Music I'm gonna go home. In 2008 and this is the regular meeting of the City of Fairfax School Board, we will start with the Pledge of America and to the Republic from which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. There are no announcements and there are no changes in the agenda before we get to our agenda, though. I have several presentations and I will come down front. It is nice to have traditions and one of the traditions that we have at Fairfax High School is to have an online graduation celebration for our seniors who will be leaving us and moving on to a new phase of their life. And as part of this celebration, it is customary for the school board to give a check to the all night graduation celebration and it's my pleasure to do so this evening. Will Heather come forward, please? Thank you. This is Heather Mason and Heather is the chairman of the All-Mite Graduation Celebration. And I would simply like to say to Ms. Mason and to the people who are working with her under committee to the parents at Fairfax High School and to, of course, to our graduating seniors that we wish them well, that we are excited that through the tradition of the all-night graduation celebration continues for the 20th year. The first party was held in 1998. I happened to have a senior that year, so it is a tradition near and near to my heart. It gives me great pleasure and behalf of the City School Board to present Ms. Mason with a check for $500 and our very best wishes. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Another tradition that we have in high schools, not only in this community, but in high schools throughout the country, is we have the tradition of high school athletes. We have a group of young women with this evening, who we are very proud of and who we would like to honor. But before I do that, we have in the eyes, we have Dr. Scott Graybrand with us from Fairfax High School, and Mr. Kim Gordon, the Director of Student Activities. Did you all want to come forward or? Okay. You want to do it very nice though. Okay. All right. Okay. Anyway, we thank Dr. Graybrand and we thank Mr. Gordon for being with us. As a lead in to this, I would like to say that I've been involved in the athletic community for the youth athletic community for a long time. My children graduated from Perifax High School. We had baseball players, basketball players, wrestlers, field hockey players, swimmers, baseball players, softball players. And I think that as a parent, I know how special it is when your child does really well. This group of young ladies, we have here this evening, not only did well, they did extraordinarily well, and we are very proud of them. The girls' swim and dive team has won the state championship. The reason why this is so phenomenal in that, in the history of Fairfax High School, this is the first, and I will repeat the very first time that an athletic team has captured a State Championship. And for that alone, it is phenomenal that a group, and such a small group, my ad of young ladies, has brought this honor home to Fairfax High School into this community. We have certificates for each of our participants, and we have certificates for the coaches. And as I call the girl's names, if you could come forward, I'm going to say a little bit about you, and then you could stand here, and we could give everyone everyone around for applause. The first athlete is Laura Benaviance. Laura is the senior at Fairfax High School and she will attend Toledo University in the fall of swimming scholarship. Laura holds the 100 meter butterfly record and is the member of the state record setting 200 meter monthly relay. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The next young lady is Emily Ferguson. Emily is also a senior. She will attend Virginia Tech in the fall on a swimming scholarship. She holds school records in the 5,100, 250 meter freestyle. And as a member of two record setting realize the 200 meter relay, which is a state record and the 400 meters freestyle relay as well. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. All right. Christine is the Senior at Fairfax and she is also a member of the State Records Setting 200s, mentally, relay she hopes to get into film school at NYU. Thank you. Ellen Bunkardner. Ellen is a Junior at Fairfax High School and she holds school records in the 200 Medal of the 200 meter individual medley and the 100 meter breast strength. She is a member of both state record holding realize, the 200 meter medley and the 200 meter freestyle. Ellen also has an Olympic trial cut in the 100 breast strength. Thank you. Team D. O'Neillis. Jean is a junior at Fairfax High School and she is a member of the State Record Holdings 200 meter freestyle relay. In this school, record 400 meter relay. She has been a member of the 200 meter freestyle relay since her freshman year and plans to swim with the team next year. Frances Stoud, Frances is a junior at Fairfax and she's also a member of the state record holding 200 meter freestyle relay in the school record for the 300 meter relay. She's been a member of the 200 meter freestyle relay team since her freshman year and she also will come back next year as a senior swimmer. Teresa Argy, Teresa. Another junior at Faircast is a member of the state. These girls are fast. Is a member of the state record holding 200 meter freestyle relay and the school record 300 meter relay. She has been a member of the 200 meter free style relay team since her freshman year, and along with Ellen, Francis and Jean will be the core stone of the next year's team. Thank you. Team member, and we have one out other team member, Kelly Stockton. Kelly is a freshman. Kelly is a freshman on the team and she is the diver. She has the Fairfax High School diving record and we are so pleased to have a freshman at the member of the swim and dive team. I'm going to give you a big hand. The challenge is, goes a long, long way, as you can see. But part of that challenge is how coaches work together to manage the talent that they have. And I would like to also point out that there are four people who have worked with these young women to build them into the team They are and would like to recognize them as well. The first is the head coach swim and die team Matt Solerna. That is the head-swim and dive team coach in East Bennett Fairfax High School for the past five seasons. The lady rebels have been the northern region champions for the past three years. That in itself is a remarkable feat. And this past season that has coached the Lady Rebels to their first ever Virginia AAA State Championship title. And that graduated from William & Mary in 2003 and was a member of the Tribe Swim Team and was co-captain to senior year. He's a fifth grade teacher at, are you fifth or sixth? Yes, sixth grade teacher at Providence Elementary School, which is right down the street. In addition to that, Matt is head coach for the NVSL, Villa Guerrillas, and a United State swim coach for the Mason-Maker swim team at George Mason University. Congratulations. We also have with this Meredith Harris, who's the assistant swim coach, Meredith. Meredith is in her second year as a coach at Fairfax and she is also in her second year as a business teacher at Fairfax High School. Prior to coming to Fairfax, Meredith taught at South County for one year where she was the SGA sponsor. Meredith started swimming when she was in kindergarten and continued through college. She attended the University of South Carolina and graduated with a degree in business. We also have another coach Mike Cook. Is Mike here tonight? Okay. I'll just, I'm going to give this to Matt so we can pass that along. But I'll just say a few words about Mike. Mike has been assistant coach for the Fairfax Swimming and Dive team for three years. He has extensive coaching background and is highly respected within the Potomac Valley organization where he's been coaching for 25 years. He is the head age group coach for the Makaswim Club at George Mason and he is known in the NVSL where he's coached for 28 years and he has been the manager and head coach at Lee Grahamville for the past 24 years. He's a graduate of Commonwealth University and Rob Carball, how do I, maybe I would say that. Say Carval. Is he here, is he here? He is the dive coach and he's been the head coach with the Fairfax dive team for the past six years. During this past season, two of the Fairfax divers competed at the state level, which is excellent. During his coaching career, he has coached state championship divers and many of his athletes have competed at the college level. He is also the head coach for the Woodson Dive team and coaches Turo Dive team for MVSL. When I say that this really is historic young ladies and coaches, it really is. Fairfax High School is almost 75 years old and it will really be wonderful to see on our new building the letters that say State Swimming Championships. So congratulations to all of you. Mom and Dads, do someone want to picture we can move this? I guess I can't. Okay. Yeah. We're going. Yeah. That's a great way. Thank you. The next item on our agenda is citizen participation. Mr. Gerio down. Mr. O'Dell. I must say I enjoyed myself applauding quite a bit there and well so next time you want Heather to come you might rather say would Heather come Heather. I would like to read some of my past campaign literature, which is germane. Fairfax County Public Schools too long neglected teaching reading by using phonics and still dilutes phonics with less effective tools. It snubs girls to reinforce concepts, relies too soon on calculators and computers before kids master basics, displaces penmanship with keyboarding, leaving students illiterate when the power fails. The sex education is observed the county falsely promotes homosexuality as more normal and unchangeable. Token sexual abstinence messages are sabotaged with birth control lessons. Students aren't told that condoms often break, condoms offer no protection against some SDD such as the human papaloma virus. That aids, the age virus is only one-fiftyth the size of the pores in a new condom and hence condoms are totally ineffective against it. Therefore, so-called safe sex is a safe as Russian Roulette with only one empty chamber. Finally, the county requires you to affirmly opt out. It should be affirmatively opt-in to the sex education program. But of course, the convenience of the administrators should, of course, trump the rights and the knowledge of the parents. A religion especially Christianity is outlawed, but secularism, humanism and evolution, all on scientific and untenable are praise. Is there somebody who didn't set the clock? Now you do have to interrupt me when