Not "a single new brick"

One benefit of having a blog is that I can point out when people are taking my words out of context for their own means. Such is the case this week with Mr. Nicholas Graham of Ashburn, whose letter to the editor was publised in both the Washington Post and Leesburg Today. He quotes me from a September board meeting as saying:

“I have no confidence that this measure will put a single new brick in a Loudoun County school. . . . I just want to make it clear that I think this meals tax will not have any impact in Loudoun County Public Schools.”

These are my words, mostly accurately quoted by Mr. Graham and in a Leesburg Today article titled School Board Tentatively Supports Meals Tax, (a few key words are left out but nothing to argue over) and I stand by them. The article also quotes other school board members as well, so if you think School Board opinions about this issue are important, as Mr. Graham does, be sure to read the others, as well as a letter to the editor by Warren Geurin, my colleague from the Sterling District.

Folks who read the Leesburg Today article didn't have the benefit of my full remarks, which I have transcribed below from the recorded webcast (discussion begins at about the 1:45 mark).

First I asked whether the new tax would change the debt cap (the limit the Supervisors have set for borrowing money to purchase land and build new facilities, currently $200M per year). It would not. Second, I clarified that our fund balance from FY2008 was $17M. I then said:

Our fund balance this past year, the amount that we came in under budget this past year, for FY08, is greater than the anticipated revenue, if I'm reading this correctly, of this meals tax. And I don't hear any Supervisors talking about how since we've got a fund balance of $17 million that we're going to get to build more schools or they're going to raise their debt cap. I want to cooperate with the Board of Supervisors. Frankly their hands are tied by state legislation which fails to realize that the property tax system is about a hundred years old and needs to be scrapped. But I have no confidence that any of this money will put a single new brick in a Loudoun County Public School. I'll support this because the Supervisors have shown a little bit of movement towards being more supportive of, or at least more communicative with our Board. But I just want to make it clear that I think that this meals tax will not have any actual impact on the construction of Loudoun County Public Schools.

My criticism is not of the meals tax itself, which is a tiny step in the right direction towards diversification of our tax base and relief from property tax burdens. It is a criticism of the Board of Supervisors, who I am confident will offset gains in the school construction budget from this meals tax with cuts from existing revenue sources, resulting in a benefit to Loudoun taxpayers but not to the education that their children receive.

I support the meals tax referendum. I voted for the School Board's endorsement of it and I will vote for it myself on November 4th.

School Board 9/23/08 Meeting

Tomorrow night's meting should be fairly short on the public side. The agenda and complete board book are online, here is an abbreviated agenda:

1. Public comments in the FY10 Operating Budget. This is an official opportunity for the public to comment on the School's upcoming budget process, to provide proactive instead of reactive input. If past is prologue then most citizens will wait until March to express their feelings about the school budget, and they'll go to the Board of Supervisors instead of the School Board to do it.
2. Public Hearing for Tuscarora High School Attendance Boundary. Again, this is a chance for the public to comment on a major planning decision.
3. Recognition of Mr. Eric Turrill, PE teacher at Round Hill Elementary, who is the 2008 Virginia Elementary Physical Education Teacher of the Year. Ms. Jeri Lloyd, who teachers FLE at Dominion HS and Potomac Falls HS was named the 2008 College/University Health Educator of the Year for her work in the Piedmont Virginia Community College Deparmtnet of Nursing.
   
4. Recognition of Ms. Donna Celio of Stone Bridge High School, named Virginia Association of Marketing Educators 2007-08 Marketing Teacher of the Year.
5. The Board will receive a report on new hires, look for questions about minority hiring.
   
6. The Board will receive an enrollment update, the second since the school year began. September 30th marks the year's official enrollment number.
   
7. The Board will receive a report on the 2008 School Census, which will give both LCPS and the County government lots of new information to use in future planning.
   

After receiving these reports, the Board will go into a closed meeting to discuss confidential matters.

Four-Day School Week

Many school districts (and other government agencies) across the country are changing their schedules to a four-day work week to save on transporation, heating & cooling and other expenses. Last week at member Tom Reed's request, the Loudoun School Board agreed to consider the potential impacts of a four-day week on Loudoun Schools. See the Washington Post: Schools Consider Four-Day Week.

