

Kristina Cecerenot at this time

Carolyn Pitchesokay

Sarah Kelseymiss Just one quick one. The community one meetings, are they in person as well, virtual, both, hybrid?

Dr. WrightstaffExcellent question. I'm going to just do a TBD. The ones in the fall were virtual. And my hunch is that we'll probably go in that direction again, but they'll definitely be on that date.

Sarah KelseyOkay, thank you. Ms.

Carolyn PitchesBorrome?

Lauren BartelmeNo, thank you.

Carolyn PitchesAt the community or meetings, whether they're virtual or in person, will we have, will we show some options? Absolutely.

Dr. WrightstaffYou'll get to see actual designs and floor plans and layouts of the building. They'll still be in that kind of concept phase, but you'll be able to see what the architects are proposing and what are some of the different choices we would need to make around them, whether it's in terms of programs or budgets or square footage and impacts on the actual site footprint at each building but you'll have different options to look at

Carolyn Pitchesokay great no other questions for dr wright wow okay then all right well thank you dr wright we will i'm sure you're going to keep us continually updated on this so we will hear from you again um okay next thing on the agenda is public hearing we don't have a public hearing this evening so we will move on to action items and our first action item is the approval of our minutes from February or regular February a regular meeting on February 9th of 2026 may I have a motion please madam chair miss Hickman I

Amit Hickmanmove of fairfax school board approved the minutes of the february 9th 2026 school board regular meeting as printed and distributed

Carolyn Pitchessecond okay ms hickman has moved ms bartle may is seconded city of fairfax school board approved the minutes of the february 9 2026 meeting uh regular school board meeting excuse me as printed and distributed are there any changes modifications or additions okay being none all those in favor signify by saying aye

Kristina Cecereaye

Carolyn Pitchesaye is unanimous next action item is the approval of the donation to the Fairfax High School all-night grad celebration is there a motion madam chair miss accessory I

Kristina Ceceremove that the city of Fairfax school board approve a donation to the Fairfax high school all-night graduation celebration in the amount of $2,000 okay

Carolyn Pitchesmay have a second

Kristina Ceceresecond

Carolyn Pitchesnecessary is moved and miss Hickman is seconded the city of perfect school board approved the approve the donation to the FHS all night graduation celebration in the amount of $2,000 all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye no members are opposed to the motion passing passes unanimously okay we will move on to superintendent matters dr. Wright

Dr. Wrightstaffthank you chair pitches and if it's okay with the board I'm going to a slightly abridged version of it. I practiced it earlier. It was about 45 minutes, so I can do the full version. It's up to you. Yeah, abridged, please. I would like to thank all of our community members who participated in the superintendent's community listening sessions earlier this month. While attendance at these sessions was modest, they nonetheless provided powerful opportunities to listen, learn, and engage. And they will also be a good lead into the superintendent's advisory team, month and I'm excited for that you'll hear lots of you've received information over the last month and as we move through March there'll be significant

work related to the FY 27 budget process working with our city council partners including a joint work session that will take place tomorrow night I'll spend most of my time talking about some really exciting stuff that I've been able to participate in or be a part of in our schools during the last several weeks. At Providence, I was able to go to their band and chorus concert, so congratulations to all those performers. This morning, Mr. Phillips and I and several members of our team here were at Read Across America Day at Providence. And then I was able to meet, you heard about her earlier tonight, Miss Dedham, our avid teacher, and see some of that work in action. Daniel's run, I got to spend time in Miss Warren's second grade class, which is a really cool connection for me because

Miss Warren's brother was a student of mine when I was an assistant principal. And then I've done, I've been able to work with both, both Miss Warren's dad and Miss Warren's mom, which is, so it's, it's, it was just a cool connection. And then I attended the PTA bingo night on Friday where they allowed me to be a guest caller. Now, before I continue, that, that's a bingo joke, before, All right, so all right. All right, just seeing if everybody's paying attention. But it was a lot of fun being a guest caller, and I don't know if you've ever called 067 in a cafeteria full of middle schools. There you go. All right, so it was an excellent event. Katherine Johnson, I was able to speak to the leadership class

students, which is a semester elective, and also last week joined their avid class of eighth grade students and loved to hear from them. It was really great feedback. And then you heard Mr. Pratt talk about the History and Humanities Fair that took place last week. This is a student-organized event, and what I loved best about it not only was the projects that I heard, but it's a partnership between the City of Fairfax Schools, George Mason University, our Parks and Rec Department, and our HFCI History Foundation, and it was just so impressive to see and so inspiring to be a part of. And then finally, some exciting things at Fairbax High School. The student advisory team met with me last week.

We've had a van donated to the automotive program, which will be great. It was from Facets, which is a community organization, and they had a van they no longer use. WE'LL BE WORKING ON IT. AND THEN AT THE FHS ACADEMY, DANCE ACADEMY PERFORMANCE, WE ARE ABLE TO ANNOUNCE THAT THE CITY OF FAIRFAC SCHOOLS WILL BE SUPPORTING A NEW DANCE FLOOR FOR THEIR STUDIO. SO REALLY, REALLY EXCITING TO BE A PART OF. SO WITH THAT, CHAIR PITCHES, THAT CONCLUDES THE SUPERINTENDENT MATTERS. AND THANK YOU FOR THE TIME.

Carolyn PitchesTHANK YOU. AND WE'LL MOVE ON TO BOARD MATTERS. MS. BARLMAE?

Lauren BartelmeI JUST WANT TO ADD A LITTLE DETAIL ABOUT THE HISTORY FAIR. I was able to go to and there was about 60 kids who participated and It's just all of their own initiative. It was no class They just spent months working on these history projects and they were very cool

Carolyn PitchesThat's great.

Sarah KelseyThank you miss Kelsey, I Just want to wish everybody a safe and fun spring break in a month basically And yeah, I know it's forever away, but it'll come fast And then also, I know you'll enjoy this one, Happy Pi Day coming up. And next, was it next week? Yeah.

Carolyn PitchesYes. And I actually just talked about Pi last

Susan Mullenstaffweek. So

Carolyn Pitchesmy unit did not correspond with Pi Day, unfortunately. Ms. Hickman.

Amit HickmanI just want to say I'm looking forward to tomorrow's joint session with our city council to discuss budget. as Ms. Sesari alluded to earlier and Dr. Wright. I just really want to support the proposed city manager's budget that was presented on February 24th that fully funds the school's budget which includes the tuition bill as well as the beginnings of renovation processes and then other key city projects that also impact our students and their families.

Carolyn PitchesMs. Sesari? I

Kristina Cecerejust want to say enjoy the two-hour delay and happy spring break. And that's all.

Carolyn PitchesOkay. And I would just like to thank Dr. Wright for allowing me to join him on the stage at Fairfax High School when we let the dance people know that they would no longer be dancing on that floor that Ms. Bartle was talking about. SO AND THANK YOU FOR THE WORK YOU DID TO GET THE COST AND ALL OF THAT. SO THERE'S NOTHING ELSE BEFORE THIS BOARD. I AM GOING TO ADJOURN AT 942.