there are 30 seconds left because I have no one. It isn't showing. The, it's not showing here. I've got all eights. I didn't know I was starting behind the equal. Well, maybe I am. The, you're going to be given some figures tonight from three Fairfax County School Administrators about enrollment. Parents are advised at enrollment for just two days in the year. The end of September and the end of March are what are used by the state to determine that's advised at enrollment for just two days in the year. The end of September and the end of March are what are used by the state to determine how much money comes to education in Fairfax County and City from the state. If you share my views about the efficacy of education in the Fairfax County Pagan schools as I like to call them, you can bail your kids out. The four March 31st and thus to provide the system of money. But you will need to homeschool. May I suggest seat in homestudy.org would be a good site to start. How many of you at the Dias are still in favor of not declaring independence from Fairfax County public schools for the reasons I just gave you that you should? Anybody here favor serving? Your time is on, Mr. O'Dowell. Thank you. You can still reply. The next item is going to be stricken from the agenda tonight. Christina Tamarro is unable to be with us. She's at a school event. The next item is the school census. And we have with us tonight three people, Maryanne Krucch, Wendy Kerwin and Laura Robinson. Thank you for being here this evening. Good evening. Thank you so much for allowing us to come and talk about the census, the 2008 Virginia School Census. Mary and Crouch from Decision Support and Information Technology. And our office is always delegated to the task of doing a triano census every three years which is required by the State of Virginia, the Virginia Department of Education. And what the census is is we count or have to count every child between the ages of five and nineteen. And what this does is each count by each school division is sent to the state and then they distribute state sales taxes to the individual school divisions based on the numbers. So the school census is really important as far as funds, extra funds to the school divisions. The census began officially, actually January 1, the Virginia Department of Education normally starts a census on March 1, but they pushed up the deadline at the last minute to start January 1. But the forms for Fairfax County Public Schools went out on Friday. They were all delivered to the Maryfield and Della's post office. And they start showing up in everybody's mailboxes on Saturday. We have gotten a great response rate over the weekend. We already have over 10,000 responses and we actually sent out over 408,000 census forms to Fairfax County and the City of Fairfax residents. There are four ways to respond to the census. the web, an interactive voice response system. They can respond by a mail. They just fill out the form and put it in the post-it's paid envelope or they can actually fax the census form back. And hopefully some of you or all of you received your little census form in the mail. We are really hoping residents will respond via the web and mainly because it saves us the return postage but also saves on time processing the form, opening the envelope, scanning the information in to our system and the web is so much more quick and easy and all they need is their form with their little ID and pin number on the form, and that identifies them and the information that's on the form. The, for every student counted that we can count, it means approximately $3,000 per student, and that's over three years. It's about $1,000 per year for each student. So that's why we are really pushing for a higher response rate, especially since 2005 we didn't have a lower response rate than we expected. We are not only addressing FCPs families, but these also go to non FCPs families. Because we're looking for every student, every child between the ages of five and 19, which includes private school students, home school students, students that have gone off to college, students that have joined the military. The census has also has assistance in different languages, actually seven. There's Urdu, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, Korean, Farsi, Vietnamese, and they just call one of the numbers that's on the form and somebody will be there to help them translate the form and fill out the form. And in order to start my discussion on the publicity that we're doing, I have a short video. Actually it's a PSA that we've produced that will be shown on any channel on the COX network and I think they're supposed to start the PSA. Here we go. I'm going to go back and check with him. Mr. Griffith is going to step back and ask the technician to make sure we're starting. He may think it's going. Okay. to make sure we're starting. He may think it's going. Okay. Sook, okay. All right. We, our publicity campaign has been stepped up this time in 2008. And actually Wendy Kerwin, who was supposed to be here tonight to help me discuss census. She had a family emergency so she wasn't able to attend. But we hire temporary publicity manager for census. The task of doing publicity is huge. And so we need one person who's dedicated solely to this task. And she's done a wonderful job. And a couple different things we've done this year for the census publicity is that we join forces with other counties, with join forces with a loud in, and Arlington, Prince William, Faulkier, and number other counties to develop a better campaign, to come up with better ideas. And those ideas are going to filter out into huge ads in magazines like Washington Parent Magazine and a bigger broad base with newspapers. We are also hoping to have a kick off this week with some politicians and some superintendents and board members. So it was a wonderful idea. We're also sharing a logo. We actually came up with this We're counting on you logo and we are sharing it with the other counties and they are using it on their websites and we're so excited because now we've decided to use the same logo from Census to Census so that we're basically branding this logo. So it's name recognition so the next census in 2011 we're going to use the same logo so people say oh I remember that and When we do advertising all kinds of advertising It doesn't matter whether you're in loud in or any other county. You're gonna see the same logo We have developed some of the advertising or some positions they advertising publicity is in Spanish and in English to reach the Spanish community. These are two posters and it has all the information that's necessary. It has the website. It has the email address and phone numbers for more information. The other big thing that we did different this year is we decided to try to do something to reach everybody. Not only FCP students but private school and home school is these bookmarks and you all got to have a little bookmark in your little folder but these are being distributed to school libraries, some school libraries, but mostly public libraries, they're being distributed to Barnes and Noble and Gorders bookstores, pediatricians offices, rec centers, a number of different arenas where we know that all students go, all children go. And they pick up the bookmark and everybody uses a bookmark. Everybody reads and this is good publicity and it's quick, everything, all the information is right on the bookmark. As posters on buses, we have an ass slide and a cinema slide at a number of movie chains. So hopefully when you go to the movies in the next coming few weeks, you're going to get to see our census ad. And I know I got excited the last one in 2005 and I actually embarrassed my daughter when I saw the ad come up and I screened that's what we did and She was very embarrassed she slunked down and received but We also are have all the schools Putting the logo on their websites Fairfax County government actually put our logo on their website. We're trying to reach as many websites as possible so that it's very visible. And we're really, really reaching for a higher response rate. The more children counted, the more money in return, and the end result is the children benefit. It's all money that's coming back to us, which everybody in Fairfax County in the City of Fairfax has spent sales tax. Everybody pays sales tax. So let the sales tax come back to us and not elsewhere. Do we have Madam Chairman? Yeah. Are you finished with Madam Chairman? Yeah. Are you finishing with your presentation? Yes. Questions from Mrs. Riego. I thought I might give you something else to talk about. We're waiting on the slide. You may have said this already, and if so, and I missed it, sorry, but can you just tell us a little historically what the response rate has been? I mean, it sounds like the publicity plan is wonderful, and it should improve the response rate, but I'm just curious on how it has historically been. In previous years, from my understanding, Elora correct me if I'm wrong, but way back, the response rate was very high and they noticed a decrease starting in 2002 and then a serious decrease in 2005. And we don't know what to attribute it to, but we think that possibly 9-11 caused that, where people are very, want to keep their information confidential and they don't, they're very nervous about filling out a census form. So we think that is it. And we are working with a lot of parent, filling out a census form. So we think that is it. And we are working with a lot of parent groups. And we're out there now. And that's another thing we're doing is being very visible to try to get them to feel comfortable. That this information is kept confidential. We are all we care about is counting the children. And we don't send anything to the state except one final number A final number for the city of Fairfax and a final final number for the Fairfax County government or Fairfax County Poles schools So great madam sure, yeah, Mr. Griffith our friends in the bag are having some technical difficulties You might understand and they apparently found the audio but not the video. And they are sure that by the end of the meeting they'll have it, so you don't have to any longer. We'll just pick up the video as soon as they're able during the meeting. One of the things we want to bring to you, we want to present to you is we had a lot of these banners made. All right. Thank you. And this is something for you to hang in anywhere that's be visible to help us. Great. We'll see where we can thank you. We'll see where we on this campus here where we can have it posted. We appreciate that. Are there any other questions? I had two questions. And what is