Most districts that have adopted a four-day week seem to be rural, which makes transportation costs a much larger share of their budgets and therefore have great savings when they cut their routes by 20%.

This is under discussion only because of potential budget constraints, and would only be adopted if it seemed to focus more resources on the classroom. Let your representative know how you feel.

2009-2010 School Calendar

The Loudoun County School Board is considering the calendar year for the next school year. We need public comment. A parent last year made a suggestion to me by email about this year's calendar that we adopted, your input really does matter.

See the LCPS website for the staff-proposed 2009-2010 calendar. Notice that the final day of school isn't until June 23rd! This is because labor day doesn't come until September 7th and we are required by state law to start school after labor day.

See my previous posts on this subject Back to School Before Labor Day?

Consider the following:

• The later school starts and ends, the less time students have to learn before taking the SOLs, and the more time they have in the classroom after taking them.
• We can shorten the calendar by reducing the number of 3-day weekends, generally around federal holidays.
• We can shorten the calendar by having longer school days, but this places a greater burden on teachers and younger students.
• We can add an additional half-day before Christmas and Thanksgiving, they count as full days on the calendar but are of little educational value.

Write to your representative on the school board, give us your ideas.

VA Supreme Court Releases Ruling

Here it is.

Friday Mishmash

I don't have a big theme today, just a series of items that might not otherwise get their own post, for whatever reason. I might make this a standard practice on Fridays, just a list of miscellaneous things that have crossed my desk and my inbox in the previous week.

• There's a picnic this Sunday September 14th sponsored by the Arc of Loudoun (LARC), PACE (Parents for Autistic Children's Education) and LoCo Autism network. I'll be there for some of it, if you'd like more info send me an email and I'll forward the info to you.
• The Joint Committee of the School Board and Board of Supervisors met again today and received a great presentation by Northern Virginia Community College. Over the summer the Joint Committee passed a resolution urging both boards to build to a LEED Silver standard of environmental quality, this went virtually unnoticed but hopefully will get much attention when and if the full Boards pass it as well.
  
• The School Board is spending the next several weeks putting together its legislative packet, a collection of changes to state law that the Board's lobbyist will advocate for and against during the 2009 Legislative Session. The next meeting on the subject will be on October 9th at 6pm, members of the public are welcome to submit their ideas on changes in the law.
  
• The Department of Education is seeking public comment on the revisions to the Regulations Governing Educational Services for Gifted Students. The proposed changes to the regulations are indicated with underlines for additions and strikethroughs for deletions. Public comment will be taken until September 26, 2008. Comments can be submitted through the Town Hall website, at public hearings or via e-mail, fax, or mail. The nearest public hearing location to us is Monday, September 22, 2008 from 7:00PM-9:00PM at Marshall High School, Fairfax County
• I haven't used my voice-blogging feature all summer, or Twitter either for that matter. I'll look for some reasons to use them this month.
  
• The School Board will soon go paperless using software called BoardDocs. I hope this will lead to many more online documents accessible to the public.
• The School Board has scheduled a followup to its May goal-setting session for October 6. This is a public meeting.
• The Piedmont Community Foundation is beginning another year of the Student Philanthropy Project with LCPS. Two students can attend from each high school. Registration is open for students who are interested and who are a good match to the criteria for success. LCPS students are doing well in the project and are becoming accomplished young grant-makers, having granted $9,800 to youth projects in the last two years.
  

Lambert & Van Metre Properties

Continuing with this week's Lenah land acquisition theme, I move to discussion of two sites recently offered as possible alternatives to the Lenah property for a high school and middle school in the South Riding area. Last night the Planning Commission heard public comment on the LCPS application for a special exception for the Lenah site. I couldn't attend but I'll get briefings this morning on what was said. While I'm sure most speakers focused on the application and on the land in question, I'm also sure there were echoes in the room of two other properties which have been the subject of much discussion over the past two weeks.

