Prince William school board states their priorities for 2016

Update

We received clarification on the legislative priorities listed on the Prince William school board website from Associate Superintendent Keith Imon:

The School Board has not yet approved the School Division’s Legislative Priorities for next year. Instead, the Board simply agreed to send the items in your article and on the School Board’s June 3 agenda to the VSBA for their consideration to include them in the VSBA’s legislative agenda. This is the time of the year that the VSBA seeks input from all of Virginia’s local school boards. The PWC School Board will begin the work to finalize the School Division’s Legislative Priorities in September and typically adopts them around October. Of course, the items submitted to the VSBA for its consideration will be part of the School Division’s recommendation to the School Board as part of that process, but in all likelihood there will be other recommendations as well.

The PWCS webpage has a link to our Legislative information and the adopted list of the 2015 priorities are there. Once the Board adopts next year’s we will post the 2016 list to that same location.

Original post

The Prince William school board has set their legislative priorities for the next year.

The Virginia School Board Association (VSBA) presented their own legislative priorities for 2016 to the Prince William school board at their last meeting, asking for their input.

According to the Prince William school board’s site, school staff from the Superintendent’s office outlined their priorities. Potomac Local has reached out to obtain their drafted copy.

Here’s the list of what the VSBA thinks is important this year:

That the state eliminate the local school division budgetary match currently required to receive Virginia Preschool Initiative (VIP) funding to allow school divisions to expand preschool opportunities without negatively impacting funding for other programs and services.

That the state define comparable verified units for students transferring to Virginia school divisions from other states for graduation purposes.

That the state provide school divisions with flexibility on the requirement for 140 seat-hours to allow for greater opportunities for virtual and dual enrollment courses.

That the state provide local school boards with the option of allowing at-home, digital e-learning (or offline assignments when home technology and/or connections to the Internet is not available) to count for required days/minutes of instruction when students are home doe to unexpected school closures (e.g., inclement weather, natural disaster, facility problems).

That the state allow school divisions to use the WIDA (World-Class Instructional Design and Assessment) ACCESS (Assessing Comprehension and Communication in English State-to-State for English Language Learners) score of 5.0-6.0 on the Tier C test for English Language Learner (ELL) students as an alternative for fulfilling Virginia’s requirement for a verified credit in the English Reading End of Course (EOC) Standards of Learning (SOL) test by substituting the WIDA ACCESS for ELLs assessment.