the deadline for response? The deadline for response is we have, we can't take any more responses after July 15th. So July 15th is the absolute deadline. We hope that as many people as possible could respond as soon as possible because whoever doesn't respond by the end of April, we actually send out another mailing as a reminder to say please, if you have, you know, you haven't responded to the census. Can you please respond? Okay. And what happens if someone doesn't receive a letter that somehow they toss it away because they think it's junk mail or it gets slipped into a flyer that is considered to be an advertisement. They don't pay any attention to it. If families or households do not receive something, then what should they do? You're assuming you'll pick them up at the second go round? They will pick them up the second go round or they can call the census office at 703-329-7765. And that numbers on our website. They also can send an email at census census 2008 at fcps.edu. And that will reach us as well. Okay, great. Thank you, Julie. Madam Chairman, I'm just mysterious. Is your publicity chairperson working or coordinator rather working with someone within the city of Fairfax directly or is that something that our communications person for our city schoolwork can help facilitate whether it's getting it in our local city newsletter or some things like that. That already got followed up on. It looks like Mrs. Munde has every sponsor that. Hope Gibbs is here this evening and she will be our link with as she has been in the past and she's already taken some steps in regards to our website and making certain that we use our city media to promote the school census as well. That's obviously an addition to everything that the county is doing in this campaign, but we will make certain that our citizens also know that we want them to fill out the census forms. Thank you. Great. If there are no further questions, I'd like to say thank you to both of you for coming this evening. We appreciate this information. It is good, easy information, and it's nice that we will have an opportunity to see something positive coming out of it for our children and for this community. Are we ready to roll? Mr. Griffith? That's a pretty whole statement. We're going to try. Okay. Okay. All right. Thank you. We have a video. We have a video of it not the audio. This would be great because we played on our city. back with. We're county on you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Again, thank you both and we do appreciate that. And perhaps if we get that working then we could make some arrangements to have that run on our channel 12. Thank you for coming. Thank you. The next item is a presentation by Linear Middle School. And we do have a Dr. Scott Poole with us this evening. I would also like to point out before Dr. Poole gets started that we do have Linda Burke, who is our cluster superintendent in the audience and we appreciate her being with us this evening. Dr. Poole. Good evening everybody. Before I get started I'd like to recognize and thank the linear staff members that generously gave up their evening to join us. I'm going to be assisted by a system principal nettingan's hall of sales. Also, Director of guidance, Francis Wood is here, as well as a system principal, Carl and Floyd, and our instructional coach, two Phillips. And for tonight's presentation, what I'd like to do is start off by going over some sort of general trends about what's happening to school in regards, especially into our demographics, then go into our student achievement results, and then look at some current initiatives that are underway this year, and those that we have planned for the future, and also conclude by going over the terrific renovation that's coming to a close, and also some other city initiatives, and they give you an update on this. Anyway, it started off, and I hope you all have a copy of this as well. But just to give you a sense of kind of what's happening and how linear is changing. First, in terms of our population, we are sitting at our highest overall enrollment number that we've had in a number of years at linear. And we haven't received our budget or I shouldn't say a budget. Actually, I know what the budget projections look like, but in terms of our student enrollment projection for next year, I haven't yet to receive those, but it seems like it's going to continue to be where it's at or maybe even higher. So, I have to see. But in terms of our student demographics, you can see our white student population is still our largest subgroup, followed by our Asian subgroup and then Hispanic and African American and then multiracial and other others. So, it's fascinated by the, in preparing for this evening, just looking at just how diverse a linear has come as many schools in the area, particularly in Fairfax County. We have students that speak 43 languages at linear now. So it's certainly really becoming a worldwide school in that sense. But anyway, in terms of our percentage of white students, you can see there's been a kind of a slow decrease over the years from 2003, 2004, around 50, just under 60% down down to about 45.6%. Our percentage of Asian students is pretty constant just going up and down about 1% over the last five years. And if you look at our our fast-disgrowing subgroup or Hispanic students that have risen from 12.89% to this year just under 16%. Our percentage of African American students took an uptick this year, about 1% from 8 to 0.18 to 9.32%. Percentage of special ed students has remained fairly constant. We're sitting around just over 15%. One other interesting trend I think is that we have increased pretty significantly over the years in the number of students that have limited English proficiency. And in fact, to meet this need, we did pick up an additional staff member over the summer and through in the middle of the year we decided to utilize some of our extra staffing to help along these lines. But in terms of our instructional program and our student achievement results from last year, just like to walk you through some of those and then kind of look at those in more detail at the end. You can see in our eighth grade reading skills dropped a little bit from last year. If you look at our writing scores were relatively constant. Droped just a look 3%. And our seventh grade math scores did increase 4% from last year. Our eighth grade math scores declined, but sort of mirrored what was going on in both the county and state levels as well. And our end-to-course algebra continues to be one of our shining stars. You can see all the kids that are taking algebra are passing at 100%, so we're real proud of that. And our seventh grade history scores took a bit of a downturn and we're hoping to bounce back from that this year from 93 to 87%. And our eighth grade civics also declined a little bit from 93 to 90%. So we're now we're back down to what the county average is. And if you look at our eighth grade science scores, another one of our shining stars from last year's results continued to increase from 93 up to 94% last year. So we're real proud of that. Some notable things that are happening in terms of our instructional program and the numbers of students that are taking courses, the upper level courses, honors courses in English and math continue to increase, although as a percentage from this year to last in English are pretty constant, but we haven't had an increase from 287 students to 316 in honors math and that's combined in both grades 7 and 8. And one of the encouraging things within that subgroup 2 is that we are now offering one section of geometry at linear and we expect that number of students because if you look at the next slide the enrollment in seventh grade honors algebra is the precursor to that course and so we expect next year are the number of students to double or over double to 19 students and at this point in the mid-year I'm proud to say they're all still there, none of them have dropped out so that's good news. But then the next step I thought it's important for us to look at why didn't linear make a YP last year as the first time ever and certainly it was disappointing to us, but I try to be positive and learn from what occurred and move on and try to target what's happening. But linear, like many middle schools in Fairfax, struggled to make AYP last year, 19 of the 26 schools did not make it. We specifically did not make it because of our English scores. But one of the more encouraging things, if you sort of drill down into the data, data suggests that overall the majority of students at linear are still performing at a high level, particularly our white students and our Asian students. In fact, 44% of those students scored past advanced on their English SOL results. But as you look at it, and we really tried to break out, you know, what happened last year, we noticed we had a rather sharp drop within some of our more specific subgroups, particularly our African American students, our Hispanic students, our students with disabilities, and our disadvantaged students. And Miss Phillips also, she helped me look at these results real closely. And what you find is that a number of the students that did not pass in those four categories actually cut across many of the same categories. So the bad news is we failed to make AYP English on four subgroups, but the good news is it's a relatively small group of students that I think we can target and we are trying very hard to target and length them up with appropriate services to better meet their needs and to improve their level of student achievement. And these particular subgroups are the major focus of our school plan this year. And in particular, as you are sure aware that the county has adopted an entirely new school plan and new school plan process with three new school board goals. One, based on academics, second is essential life skills and the third responsibility to the community. But for our academic goals addressing the needs of those subgroups is our top priority. But as you look at sort of what are we doing about it? And the next slide is a list of a number of the initiatives and I'm not going to read through all of them at this time, but I'm going to try to highlight a couple of those that we are really hopeful that are going to make a difference this year around. Particularly, we are pushing really hard to continue to adopt the tenants of professional learning communities or we call PLCs. And in particular, we're really trying to utilize collaboration in terms of designing, or not design our instructional program, but designing our lessons, working together to analyze our results, to develop common assessments, and