First the Lambert property, which was offered to the County by way of a letter from the owner to Supervisor Stevens Miller. This is a very sensitive issue and so I'm going to offer no commentary on it at this time, but I want to be sure that folks have access to good public information so I'm offering a few documents and links for your review here:

• The Washington Post's Erica Garman has done a fair job of reporting on the Lenah question in her Living in LoCo blog. She wrote LCPS, BOS, Weigh in on Lenah Run a month ago, and followed up two weeks later with More Lenah Run Questions Answered. Last week she beat everyone to the story with her post on the the Lambert property called Will Miller’s New Deal Trump Lenah School Site? The LCPS Public Information Office provided Erica with an extensive written response to questions prior to that post, I thought you should be able to read the full text of the response: Living in LoCo Q&A on the Lambert property (PDF, 79K)
  
• A couple of days later with the assistance of engineering reports, LCPS produced a preliminary analysis and presented it to the Board of Supervisors in a closed meeting that I attended. The document is a matter of public record now and you'll need it to be well informed Lambert Preliminary Analysis (PDF, 185K).

Even more recently there has been discussion of a third potential site, currently zoned for commercial development and owned by the Van Metre company. I have less information about this site. On Monday September 8th there was a community meeting regarding the property, LCPS Planning representatives attended and the members of the School Board who represent constituents in this attendance zone sent a letter for distribution to the attendees. That letter is here for your review (PDF, 54K).

I'm a firm believer that the more information we all have, the easier it is for us to have a rational discussion. The world sorely needs more rational discussions.

Lenah Links

I love this era of emerging government transparency. This blog is one of my contributions to it. Among the great things you can find online now are the many documents that the people you elect to represent you use to make decisions.

Tonight the Loudoun County Planning Commission hears from the public on a special exception request on a property in Lenah Run south of Route 50. The request is to build a High School and a Middle School on the property. Later they will decide whether to recommend the exception to the Board of Supervisors, who have the final say in the matter.

Here are links to some of the documents they will review.The LCPS planning department puts a lot of documents online, among them questions asked by citizens and answers to those questions, presentations made to nearby communities, maps, permits and analysis. Look for the heading "MS-5/HS-7 - Dulles South Project" for items relevant to the Lenah application.

To view everything, use this link to get to the Planning Commission's public hearing documents. You'll need to navigate to the folder for the September 10, 2008 hearing documents.

Those of you looking for the meat can skip right to the staff report (PDF, 1MB). It's 33 pages, if you aren't interested in combing through it, here's the gist (from Page 8, Conclusions):

The proposed Special Exception and Commission Permit for Middle School and High
School use and associated accessory uses are consistent with the existing
landuse policies of the Revised General Plan (RGP) for the subject
area(Transition Policy Area). Subject to the prescribed development conditions,
theproposed special exception applications will be in accordance the RGP. [sic]

There's a nice full-color plan on page 15 showing the proposed layout of the two schools (the Middle School would be Loudoun's first with two stories). On Page 16 begins the "Summary of Outstanding Issues." They are, in their entirety:

• Additional turn lanes on Route 50 and Lenah Road
• Transportation improvements on Braddock Road
• Additional road improvements requested by VDOT (see Attachment 1 Page 47)

My hope is that these issues will be resolved and that the staff and commissioners will be able to recommend the special exception to the Board of Supervisors. With approval, LCPS will begin building these schools as soon as possible.

Lenah Form Letters, Part 2

Yesterday I posted about a form letter circulating over the weekend regarding the Lenah property, and School Board Chairman Robert DuPree's response.

First, the form letter:

Dear Vice Chair Stevens,

Thank you for working to ensure that Loudoun County Public Schools remain among the best in the nation.

I am concerned that the current system for new school site selection is flawed, leading to overpriced, poorly sited locations that don't meet the goals of the Comprehensive Plan for neighborhood schools. It doesn't make sense for Loudoun taxpayers to continue footing an unnecessarily high bill for these new schools, and for our kids to keep suffering boundary changes. With so many new schools needing to be built, I urge you to closely examine the process and find ways to reform the process.

