At yesterday's annual Organizational Meeting, the School Board elected a new Chair and Vice Chair for the coming school year. I will be very pleased to work with Bethany Zecher Sutton as our new Chair and Miranda Turner as our Vice Chair!

The outgoing Chair is invited to speak about the year just concluded and the work that's ahead. Here is what I said:

It’s been a privilege to serve as School Board Chair over the past year. I’d like to thank the Superintendent for his partnership and his Cabinet members for their leadership and collaboration. I’m grateful to our Vice Chair Bethany Zecher Sutton for her support, our School Board Clerk and Deputy Clerk for their patience and skill, and my School Board colleagues for their commitment to doing the hard work for this school division and our community.

When I began my term as Chair last July, I shared my belief that this board makes its best decisions when it is carefully attuned to the practical wisdom and perspectives of all who value public education. When we are generous in sharing our own ideas, questions, and experiences, we enrich the collective outcome.

​I’m so proud of what we’ve accomplished together over the past year, through genuine listening, valuing what we hear, and working together. I’d like to mention some of the progress I believe we’ve made in the areas of community relationship-building, stewardship of resources, valuing staff, and acting in alignment with our values.


Community Relationships
First, I want to say a little bit about community participation and trust-building, with an eye to ensuring that the school board is as well-connected and responsive as possible. As of today, we’ve streamlined our Guidelines for Public Comment and changed our Public Comment sign-up process so that it will be easier for people to participate. During my term as Chair I have taken notes during Public Comment and summarized the concerns brought forward during each meeting as one way of demonstrating that speakers are listened to and their feedback is carefully considered.

In an effort to highlight issues that are top-of-mind for many of our stakeholders, this year we changed the way we presented Monitoring Items. We identified a more specific focus for each monitoring report—for example, chronic absenteeism within the broader category of Student Services. We’ve also made an effort to include school staff as co-presenters of our Monitoring Items to hear directly how the issue being discussed manifests in their classrooms and schools.

We’re reinventing our School Board Advisory Councils so that they are more relevant, better aligned to the APS Strategic Plan, and will make better use of the volunteer time and energy that we’re so lucky to have in Arlington. I am particularly grateful to all those who have participated in the Advisory Council Working Group and we look forward to sharing more about the proposed changes this fall.

In this year’s budget development process, we provided expanded opportunities for public engagement, including drop-in Open Office Hours last summer, meetings with community groups last fall, and multiple meetings that were open to the public from July through February. We posted to the APS website an infographic that explains the budget process start to finish and shared the template that APS department heads use to request changes to their baseline budget.


Good Stewardship
A second area of progress been in good stewardship of the school division’s financial, human, and capital resources. For the first time, we have written guidelines that spell out when and how our reserve funds should be used, in order to get on—and stay on—a more sustainable financial footing. We’re standing up a hotline to report suspected waste and fraud. This past year we’ve conducted rigorous internal audits and publicly shared the results as audit reports are finished. Then, we’re actively monitoring the implementation of recommended improvements from each audit. You can expect to hear about the final audit from this school year, on Information Services device management, next month as soon as it is completed.


Valuing Staff
A third area of progress I see is in the effort we’ve made to ensure that our talented staff members have the resources and support they need to do their best work.

Early in the year, teachers and school leaders shared their concerns about the negative effects of constant access to phones. Through careful listening and collaboration, we created a cell phone policy to create better conditions for teaching, learning, and building positive relationships among students and staff.

The audit of and leadership changes in our Human Resources department aim to make HR the consistently responsive, accurate, and supportive resource all our employees deserve. We closed a projected $49 million budget gap this year without instituting an across-the-board class size increase. In the budget, we were able to expand parental leave and offer a better compensation increase than the year before.

We’ve followed up on last year’s audit of our school activity funds by making changes in our Finance department designed to ensure that school administrators, school treasurers, and other staff members have clear guidance and support about how to manage these funds. We created a Policy Implementation Procedure on administrative leave so that our staff members would have a clear sense of the rules of the road when complaints are made against employees and investigations need to occur.

We’ve launched a more inclusive and transparent process for health insurance procurement—thank you to all employees who completed the recent survey to inform this process. We’re now writing a standard operating procedure that will lay out how new principals are hired to ensure that the staff members and families in those school communities have a solid understanding of how their interests will be represented in panel interviews and by other means.

The School Board has also invested energy in its own improvement. With the help of our School Board office staff, we’ve created a comprehensive shared drive that School Board members can reference and to better preserve institutional knowledge. The School Board is creating a process to conduct a formal, annual self-evaluation, something prescribed in our policy that we haven’t undertaken during my time on the board. Beyond compliance with policy, we want to model a commitment to reflective practice, growth mindset, and continuous improvement, which are important at all levels of our school division.