then to work together to share ideas and think real creatively about what we can do to help our students. And in particular, on one of some of the things that we've done this year are we've put forth some very clear expectations for each of the PLCs that are operating in our core areas. And we've tried to also encourage those that don't have a natural planning time like some of our elective courses, physical education, foreign language. We wish we could have common planning time for all of those, but the schedules inherently limited on how much we can do. But we are still trying to encourage them to work collaboratively with each other to the extent that they can. And even if there's only a couple people that teach a subject area at the school, even work with those and other schools to share ideas. But in particular with those expectations for our core content PLCs, we've asked them to develop at least four common assessments over the course of the school year. Also teachers are expected to utilize a common protocol when developing each common assessment or task that includes identifying desired outcomes, reviewing common assessment and task results by identifying those content strands or at least two content strands of relative instructional strength and weakness, also learning from the analysis of student performance, the plan intervention, enrichment and instruction. So hopefully by really clearly delineating what is expected of all those groups will get better results and everybody will know what they need to be doing to be successful. And also among one of our primary tenants of our school plan under the essential life skills was to implement what we call pride time. And it's sort of similar to what they're doing at the high school, what they call R&R or VIVIT's remediation and forgot what the other R stands for. Reward, thank you. And in fact, it's a little bit confusing because Fairfax also has another program called Pride Time as well. But our Pride Time is very much analogous to their R&R program. And we were moving towards PLC's. One of the key pieces of it is that they said you really have to look at time in a creative way to figure out how can you use time to help kids? Because if you look at it and just from your own our own experience, a lot of kids that you try to get to stay after school, you invite them to stay after school to get extra help, there's a lot of the kids that need that help the most aren't going to do it. For a variety of reasons, they don't want to, they have other responsibilities with their family, they have jobs, and so we really became convinced after looking at the research and also looking at some best practices that are being utilized at other schools that we had to come up with a time during the school day when we could get the kids and we could mandate that they get extra help. Not ask them was a key piece of all this. So we really took a hard look at our schedule and we looked at a whole bunch of different proposals, but we ended up creating, we dropped what we used to have called TA periods and we collapsed our lunches from four into three to create this 30 minute block of time during the school day when every single teacher and every staff member would be available. And that way we could shrink the student teacher ratios and really, and if a kid is not doing well, we could say you have to go get help from this teacher. Not ask them, but say this is what we're going to ask you to do until your grades improve. And then at the same time, build in some reward piece to that so that when the students do improve that we could acknowledge that. And during those on certain days of the week we'll have what we call sore days when the students could go play basketball with their friends. They could go just hang out in the cafeteria, but only if they've earned that. They if they're great is they're not getting D's and F's or their behaviors is as appropriate in school. So it's sort of the we're trying to give that carrot and that incentive to help kids do well. And the staff was we were rather ambitious. We decided to change our whole master schedule in the middle of the year much to Dr. Wichita Grand, much of work with us and we were able to push it through and it took a lot of effort on the part of our guidance department and our teachers to make those adjustments and we totally reorganize the kids by academic need. So that if they were getting a D or an F and a subject that became their default pride time teacher. And then also have students need to make up work, make up tests. Teachers can email one another, request students during that time, so that they can get what they need done during the school day. So while it's still early, it's only been in place since the start of second semester. The early signs are encouraging and we're certainly going to take a hard look at it again at the summer break and then tweak it again and you know as they once said I think when they're building the Hoover Dam you know it's build it and figure out what's wrong with it but I think we're really we got off to a good start and I'm optimistic about what's going to how it's going to help our kids. Also some other initiatives that we believe we're going to help this year when it comes to our SOL test, as you all probably remember the big controversy last year in relation to our testing our ESOL students. And how we didn't, a lot of folks, including our Fairfax County Superintendent, did not feel it was fair to ask students that have very limited English to take tests. And we believe that's one of the reasons why a number of middle schools, including linear struggled with the English piece, especially because of our increasing numbers of students with limited English. But this year they have come up, the county has come up with an alternative or a proxy for students with limited English and also special ed students that meet the qualifications and we have identified 94 students to take the VGLA instead of forcing them to take the SOL test and we believe that this is going to help us as well. And the early because what the students are asked to do is create portfolios of their work, which are then submitted for evaluation and a lot of the early indicators suggest that the kids are getting. And they can be successful in this manner. So we're hopeful that that's going to help. Some of the other initiatives, one of the you all, have been so generous with and helping us with our jump start honors camp. And again, the results are, I think, demonstrate the effectiveness of this initiative. We had 33 students participate last summer, and again, the camp is designed to help students ready to take honors courses at Leneer. Two students moved away, but of the 31 that participated, and there's still Lene linear, 29 of those are still enrolled in Honors Math as of today, as far as I know. And it also was a real helpful process, not only for those 29 students, but it helped us think more proactively about how do we identify students to take honors courses and how can we go out and sort of reach out to those students and bring them in to the program. So we're hopeful to continue that next year, perhaps even on a larger number of kids moving through the honors camp. Also to address the needs of our African American students, one of our council or two, our council are on Adrian Williams and one of our teachers for Kell joiner and Dr. Wood has been assisting with well. It started this initiative we call teachers inspiring change and it's specifically geared to empower and encourage our African American students, they're a number of initiatives mentoring academic remediation, and you could see some of the others book talks to try to engage those students in the academic community at school and to give them the support that they need to be successful. In regards to our special ed students, another one of those subgroups that causes to not make AYP, we're trying to reach out to those students and work with the parents to help them build that school home connection to create a partnership to help those students be more successful. We had a special ed department organized a, called an SOL brunch in February. And while we were at hope that more parents would come we were proud of the fact that 20 parents and their students attended and took part and they give a whole bunch of presentations on interactive notebooks, service learning hours, benchmarks, how to access Blackboard so that parents can look at what's happening at school and better monitor what they can do to help their son or daughter be successful. And also, there's a lot of real positive things going on with the after school programs. After school is not just sort of fun and games, although that's certainly a part of it. But we have been real pleased with the work of our new after school specialist, Mr. Julio Dejo. We're now averaging between 800 and 1,000 kids a week who are staying after school at Leneer. And we believe that's a wholly positive thing because of course we can monitor them and make sure they're safe. But also there's a lot of really neat clubs that have come into existence this year. The LEGO Robotics, Guitar Club, Homework Club, Intermeeral Sports, which is by numbers our most popular. And in a game's chat room, in fact, there's a bit of an extension of the Intermeeral Sports going on there as if you're interested. There is a student faculty basketball game this Friday. Lenny, we've already sold 450 tickets, and we're expecting approximately 600 people to come thanks to our new and large gym. But the best student intermural team is going to be playing the faculty and unfortunately I can't play because of my knee but students and I'm fanning injury because I'm scared but I've been hobbling around for three weeks, honestly. I really would like to play, even though my basketball skills are limited. But it really is, I think, going to be a neat event, and the PTA has been very much involved, and so we're really are trying to bring the community into the school. And I look at that as a real direct extension of what's going on with our after-school programs. And then last I'd like to conclude with the renovation. Of course, whenever you all have seen the school, I have to tell you a lot of principals come by and are quite envious of what we have, the facilities that we now have. And it's certainly, for me, it's real exciting this year to be more focused on instruction and those things and less on the heat and electricity and the fire alarm and going off and those kinds of things, but it really is beautiful and it's really I think showing that a building while I believe first and foremost that the people make the school successful, that