Sincerely,

And now my response:

Thank you for your letter of concern regarding the school site selection process. Together with my colleagues it is my responsibility to ensure that LCPS conducts all of its operations with utmost efficiency while ensuring the best education possible for the children of Loudoun County given the resources available. The school site selection process is an important part of that responsibility and occupies a considerable amount of the time that we spend representing our community and neighbors.

The best opportunities for improvement in the land acquisition process involve improved cooperation with the Board of Supervisors. According to a recent year-long efficiency review of LCPS conducted by outside experts, the single largest opportunity for savings involves changes to the County's process for approving school properties. We are working diligently with our counterparts on that board to implement those changes.

Many school sites in the past have been proffered by developers. As fewer planned developments are approved, purchase of land becomes more frequent. The site selection process operates inside a staggeringly complex arena of government regulations (Federal, State and Local), zoning considerations, fiscal constraints and the free market. Few available parcels are large enough, fewer still have willing sellers and only a small subset of these meet the geological, topographical, location, and transportation requirements to support a school for the next 75 years.

To navigate these intricate and often conflicting obstacles LCPS has hired a staff of truly exceptional planning professionals who operate under the guidance of the School Board and in close cooperation with the Loudoun County Government planning staff. This team has managed the astonishing growth that Loudoun has experienced over the past 15 years without increasing class sizes by consistently delivering new schools on time, under budget, with the highest quality and lower cost than any school district in the state of Virginia. (As a bonus each school is built with even more energy efficiency than the ones before it!)

As a parent subject to the boundary process that accompanies the opening of a new school, I know it is often very difficult for families, and so even though the current LCPS practices have done well over time it is subject to continuous review and adjustment by the School Board.

It would be wonderful if we could name our own price for a parcel of land once identified, and I know that we would be fair to the landowners in doing so. Unfortunately we must negotiate for a mutually agreeable price. These negotiations are based on a number of factors, chief among them are professional appraisals provided by the most experienced appraisers in the area and under contract to LCPS. This is an important independent check on our internal processes and verification of the true market value of a property. At the Board's direction LCPS has terminated negotiations or initiated condemnation proceedings with a number of landowners just in my short time as a member because their asking price was above and beyond the appraised value of the land.

There is a tremendous amount of conflicting information regarding two recently contracted properties, commonly referred to as the Lenah and Rouse parcels. I have done my best to contribute unvarnished information about these to all of my neighbors in Loudoun through my blog, Our Loudoun Schools (at www.LoudounSchools.org), because this is your government and its dealings and the decisions of your representatives should be transparent to you. If there is additional information that I can share, particular questions that I can answer or specific opportunities for improvement that you can provide then I hope you will call or write to me again.

Until I hear from you again or we see each other in person, I again thank you for taking the time to write and for your interest and concern.

~John

Tomorrow I'll provide links where you can find original data on the Lenah property.

Lenah Form Letters, Part 1

Over the weekend School Board Chairman Robert DuPree & I received a form letter from about 20 people regarding the purchase of some land in South Riding for a new High School and Middle School. According to one correspondent, the information came from the organization Campaign for Loudoun's Future. The letter went like this, few writers added any of their own words to it:

Dear Vice Chair Stevens,

Thank you for working to ensure that Loudoun County Public Schools remain among the best in the nation. I am concerned that the current system for new school site selection is flawed, leading to overpriced, poorly sited locations that don't meet the goals of the Comprehensive Plan for neighborhood schools.

It doesn't make sense for Loudoun taxpayers to continue footing an unnecessarily high bill for these new schools, and for our kids to keep suffering boundary changes. With so many new schools needing to be built, I urge you to closely examine the process and find ways to reform the process.

Sincerely,

I treat each of these letters as the heartfelt position of an individual, even if the words are not individualized. Nonetheless my response to the same letter over and over again is the same. With so many people interested I thought I'd save others the time by placing it here. First though, I'd like to share with you Mr. DuPree's response (with his permission).

Thank you for your email voicing some concerns about school site acquisition policies and processes. I also appreciate the kind words regarding our work to make Loudoun County Public Schools among the finest in the nation. Inasmuch as I received virtually identical emails from some other individuals who live in various places, I thought I would respond to all of you and provide you with some factual information you might not have been made aware of.