Living Our Values
Finally, and most important, I want to note that this year APS remained steadfast in its commitment to providing safe, welcoming, and inclusive environments for all our students, families and staff, in spite of changes being handed down at the federal and state levels.

In the wake of a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Education in February, we are defending our policy and practices that protect LGBTQ+ youth and ensure they can access every opportunity available to other students. Although the Virginia Department of Education has limited how it recognizes student gender in its state-level record keeping, in our local record keeping and in our schools we will still affirm all gender identities. Similarly, we remain committed to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion even while those values are under attack—because we want a public education system that works for all our students and prepares them for the diverse, complex, and ever-changing world they’ll inhabit as adults.

This winter we passed a Safe Schools Resolution and we created a new policy that details how we will engage with law enforcement representatives outside of our local police department, including ICE agents. I want to say a special word of thanks here to our in-house legal team, who trained all employees working at schools and on school buses in how to respond if agents come asking for students or staff members.

There are new challenges to grapple with as well—like the Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor, which casts into doubt our students’ ability to engage with a truly varied, culturally rich, and representative curriculum. The federal spending bill signed into law last week will slash funding for Medicaid, which provides health insurance to 37 million school-age children and is the fourth-largest source of federal revenue for school divisions. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Medicaid to serving students with disabilities, with mental health conditions, and behavioral health needs.

​The new federal law also limits eligibility for SNAP, which provides food assistance to over 13 million children and makes kids automatically eligible for free meals at school. It significantly narrows the ways that students and their parents can access federal financial aid for a college education.


For all of us who care deeply about our youngest community members and want to see them thrive, these are disturbing developments. It feels more important than ever to live out our core values, which are: excellence, equity and inclusion, relationships, integrity, stewardship, valuing staff, and providing a world-class, whole child education to every young person we welcome into our schools. I look forward to doing that work for the rest of my term.

Last week, the School Board meeting included an Information/Action item that recommended a change to the approved school year calendar. I chose to abstain from this vote—something I have not done before as a board member.

Since the meeting, I’ve received questions and comments about my decision to abstain. As an elected official accountable to the community I serve, I believe it’s important to explain any vote I cast--or in this case, my decision not to vote.  (This is why I have maintained a public record of all my votes since taking office, along with my commentary on particularly significant votes, in multiple languages.)
 

As a board member, I have always sought to understand an issue as thoroughly as possible in order to make an informed, responsible decision. This involves asking questions (often I ask a lot of them!); listening carefully to the perspectives of families, staff, and students who will be affected by a vote; studying how other school divisions have handled the same issue; and when necessary and possible, working with my colleagues and APS staff to explore compromises or alternative solutions.

Because of this, I don’t like Information / Action items. Normally, an issue and a related recommendation are presented an Information item and not voted on as an Action item until the subsequent board meeting. This allows board members time to deliberate and it gives the community time to understand what’s being proposed and advocate.

In this case, the School Board learned about the proposed calendar change Tuesday afternoon. It was shared with the community on Wednesday, and the board was to vote on Thursday.

The issue at hand was (is) deeply important to many in our community. It was also divisive: in the space of about 24 hours, the School Board received hundreds of emails. I carve out time to read all incoming emails, but in this case I was not able to because I also have a full-time job.  Additionally, from Thursday morning right up until the time of the meeting, I was receiving new information about the possible consequences of this vote. In the very limited amount of time available, I could not study what other school divisions were doing in response to the same issue, and I could not explore whether there were possible compromises or ways to mitigate the negative impacts of a vote in either direction.

There are completely valid reasons why this was presented as an Information / Action item. It is also true that I was deeply conflicted about the decision (to learn more about that, you can watch the meeting video and listen to my comments beginning at 3:31:20). With the time I’d had to deliberate and the information that was still coming in, I could not cast a responsible, well-informed vote. So my decision was to abstain.

Board members may abstain from a vote for a few different reasons. Abstention is different from recusal: in abstention, the board member participates in the discussion but declines to vote. In recusal, the board member has a conflict of interest and does not participate in the discussion or the vote.

I understand that an elected official’s decision to abstain may be seen as an abdication of decision making responsibility. And I believe that it’s my job to cast votes that are reflective of serious thought, study, and engagement. Last week, those two principles were in conflict.

I’m not a career politician and I don’t have a degree in any related field; I made a judgment call. It’s entirely possible that I should have made a different call, and if you believe I should have done so, I welcome your constructive feedback.