having the kind of facilities that we do is certainly a real added bonus. But to highlight a couple of the other initiatives that are going on, I wanted to just give you some updates about our Latin program. It's a city that's been so generous in helping us with over the years. We had a little bit of a dip in our grade eight, Latin 1 numbers. Our Latin teacher left during the middle of the year to have a child and never return. And so they dipped a little bit, but I'm very excited about our new Latin teacher this year. I'm just a North mash rep and we have four sections of Latin enrichment, which is the precursor to the Latin one course. We have 51 students taking that class and there are 25 students taking the eighth grade Latin one course this year, but we do expect those numbers to rise next year with now we have an stable Latin teacher there. And also with the technology support, again, I can't thank you all enough for the support that you help provide us that allows us to have a full-time technology sports specialist for us that is just huge with all of the new technology that we have at linear laptops for all of our staff members, smart boards in every classroom. We're also in the process of boarding the airliners where the students, the teachers can walk around and actually use a, like it's almost like a template where a notebook that they can use to teach what's on their smart board from any place in the classroom. And as for any teacher knows, that's really helpful when a student, maybe a little bit off task, a little bit distracted instead of stopping the whole class, they can simply walk over to them and keep right on teaching without interruption. So I think that, but having that kind of support, having someone at the building full time that can help is really, really been a big help for us. And especially, I believe it's one of the main reasons that linear was selected as an E-Cart pilot school because we have both the technology and the support to make it happen. And with the online testing or the advent of online testing and the increased use of online testing, having that person around is really key. We had our first test today and certainly miss pane our technology support specialist was quite busy. So again, we're glad that she is there. But concluding, I'd like to just conclude with the renovation and I've already mentioned that the smart boards are being used. I think it's fair to say I haven't. They'll have official statistics on this at this point, but just from observation that our smart boards are being in a routine manner in most of our classrooms at this point. And at the end of the year I'm going to give a survey to our teaching staff to try to come up with some more clear cut data on how much they're being used and what kind of effect they believe that they're having on our instructional program. Also, our new technological infrastructure which we really have worked hard to think through and work collaboratively in developing so it wasn't just sort of like what the administration thought that the staff would need, but we worked closely with teachers to assess their needs and then worked with the vendors. We had a fair, a technology fairer to so they could showcase their equipment. And then we took the feedback we had surveys taken to discern what would be best. And then we've implemented it. And it's really been based on our whole technological plan, on scalability, mobility, moving to that wireless environment. And again, it's been very, I think, a big part of our efforts to implement online testing and utilize an E-Cart and other common assessments that can be generated so much faster and so much more easy to move them around and to trade ideas when you can do that electronically. Also, the larger cafeteria, which is about a third larger than it used to be, certainly when this was all under the works, this wasn't in the plans, but because we had that larger cafeteria, we were able to shrink the number of lunches that we have from four to three, and that's what allowed us to do the pride time during the day, which we really believe has been such an important piece of our effort to adopt the tenants of professional learning community. So that was also a big benefit to us. And also, I've heard a lot of feedback from teachers that I know is very expensive to when you redesign the building to instead of having a science hall, move those science classrooms all around the building and put in all those pipes, but it really has helped with the, us maintain that focus on middle school philosophy and that stressing that interdisciplinary piece because by doing so we've been able to keep our four core teachers, our science, math, social studies, and English teachers all together. And most kids, it also helps with, I would say to some extent, from safety and security purposes, the kids never have to travel to any of your core classes more than about 50 feet. So they don't have to move all around core classes more than about 50 feet. So they don't have to move all around the building which helps with the congestion, helps with the monitoring of students, but also just makes it easier for teachers to communicate with one another because they're all right together. And also by the new design of having really essentially two separate wings, a 1-7th, 1-8th, it really has created two schools within a school because as a principal of a school with a thousand kids, I don't want students to get lost in the shuffle and I think that really does help to have the sort of smaller communities within the school, your seventh and eighth, and then your teams within those two sides. So hopefully the kids feel a more connectedness in this better sense of connectedness to their school and to their teachers and to their community. And also the fine arts folks, I think I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you for them. They absolutely love the new fine arts hall and all the facilities that they have been given and the new auditorium are completely renovated auditorium. And I don't know, it's maybe partly the excitement of all of that, but our symphonic band just received perfect scores of ones across the board, the District Land Festival, and Mr. Miles' our band teacher is just really, really excited about that, and I promised him I'd share that with you. So that's it for me. Thank you. Great. Thank you, Dr. Poole. So wonderful presentation. And gives us a really good overview of what is going on at linear questions for Dr. Poole. No, no. Mrs. Craig? First, I want to tell you, I have a seventh grader, Connor, and he loves Pride Time. He struggled the first two months of this year adjusting from Daniel's run and seeing the same teacher every day to block scheduling. It was very difficult in our house for a couple months, but we have an underway now and he enjoys Pride Time. I have a question on the Jumpstart Honors Camp. And I know the numbers went up 29 kids on the graph and we talk about math. Is that just exclusively targeting the math honor kids? The program is geared to help any two recruit students to all of our honors courses, but there's certainly a focus on the math piece. And it could be open to seventh and eighth grade kids. I was curious, and how do you pick them? How do you choose those kids? Well, we look at a lot of criteria. We look at their SOL scores, look at their grades, primarily. They look, I'm trying to think of some of the other scores to or maybe anybody can help me to help develop the rubric that was used to look at it. But grades S. O. L. scores, I think they were also their teacher recommendations that came in through for the honors courses. And in some cases, yeah, it's coming back to me now over the summer, so it's a while. But one of the things that we tried to do is look at if students had, I can't remember the cut scores now, we didn't really use cut scores as much but targets. But we tried to go back and look at those students that may not have been recommended for honors programs. But it looked like, according to their scores, S-O-L scores and their grades that they could do it. And so we tried to go back and revisit those. So even if there maybe were some kids that were initially recommended and didn't look like a clear cut candidate, we went back to try to pull them off. And would you attribute the manner in which you just spoke of? Because I mean, you jumped in incredible amount of kids, in 0506 English, 0607, 87 kids at one year. Was there a reason for that? I mean, is that when you started, you know, really analyzing what kids? It's hard to isolate the variable exactly what was it. I mean to me it's probably a combination of factors. I just know in the last few years we've tried to be a lot more aggressive in terms of recruiting the kids to take those classes. Rather than and I think that's been really happening across the county to some extent rather than just sort of the old model when I know when I was teaching AP courses in eighth grade, the honors courses, they would just sort of say you have to reach this or you can't be in it. This year they were sort of moving more towards something like open enrollment for the kids but within certain parameters. So I think unlike the high school where it is open enrollment, the middle school, you have to be kind of careful. You want to encourage kids to take courses that are challenging, but appropriately challenging. At the same time, you don't want them to get so far and over their head that they don't feel like they can be successful. But one of the things I will say that we've done, at least the data indicates that we're keeping a lot more kids in our upper level courses last year we lost public 20th and kids Francis in our from algebra back down to math eight and so that was something that really alarmed us and we tried to look at what are we doing what can we do better to keep those kids from dropping down and I'm hoping that the pride time piece will help with that too because before they fall below that threshold where they don't feel like kids from dropping down. And I'm hoping that the pride time piece will help with that too because before they fall below that threshold where they don't feel like they can do it, they'll get that extra help. Okay, well your staff has been great too. I've had the email just a couple of times and they responded great and I appreciate that. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Mrs. Craig. Additional questions? Not true. That Mr. Bretcher and then the same. Thank you Dr. Bullock. Again, a great presentation and good to see all the things going on at linear. Just a couple quick questions, going back to provide time. Sure. The students that are identified as needing the additional health and as they are asked to come to the different classes. Where do we find all the students going? I mean, do they go to separate study hall kind of places or are they expected to be in certain classes? They're expected to be in certain classes. What happens is there's sort of a sign that they're assigned a default teacher. And Dr. Floyd, I have to give her credits, spent many, many hours going through, pouring through all of the grades and teacher input. We went out and when we redesigned or we reallocated all of the kids, she went through and looked at where the kids were struggling and we started with core content subjects first. So if a student was getting a D or an F and English math science social studies, that took precedence of everything else. Those students had to go specifically in math English first. They have to go work with their math teacher, English teacher, until the situation improves. Then we worked sort of backwards from there so that the kids that were performing at a high level, we also worked with the band teacher. He was looking at his chops to get his band kids for some extra practice time. So a lot of those students are doing well. So those students were placed in our electives and also perhaps with our physical education teachers because on those sore days, days when the students are rewarded which we're eventually going to work up to starting after spring break, correct? One day a week that's where they'll end up because if they're doing well those are the students that are most likely to go play basketball, go to the media center to read or to go hang out in the cafeteria with their friends. But every single student is assigned to a teacher or a staff member at this point. But they can also, during Pride time, if it's arranged in advance by the teachers, it sounds really confusing. But it actually works pretty well because we were kind of, when we heard about this plan because they're doing it at Thore it thorough at Cooper Middle School and a couple others to some extent we're sort of like oh my god there's gonna be a thousand kids running while all over the school but it's amazing when the bell rings the halls are empty and it's quiet but the kids if the teachers work out in advance the kids can go to their default teacher their pride- teacher, sign out and go see the teacher who they need to make up work with or need to make up with that. But they have to be there by the time the bell rings. Okay. So, but and it also has to be agreed upon by the two teachers in advance. So there's always that accountability piece we know within student is. Is there a parent notification in this that tells parents that their child is, you know, participating in a bright time in a specific class? Do we notify them? I don't. I'm just. Is there a reason that some of the teachers because they're constantly communicating, you know, with the parents? No, I would. Yes. And then also. So only as the teacher notifies them. It would be through, well, most of the time, I mean, I have been updating parents through the PTA newsletter and about through the weekly keep in touch update about what pride time is and how it works. But hopefully the parents will know if they're getting a D or an F, that's where they're going to be. And by and large, the parents have been from what I've heard and seen have been very pleased that their students getting extra help during the day. And I've been very supportive of what's happened. Okay, for the S.O.L. branch, new topic that you do with the special education. You had 20 parents and families still have any thought of extending that to S.O.L. in general for parents and have a broader opportunity for parents to do. Yeah, I mean, we could. We, certainly, we had, I know on that day, we had so many staff members there. I'm sure we could have accommodated many more. That particular event was geared towards trying to target that subgroup because we had noticed such a significant drop in the performance of our special ed students. But yeah, sure, I think it could hurt to do with all of our kids to some extent. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, it was on a Saturday morning. Indeed. Good. Last question. Going back to meeting the AYP and subgroups that did not fare well with the English. Any indication how they fared with the MAP? Yeah, in some cases, some of our, those same subgroups declined as well in MAP, but not as much, not as enough to cause us to not make a YP. The exception being probably with our limited English proficient kids, a lot of them still did quite well in math. And for obvious reasons, they can still figure it out and I have to weren't as negatively affected by the limited English as they would be on the English skills, the English test. But yeah, some drop it. It still did well enough. But we had a lot of, I guess probably the best way to describe it is we had some kids, as you can see, especially in our algebra kids, doing really well. And then sort of maybe a greater divide between the ones that are doing really well and the ones that didn't do quite as well. I look forward to come by and hopefully watching the use of the smart boards and it's fun. And the air pad since that would be great. Madam Chair, from this way I have. Okay, thank you Mr. Betriem. Mrs. Knight. Thank you. Thank you very much. Appreciate the thorough presentation. I would be interested to know how enrollment in honors science and history, maybe his track in the last few years. Do you have any similar data to what was presented here for English and math or? Frank, I did not prepare that specific ones. I don't make Dr. Wood gave me an idea of how we're doing in those particular courses. Thank you. Good evening. I've been at Lanier for the last four years and in all of the course subjects we have increased each year the enrollment in the classes has increased in all of the subjects. So we targeted initially the math and English, but we also placed students in the science and the social studies. And I've made a concerted effort at the beginning of the year, like actually it's over the summer. When we received the scores from the elementary schools, we look at those scores very carefully. We look at the teacher recommendations, we look at the grades, we look at those scores very carefully, we look at the teacher recommendations, we look at the grades, we look at a number of things, and then we go ahead and place those students in those classes, and then we monitor the students. For all of the students in our Ryzen 7th grade classes, and they're recommended by the elementary staff, we place them in the honors classes. But in addition to that, I look at that information and then I add to that placement. So yes, in the science and social status, they have increased over the last four years. So would, there's been an increase, which is great, that we're seeing that trend across four areas. Would the actual enrollment numbers be anywhere comparable to the enrollment for the, we have here for combined seven and eight for English and for math as far as in honors class? Yes, yes. Could I ask this that either Dr. Poole or you would get that information and forward it to Mrs. Monday and then she could distribute it to the board members. Would that be helpful? Yes. I will be more than happy to do that. Actually, I have over the last four years kept that information so I can get that information to Mrs. Monday tomorrow. Gravy, great. Very good. Anything else, Mrs. tonight? I've just a careful. Go ahead. Thank you. I actually had the opportunity to see Dr. Poole this morning at Providence reading for Read Across America Day and we were trapped in the car pool line and couldn't depart so we had a chance to talk about a couple of items. And one question I know you were related to honors. I'm wondering do the teacher prep? Do they prep for, do all teachers teach both honors and regular ed classes? Or do you have just some teachers only that are teaching the honors classes? Or how has that done? Well, at the county level, do you mean like a few? Well, actually at one or the other. Actually at linear. I mean, are all teachers teaching a mix of classes at both honors and general ed? Or do you only have a set? Well, we have a split theme that is an honors team. But we do offer at least one section on each team. Correct. Yeah, I think so. I think I did that. But as far as the question I know you'd ask me about GT and what are the qualifications, the difference between the GT teachers and honors teachers. I did look into it. We had to ask about it earlier today. So I always had a chance to talk to Mrs. Horak, the one of the folks that works in GT instruction. And she explained to me that the state doesn't require any specific, have a specific requirement for teachers to teach GT or honors, but she explained that the county has requirements. There's regulations that pertain to it. And she explained that in particular to teach GT level courses that you have to complete four graduate courses or you're recommended because it's a little confusing. It says that the regulation states that full-time teachers of GT must obtain their endorsement within five years of the teaching assignment. But this often has the effect of providing a loophole because most middle school teachers do not teach five sections of GT. But what they're shooting, they to get endorsed in GT, for according to Fairfax County, Miss Monday, please correct me if I'm wrong. But they require that you take four graduate courses and also teach gifted students for minimum two years. Now, it's sort of juxtaposed that with honors, honors right now, there is an internal expectation, but not a regulation, that honors teachers will complete honors training. I miss where I did say she is trying to change that, so it's a requirement, not just an expectation. In particular, right now, the expectation is that complete three days of training in courses that include the parallel curriculum model, one day of training on critical and creative thinking skills, and then I'm trying to figure the last one. And then there's a follow-up day where they spend time reviewing resources. And they have sort of still tinkering with that because they have problems because the academy course pulls teachers out for three days. So they've tried to, they're looking at other options that give teachers more flexibility to meet it through either an online course or some other possibilities. Well, I appreciate this information and that would be wonderful. Maybe if that was something that also could be forwarded to Mrs. Yunday. I was actually not intending though to try to get into the specifics of trying to compare the GT and the honors teachers, but I guess more what I was looking at is that linear actually and I'm sorry if I wasn't making my question clear maybe I'm not understanding the answer but I was just curious within the different teams at linear then do all teachers teach both some honors and some regular-eyed classes or is it really just this small select group of teachers that have had this additional training that are teaching the honors classes and most of the teachers are just teaching the regular ed general ed classes. And I'm not clear on my question, maybe. 