On the matter of long-term reform for the future, you will be pleased to know that I am to begin meeting soon with Supervisors Burton and Buckley to brainstorm on
whether and what changes might be warranted to the current process. Loudoun County Public Schools does have some definite ideas about improving the process so that the school system can keep up with the growth of enrollment caused by factors that are completely beyond our control (the economy, job growth in the area, previous land use decisions by the Board of Supervisors and the demographics of our population which has caused our birth rate to far exceed the national and state averages). Indeed, a recent outside audit of our school system concluded that the most important thing that could be done to improve school operating efficiency and achieve savings would be for the Board of Supervisors to reform the land acquisition and approval process in order to allow the School Board to move forward with greater speed and certainty on school sites. I look forward to discussing these matters with the Supervisors.

Please know that under the current policies and plans established by the Board of Supervisors, that Board determines the school system’s budgets for land acquisition, school construction and overall school operations. The Board of Supervisors also establishes the county’s land use plans and policies. So they already have established the parameters for our decision-making in school site selection and, as such, the School Board is seeking to build a middle school and high school at the Lenah site in Dulles South within the above constraints already set by the Board of Supervisors.
With this in mind, you should know that the land we are purchasing for these schools is 20% BELOW the budgets which were previously approved by the Board of Supervisors and by the voters. So we are clearly in conformance with the budgets already set by the Supervisors and approved by the voters.

With regard to location under the county’s plans, according to the official report of the Loudoun County Government professional staff (not the school staff), which is charged with advising the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission on whether an application meets the requirements of the county’s plans, the county staff has concluded that "the proposed Special Exception and Commission Permit for Middle School and High School use and associated accessory uses are consistent with the existing land use policies of the Revised General Plan for the Subject area (Transition Policy Area)." Indeed, the county staff correctly notes that the Revised General plan
for the Transition Policy Area does call for public schools in the Transition Policy area. Finally, the staff report states that, "as the proposed middle school and high school are centrally located to serve existing and future students residing within the Transition, Rural, and Suburban Policy, staff finds the location of the proposed schools is in conformance with Plan policies."

County staff has also concluded that the application is in accordance with the Revised 1993 Zoning Ordinance. Indeed, nearly every single issue or concern that was raised over the past year by the various county referral agencies has been resolved according to the staff report. There are only a few outstanding transportation issues that are still under discussion, and we look forward to addressing them with the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors. Keeping in mind these few remaining issues, the staff report indicates that county staff "finds that the proposed Middle School and High School, as designated facilities with the School Board CIP, are in substantial accord with the Comprehensive Plan, and therefore (staff) supports the approval of (a) Commission Permit for the proposed public facilities."

Thanks for writing, and I hope these facts are helpful to you.

Robert

Robert DuPree
Chairman & Dulles District
Representative
Loudoun County School Board

Tomorrow I'll post my own response to these letters, and on Wednesday I'll post a links to online information from LCPS and the County that you may find useful. On Wednesday evening the Planning Commission holds its first public hearing on matter.

LCPS Evaluation By Testing Part 3: Graduation Rates

Within the past two years, the issue of graduation rates as a metric for evaluating school districts has become a prominent issue. It's a matter of some dispute as to how to calculate graduation rates accurately as a matter of fact. Loudoun County boasts a grad rate of 93%, but it's tough to know what that means without context.

I found a tool that helps to put the whole thing in perspective, EdWeek.org's Graduation Rates Map. Have a look, and see that there are four states in the US that have graduation rates from 50-60%. Three of them (AL, MS, GA) are in the southeast. That's tough for me to visualize. That's what anti-tax fervor will do for you. Other things I see:

• No state in the sunbelt rises above 70%.
  
• Not a single state has a graduation rate above 90%.

Zoom into Virginia and it color-codes every of the 134 school districts. By my count:

• Eight (including Loudoun and Clarke) are above 90%
• Five are below 50%

One final note, according to this map Loudoun County is the only district in the Washington metro region with a graduation rate over 90%.

