The chair of the Advisory Committee on Students with Disabilities told the Fairfax County School Board on Saturday that the committee had a “transition year” and recommended steps to narrow gaps between division strategic plans and students’ day-to-day experiences.

The committee chair, identified in the meeting as Committee Chair, Advisory Committee on Students with Disabilities, said the group had changed its process this year to highlight public testimony and added three student members. “We had dozens of people show up and we spent a good, what was it, hour and a half, 2 hours listening to people who had joined us either in person, in writing, or by video,” the chair said.

Why it matters: Committee members said they routinely encounter limits in the division’s available data that block their ability to show how policies affect students with disabilities in real time. The committee recommended an annual charge to study how data is collected and used for students with disabilities and asked the board to call the committee into projects that affect that student group specifically.

Committee recommendations emphasized three areas: better data collection and timing so the committee can run iterative queries before a report deadline; enhanced access and inclusion (including expansion of inclusive pre-K and ESOL in Title I pre-K settings); and increased attention to social, emotional and clinical supports using weighted staffing formulas to compare student-to-staff ratios.

During question-and-answer, members of the school board and staff discussed how privacy and currently uncollected fields limit the committee’s ability to drill down on items such as exemptions from literacy screeners and IEP timelines that can steer elective access for students. Dr. Reed, who spoke as the division superintendent during the session, described current cross‑office efforts to refine identification processes for multilingual learners and to be “a little bit tighter in making sure that schools not only understand the practices, but understand the data points when evaluating multilingual learners prior to identification for special services.”

Committee members also urged the board to use the advisory group as a communications arm for special education initiatives. “I am not personally aware of any way the ACSD has been leveraged to assist with that dissemination of community information, but I believe there's a lot of opportunity there,” the committee chair said, referencing the special education improvement plan and the AIR report.

Speakers who asked questions or commented during the discussion included Board Member McDaniel, Board Member Dixit and Board Member Moon. Staff member Mike Bloom was repeatedly acknowledged by the committee chair for his logistical support.

The committee will return with more detailed clarifying requests about the AIR recommendations and about how exemption data and concussion baseline testing vendors can be made accessible. The chair closed by asking for the board’s attention to the committee’s annual charge recommendation to examine data collection and use for students with disabilities.

Looking ahead: The committee said it will continue monthly public comment and repeat the town‑hall style meeting that produced the large public turnout this year — both actions the chair called essential to “amplify the voice of the public and be able to reflect those priorities.”