16 we have six of our seven teams have an honors class You know they can it's a little is general and I think the seventh is our ESOL. Is that correct? 3 7th grade teams and 3 8th grade teams and on those teams the teachers actually teach At least one section of honors and also Three sections of general aid then we have a 17 which is a split team and on that team the teachers are actually teaching 7th and 8th graders. And those teachers are actually teaching all honors classes. That's the only team where you do not have the teachers teaching in the ed. And basically the reason for that is so that the teachers will not have so many preparations. Right. They already teach in two grade levels. And so therefore, you try to minimize the preparations that they actually have. So correct me if I'm not understanding this. Right. In other words, then, because all of the teachers are teaching at least one or more honors classes, then they're all really getting the same level of teacher training and preparation as allowed with availability to get into a kind of class. There's the same expectation. The same expectation, it's just a matter of being able to fill. So I know all of our teachers are very highly prepared and excellent teachers. I was just curious about the training and differentiate between the general ed and the honors classes. Each year, I have to submit to Ms. Horrick's office the names of the teachers who are teaching honors classes and the number of sections. And at that point, she contacts them for the training. And so then they have to follow through with the training. Thank you. One other just question I noticed in your school improvement plan about the TA lessons in September and I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about how that went. Is that something new? I'm not as familiar with that. Well, the TA lessons were designed to help students that are coming into the school, specifically our seventh graders, but also our eighth graders to help them give them some study skills, give them sort of the basic skills that they could use across their classes to help make that transition to middle school. Obviously, we don't have TA anymore because we've moved into pride time, but the lessons are still applicable. And I think what we're going to do next year is take the lessons, we just won't call them TA lessons anymore and probably end up calling them pride time lessons so that at the beginning of the year the students can get some of those basic things down so that they can understand what they can do to be successful in middle school. So it serves kind of as an orientation in them? Yeah, it's like an orientation for the first couple of weeks of school to help them get acclimated to middle school life. Great. They're like homework and keeping track. As we find out a lot of this middle school kids is they struggle with the initially with the movement of the going from one class to another and tracking everything and even just keeping track of their assignments. We give them a plan, I mean I don't mean that facetiously, but they do, if you look at their backpacks, it's just sort of a mess and so we try to help them keep a notebook, utilize their student planner, how to record their assignments and so hopefully they can be better organized and that will really help them down the road. Great. Do we have second sets of textbooks for any of the classes that you can't remember all of, I mean so that students can keep a set at home and- I can't say right now that every single class has them but I know I've ordered some just recently to help but we try when we can because I remember when I was teaching myself it is taxing at times when they're they beat up the book real bad too when they're carrying them back and forth so we try when we can I know that next year I might be a little more difficult because it looks like textbook adoption is gonna be delay but we'll do the best we can. Specifically with some of our smaller classes of what we'll try to at least help them with the books and keep a class set so they can take the others home. Thank you very much and I also thank you for forwarding the information to Mrs. Mimey to share with us. Okay, thank you. Any, Mr. Griffiths, do you have anything? No, ma'am. Okay. Good for you. I'm Chair. Can I just say? Okay, I just wanted to ask a question. Follow-up. Could, for our viewing audience, could you tell us what TA stands for? A teacher advisory. Okay, thank you. So for a teacher advisory period, that's what we used to have in lieu of prizes.. Sometimes we slip. Everyone in here sort knows what TA is, but there are people who do listen to us on television, so we want to make sure the viewing public understands that. Mrs. Monday. Well, I just want to thank Dr. Poole for his very thoughtful leadership at Lanier. He spends a great deal of time looking at student outcomes and looking at results and planning accordingly. And you can see it and the results that we're getting now as you see all of those indicators going in the right direction. I have no doubt that he and his staff will address the issues and their tough issues. These issues at middle school in Fairfax County and throughout the state by the way, I mean we are not pleased with what we're seeing with middle school outcomes across the state. Fairfax County is struggling with 19 of its 26 middle schools not making AYP last year. This is information that we take very, very seriously. So I know that at a certain point this year, Dr. Bulls said I'm not making the staff do one more new thing. Well, I don't know if you actually kept your word, but that was an awful long list of new things. But they're good things and they're the kinds of things that researchers telling us will make a difference for students. I know the pride time model is one that does have a research base, but it also has a lot of common sense and that is intervening before students fall too hard. And just the things like making up work, a child who's out of school for three days, sometimes by the time they get to all of their teachers after school they feel overwhelmed. So the ability for students to get the time, the help that they need in their real time is just so important. And lastly, you heard it from our elementary schools. I know when we have Dr. Brabrand here to talk about Fairfax High School, we just love the emphasis on stretching all of our students and looking for their potential. And the Jumpstart Camp obviously was part of that, but you don't see that kind of movement in mathematics just because of one event. It's a change in how we're looking at students, the support that the staff is giving to students, looking at results like last year and saying why did we lose 20 students out of algebra in eighth grade, what can we do differently? And those kinds of actions are making a huge difference and I thank you. It's a wonderful presentation. Thanks. Thank you, Mrs. Monday. I have just one question. I think that we've asked you a lot of good follow-up questions and you've been very gracious and very thorough in your answers and I appreciate that. And the afterschool program, the slide shows the slide said that between 800 and 1,000 students are staying after school each week. I'm assuming that means roughly between 150 to 200 students per day. Is that how you get to 800? Yeah, those are, that's each day. It doesn't mean different kids. Collectively over a separated week. But that still is a really good start. I know that your after school coordinator is really a dynamic personality. And it's good to see that youngsters are staying after school rather than being part of an empty household and there are good things that go on there. So again on behalf of this board, thank you so much for coming this evening for bringing your staff out and we wish you continued success and we just know those SOL scores are going to be better in the coming year. Thank you very much Dr. Cool. Thank you very much, Dr. Pohl. Thank you, Fawar's Court. We're going to move into two action items. The first one is the approval of the minutes of February 4, 2008. Mrs. Pierce provided those in our folders. The chair will entertain a motion. Madam Chair, Mrs. Knight, I moved to the city of Perfax School Board approve the minutes of the February 4, 2008. School Board regular meeting is kind of indistributed. Thank you. Mrs. Knight is there a second? Thank you. Mrs. Knight moved and Mr. Griffin seconded that the City of Fairfax School approve a school board approved the minutes of the February 4, 2008 regular school board meeting is printed and distributed. Are their additions or corrections. They're there they're being done all in favor signify by saying aye aye chair votes aye members opposed members opposed the motion is unanimous the next item is release of CIP funds to the city of Fairfax and I'm going to go to Mrs. Monday for a briefing. Mrs. Munde. Thank you. I think as we are all becoming very aware, there are serious deficit issues in the city of Fairfax, as are in other jurisdictions because of the decrease in property values and decrease in revenue. For that reason, I was asked by the city to consider some existing funds and releasing those funds to the city to address deficit issues. We examined carefully our CIP funds and determined that we could release $60,000. Most of it coming from a fund that had been built up over a couple of years to address paving issues at our two elementary schools. We will, by the way, have extensive repaving at linear when our project is finished and Fairfax, of course, had paving as part of its renovation project. So those schools are in good shape. We felt that we could make, we could release $50,000 from that fund quite frankly because we've been lucky. We've had a couple of mild winters and we really haven't had damage to our paving to the extent that we need to make extensive repairs at this time. The electrical upgrades and then approximately $10,000 was an old account where there had been some work and that was residual money that had just not been addressed. So out of those two accounts, we left 25,000 in paving repairs so that that wasn't down to a zero and electrical