Update: I poked around the site a little more and found the following statistical report specifically about Loudoun schools graduation rates, which has more details on the methodology for the calculations. The best part is on page 3, where it shows the 10-year trends. In that time Loudoun has increased from 85.5% graduation rate to 92.9%. In that time the Virginia average held steady and the national average improved from 66.4% to 70.6%.

LCPS Evaluation By Testing Part 2: SAT & ACT Scores

I don't have as much to write today because I don't know as much about SAT & ACT testing, preparation & scoring as I do about SOLs, AYP & No Child Left Behind (not that I'm an expert in those either). Obviously though, while is the the job of public schools to prepare students well in every grade, ultimately the finished product is the high school graduate. SAT & ACT testing measures high school students on a nationally standardized scale, generally in preparation for college entry.

The Loudoun Times Mirror reported statistics from each within the past couple of weeks. These aren't stories, they're just recitations of numbers (Loudoun SAT Scores Rise, Loudoun, VA Score Well on ACTs) Leesburg Today did a much better job (Loudoun Reaches AYP for First Time) by combining SAT scores with SOL scores in one story and providing context, quotes and a little analysis.

More data is available on the LCPS website: 2008 LCPS SAT Scores Rise 15 Points

LCPS Evaluation By Testing Part 1: SOLs/AYP/NCLB

This morning marks the Superintendent's annual "State of Education" speech before the Chamber of Commerce. It might be interesting to your kids this week to know that while they receive their grades from school at the end of the year, schools get their grades at the beginning of each school year, based on results that pour in throughout the summer.

For the rest of this week I'll take a look a different yardstick each day and how LCPS measures against it. As I have said many times in the past and you can read about in a million places on the web, the emphasis on testing and metrics has led to a lot of problems in modern public education (teaching to the test, reduction in critical thinking skills, test stress on young kids). Nevertheless there are some benefits to these many tests and other metrics.

Primarily, there needs to be something relatively objective by which to tell whether the folks we hire to educate our kids are doing the job well. Metrics also enable comparisons between districts, which you'll see most starkly on Friday when I look at graduation rates. Particularly with the implementation of No Child Left Behind, metrics can differentiate between how well a schools serves different types of students and identify points of weakness within an otherwise strong system, so that a strong system can't neglect a few kids by letting those at the top pull the average up. And while I wouldn't make any final judgements based on any one metric in any one year, the collection of them over time does help to paint a picture.

Today I'll start with the big prize: results of the testing mandated by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation. You can get the raw data from the Virginia Department of Education's Virginia School Report Card website. Their file is Excel, 1MB. I have isolated the Loudoun data for your convenience (XLS 200k, PDF 22K).

Get the highlights from the newspapers, Leesburg Today has a story on it, and the Washington Post did a brief rundown as well. Read the LCPS take here.

There is a tremendous amount of technical definition behind this information, and it's not safe to interpret the data without it. It's tempting for me to write about the details, but that would take a long time and there are plenty of other places to read about it. Here's a place to start: Adequate Yearly Process (AYP). When looking at AYP, you can only compare schools and districts within a given state, because each state sets different standards. Virginia's standards are particularly tough:

• Within Virginia, only 41% of school districts made AYP this year, Loudoun was one of them.
• Across the state, 26% of individual schools did not make AYP, within Loudoun it was 4.3% (3 of 70). All three from LCPS were middle schools, a level at which Loudoun seems to have the biggest challenge meeting AYP.

Not until a school fails AYP in consecutive years in the same academic areas is there true cause for concern. Of the three schools that did not make AYP this year, two have failed AYP for the third consecutive year: Sterling Middle (LCPS, Post, GreatSchools) & Simpson Middle (LCPS, Post, GreatSchools). A closer look at the data shows that of 29 AYP elements Simpson Middle passed 28, Sterling middle passed 26... neither were far from a perfect score. In case you were wondering, Sterling Middle School has a new principal this year and Simpson Middle School's principal took over in 2007.

The School Board will receive a full report with more detailed data later this month, look for it on an upcoming agenda. The Curriculum & Instruction committee will no doubt dedicate a meeting to an even more detailed review and consulation with principals as it has in years past.

As I said in the beginning, this is just one indication of school performance and should be viewed with care and together with many other factors, the most important of which is the satisfaction of concerned and involved parents. If you have questions or concerns about your child's school, you should speak to the principal. Of course I and the rest of the School Board are always available to answer your questions as best we can as well.

What the Community Asks of You

Good morning, and welcome back to school!

Early in August, when the LCPS administrators gathered to kick off the year, I was asked to speak to them on behalf of the School Board. I spoke to principals, supervisors and directors, the Superintendent and the Assistant Superintendents. I spoke on behalf of the community, so to kick off this new school year I'm sharing with you what I said.

On the Board and here today, I represent the community. My purpose this morning is to look towards the 2008-2009 school year and share the challenge the we the community give to you and our confidence that you will rise to that challenge.

We the community expect that in this year as in every year you will exceed the high standards you have set in years past. Safer buses and classrooms. Healthier meals and environments. More effective communication. More advanced teaching methods. More critical thinking skills. And yes, though it pains me to say it, higher test scores.

We look to you this year, as we do every year, to make children at every age more educated than their predecessors, to make them a generation that will compete globally and confront global challenges.

But of course we will ask more of you than that.

We will ask you to reduce our impact on a fragile global environment so that the very students you teach, transport, house, counsel and feed every day will have a clean world with sufficient natural resources in which to raise their own children someday.

We will send you students who can more quickly cite their email address than their home address, students whose only contact with paper will be in your classrooms and libraries, and we ask that you understand their digital outlook and incorporate their digital culture into your own work.

We need you to challenge our most gifted students, whatever those gifts are they need to reach their full potential; and we need you to work together with parents and professionals to help those kids who need special education to reach their own full potential.

We will also send you students torn apart by their parents’ divorce, children whose day among attentive adults starts and ends with their bus driver, and we ask that you look into their eyes and recognize that they need more than just instruction today.

We will send you students who are more likely to find abuse than a meal when they get home, we ask that you recognize them and get them to people who will protect them and feed them.

Our community will send you students who will turn from school colors to gang colors this year, and ask that you rescue us from a lifetime of paying for law enforcement, ambulances and incarceration by rescuing them from the call of the streets.

We will call upon you when our children suffer the death of a classmate, or a teacher, or a parent. And we promise to be there for you when your own lives are hit by the loss of a colleague, a spouse or a child.

For we don't just send our children into these classrooms; we send our hopes and desires for what the future of our nation will be.

With every new graduating class, we the hope to finally overcome our nation's problems of ignorance, poverty, bigotry, crime, substance abuse and personal debt.

And finally we ask that you tell us what you need, because you are part of our community too.

Above all, we the community count on you as administrators to concentrate on the big picture and prepare Loudoun County Public Schools for what lies ahead.

We are fascinated by you and the work that you do. You are going to help little kids who are just learning to read, and some kids bigger than Dr. Hatrick launch themselves into the world.

Your leadership will get our children safely between home and school every day.

You will help teachers to reach the toughest kids and help them to recognize that the world goes endlessly in every direction… not just in latitude and longitude but in altitude and time.

I know that you will give our kids the tools to achieve their dreams in this year’s athletic championships, academic competitions, and astounding musical performances.

On some days you will show them that they can be more brilliant than they ever imagined, and on some days that victory is just making it to the end of the day with a little hope intact.

In the end, our hope is that you will help us to compensate for our own shortcomings as a society.

And if there were any doubt about your ability, it will be put to rest by a letter that the Board received in June.

My daughter (a 2008 graduate) is the youngest of my 4 children and everyone was graduated from Park View High School. The Rolling Ridge School, Sterling Middle School and Park View High School will be in our hearts and our memories always. My children left part of their life in every class room and took with them the best from every teacher who gave them warm and kind moments, lecturing and giving them all advice for them to be the best with their lives. Please let everyone know that my Husband and I, we are very thank full for everyone. God bless all and our best wishes to everyone on the new year.