upgrades 10,000 in that constituted the 60,000. You can see the detail page for what remains in our existing CIP funds. We would now be down to 25,000 for paving repairs. The roof warranty refers to the warranty that we have in place currently to address issues with our two secondary schools because we do maintain our own roofs at the secondary level. We have roofs that we feel are better than what the county would provide and maintain. We will be renegotiating that contract, but we do need to keep funds there for that purpose. The heating HVAC, heating and air conditioning, that's money that is required to pay for the work that's currently occurring at Providence to replace the chiller there that has been a problem almost from the beginning. And so this will address that problem. And then the contingency reserve actually is to make certain that we have money in case of an emergency. And quite frankly, we're hoping we'll get through this providence replacement without having to go into the reserve. But that's exactly what that that reserve is necessary for. So I do, I think we can support the city. This is a difficult time and we'll be having other discussions about CIP funding in the future, especially as our elementary schools begin to see their warranties conclude after their renovations and other needs arise. But at this point, I feel confident that we can move this money to the city and still be able to take care of our responsibilities to our schools. Thank you Mrs. Monday. Questions from Mrs. Monday before we get to the motion. There being none I will entertain a motion. Someone? I'm sure. Mr. Betrum. I'm with the City of Fairfax Gold Board of Authorized Release of CIP funds from the Council numbers 320-688-1705-580-330, Havine account, in the amount of $50,000 and 320-688-1706, tack 580-330, electrical upgrades. In the amount of $10,000 to the City of Fairfax. Is there a second, second? Thank you, Mr. Betroman, and Mrs. Craig. A discussion? Questions? There being none, we'll call the question. That question is to authorize the City of Fairfax School Board to authorize at least a CIP fund, the amount of $50,000 in $10,000 for a total of 60, all in favor of the motion signified by saying aye. I'm Chair votes aye. Members opposed? No. Mr. Griffith is opposed. The motion carries forward a one. Mrs. Mendy, thank you for scrubbing the accounts. Thank you. And the next item is Superintendent Mattress. Mrs. Munde. I just have a couple of things. I think a number of us have the pleasure of reading at our elementary schools on Friday and Monday. And it's always great fun. And I have to share two of the kids say the darnedest things. First grade classroom, I'm reading this really funny cute little book about what teachers do after the kids go home and this is the first grade classroom and as I was reading a description in the story that when the students go home the teachers do such things as have food fights, one little boy raised his hands and just looked at me with very serious eyes and said, Mrs. Monday, this is fiction, isn't it? Yes. Yes, this is fiction. And we'll talk about how you know that. Third grade, and that was Daniel's run on Friday. Third grade at Providence today, I was reading a story about a dog that fangs out that it was like a wolf and decides that it needs to be a wolf. And so we know led to a conversation about the third graders about being in a family and species. And again, a child raises his hand and looks at me and says, well, you know, of course, that dog is just evolving. And I said, yes, yes, I do know that that dog is just evolving. So we're doing some very good things in our classrooms. And not only are these students, they enjoy reading. They obviously know books, but they're thinking. And they are just precious. And I enjoyed every minute with them. And I look forward to doing that again as I know all of you enjoy that experience on an annual basis. Before we leave tonight, I do want to make certain that you get some materials for tomorrow or night. As you know, we will be in a joint work session with the City Council tomorrow beginning at 5.30. And this is Pierce Prepared, folders for you. It gives you hard copies of the information that we sent on to the City Manager last week. Also does provide a list of what is in the CIP relative to projects at Fairfax. So you have that information in front of you. I'll also bring some other information that Mrs. Miller has asked me to have on hand in terms of some maps and other things. And if we are indeed asked about some of the projects that we would like to invest in for Fairfax High School. So that's tomorrow night at 530. Okay, thank you, Mrs. Munde. Any questions for Mrs. Munde? All righty. Matters for board members. Mrs. Craig? No, thank you. Mr. Patrick. Just a real quick note on the, Saturday the 15th of March, the District 13 or the Region 13, for Odyssey of the Mind will take place at Falls Church. High school, this is, obviously the Mind for anybody who doesn't know, is basically a creative problem-solving competition for school age children, and where they get a chance to exercise all sorts of innovation and discovery as they solve a series of different questions and problems that are presented to them both spontaneously and in a long-term format. So we have three teams from the city, one team from Daniels, two teams from Providence, and they'll be competing again Saturday the 15th. If you get a chance, come up, Paul Sturge. You'll see a very energetic, very unique experience. Okay, thank you, Mr. Retrim. Mr. Griffith. Thank you, Mr. Retrim. Mr. Griffith. Thank you, Madam Chairman. The board has before it a copy of a resolution passed by our colleagues of Fairfax County last week and it's been passed on to other school boards in the area. I bring it to your attention. I'm reluctant to ask the board to act on it. But I would note that it calls on our friends in the General Assembly not to do great damage to school funding during their desperate last attempts here to arrive at a budget and neither house of the General Assembly has made me feel particularly comfortable nor has the governor as far as I go. So all three in various ways are addressing well expressing their sentiments to support education. Sometimes the numbers tell a different story. expressing their sentiments to support education, sometimes the numbers tell a different story. So whether such a resolution would have any particular effect or not, I don't know, but I would bear with the will of the board on whether we ought to pass it at all or consider it or carry it on. Obviously time is a waste team because their work will be done here in the very near future. But Adam Chairman, that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Griffith. Did you want us to pass this resolution, would you like us to send a brief letter or did you just want to bring this to our attention and board members connect individually? Madam Chairman, as I said, I'm reluctant to ask the board to take action on something which they or I hadn't seen before today. I haven't been out of town. Speed readers though we are. I think some of you may be reluctant. I'm ready. I would myself approve it. Having read it this afternoon. It works for me. But unless the board is, unless there's a consensus of the board, I would be reluctant to move forward on it. You may want to poll the board and see if there's any interest in that to the member. Board member, Madam Chairman, I would be fine with supporting this. I think it's consistent with our other priorities. I agree. I think it would only be consistent with our solidarity with the Fairfax County board. I would agree also, Madam Chairman. With that sense of the board, Madam Chairman, I would move that the chair be directed to sign resolutions such as we have before us and to send it promptly to our delegates and representatives and the generalist. Okay, I plan on being in the school board office tomorrow morning on another matter. And I would ask if Mrs. Mundy and the clerk could make appropriate changes and get this ready for my signature. If since we're doing according to spike consensus, I don't believe we need a formal motion. Anything else then? Thank you, Mr. Griffiths, for bringing this to our attention. Do you have anything additional? The my second grade class would do anything. Would out match Monday's third grade cast. I regret because of a change in my schedule. I was unable to read it. Daniel's run and I do thoroughly enjoy that every year. But I was able to go to Providence this morning and it makes me feel young. I wouldn't miss that friend. Thank you so much. I'll bring my story next year. I had one thing. The Fairfax Community Coalition is planning, and so you might notice I believe it's already starting to get publicized. Asom, but in April on the 17th, the Thursday night at 7 o'clock at Fairfax High School will be hosting a night in the suburbs has been done in other communities that Fairfax Coalition will be following and we appreciate the staff Fairfax High School who's helping support this and co-sponsoring this. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Nay. I had the opportunity to read. I was unable to read it, Jane. I was unable to read at J.A.N.R.I.N. but I did read at Providence Elementary and in one of the classes that I read in my neighbor child. A neighbor child was in the class and he sort of looked at me funny as though he thought he might know me. But several weeks ago in my grandson's room, he played with him and as I was leading the class, he came up to me and he said to me, can your little boys come out to play today? Which made me feel very young again. But it was a great opportunity. The children were wonderful and it was nice to see so many members and so many parents, so many members in the community and so many parents coming to school to read and to emphasize how important it is that youngsters learn to read. We had a really good conversation on all the different ways you can read and what different materials you use. And the youngsters are very creative in thinking of books and signs. And even one little child even said a prescription bottle which I thought was really good but it was nice to talk to youngsters about the importance of reading and they were absolutely precious so it was a good thing to do. At any rate if there are no further comments we will adjourn the meeting and if I could see the clock I would say what timing is. Thank you very much for a good meeting. I believe they're gonna try to run that county and, well, well, the credits for all were just before then. Wonderful. Thank you so much. The meeting is adjourned. 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