Kaine Promotes JOBS Act at Academies of Loudoun

BY ALEXIS GUSTIN agustin@loudounnow.com

U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) along with Acting Superintendent Daniel Smith, Loudoun School Board Chair Ian Serotkin (Blue Ridge) and Vice Chair Harris Mahedavi toured the Academies of Loudoun on Tuesday, just one of Kaine’s many stops over the past few years as he visits Career and Technical Education programs across Virginia.

Kaine, who co-chairs the Senate CTE Caucus, is visiting programs to promote the bipartisan Jumpstarting Our Businesses by Supporting Students (JOBS) Act.

The JOBS Act would allow students to use federal Pell Grants for job training programs that are at least eight weeks long and lead to recognized credentials or certificates for the first time.

Under current law, Pell Grants may only be applied toward programs that are over 600 hours or at least 15 weeks long, according to a press release.

He said the JOBS Act will help people understand that CTE is every bit as important as college and help parents guide their children into a career they want to be in and have the funding available to help pay for it.

He used the example of the Data Center Technician Program offered at North-

Single-user bathrooms

continued from page 12 tell if someone or multiple people are in a single-user bathroom. He said the technology doesn’t show personal information, just heat blobs to indicate a person or people are inside.

Asked about where they were in choosing a vendor for the pilot, Lewis said that was not yet decided.

He said based on feedback from a principal advisory group created in 2021 some of the main concerns with single-user bathrooms revolve around student safety, behavior, privacy and supervision.

Lewis said the high school pilot programs for restrooms and locker rooms will be up and running this fall at the schools. Student feedback groups will be created at each of the pilot schools to give suggestions on what is and isn’t working as well as feedback from other advisory committees, according to Lewis.

Under direction provided by the School Board in 2021, he said all renovation projects on school bathrooms must be completed by August 2026.

Schools under construction, like Wat- ern Virginia Community College and said it’s currently spread over the course of 15 weeks, the length of a college semester so a student can take it and use a Pell Grant to help pay for it. He said the ideal length for it is really six to eight weeks, but students can’t get financial aid in the form of a Pell Grant for a course that short.

“So they have to take a course that is most efficiently offered in a super intense short time and spread it out,” he said.

Kaine toured the 315,000-squarefoot Academies campus, the largest high school building built by the school division, learned about various programs offered at the school like the Academy of Engineering and the Monroe Advanced Technical Academy, and visited several specialized spaces and talked with students.

Kaine noted he started the Governor’s Technical and Career Academy when he was governor of Virginia. The Monroe Advanced Technical Academy is one such academy.

He said he started it because he noticed all the governor’s schools were focused on advanced college prep and none were focused on CTE. He said that started a model for several more throughout the years.

Academies Principal Tinell Priddy said there are 26 pathways for students through the MATA program. She said son Mountain Middle School and ES-32, are being built with single-user bathrooms for students and staff, as well as private changing spaces in locker rooms and a designated wellness room.

Tiffany Polifko (Broad Run) said she was concerned that students uncomfortable sharing bathrooms with male students were being told they should use the single-user spaces.

“We aren’t addressing the fact that we have females in our schools who are experiencing males coming into their bathrooms and they are being told when they bring this concern up that they can use a single-use restroom, effectively leave their own designated space to go use a different restroom or seek out counseling. And I think that is something that we need to address,” she said.

During the previous School Board meeting, a parent spoke on behalf of some female students who had said they were uncomfortable using the same bathroom as “male students” and were told, according to the parent, to use a single user bathroom and to talk to a counselor.

“We are kind of reinventing the wheel for what bathrooms might look like, but we’re far from the first one to consider this problem so I feel like there has got to be a because students are at the Academies 50 percent of the time, they can go more in-depth, which means they can graduate with more licenses and certifications.

“With our Cisco pathways for example, which is dual enrolled with Northern Virginia Community College, students are with us every other day for one year. They will get 22 college credits at NVCC and will leave here with multiple Cisco certifications ready to go into the Northern Virginia tech workforce,” Priddy said.

Priddy also noted there are seven health science pathways at the Academies in which most are dual enrolled with NVCC. She said the Academies is the only high school that offers radiology in Virginia.

Priddy said this is the first time in the division’s history that every single pathway the Academies offers is filled.

“We definitely did something really unique here. We have three different curricular programs, a little bit like a college or a university, but at the end of the day we’ve created a community that has some great connections,” Priddy said before taking the group on the tour.

Kaine talked about his father, an engineer who wanted to be his own boss, so he opened an iron working and welding shop in the Kansas City, MO area where Kaine and his brothers worked. n model out there somewhere that we can look at,” Chair Ian Serotkin (Blue Ridge) said. “Are there school districts that are significantly further along with this that you’ve looked at beyond the one or two examples you gave and if so, can we do what they did or at least use that as a starting point?”

Lewis said the staff has been doing that, including looking at nearby schools and speaking with architects who have created plans and would continue to do so.

“Our architects are telling us that we are actually ahead of most if not all those folks,” Lewis said.

Polifko asked what the division’s plan was going to be once the state’s 2022 model policies, that would replace the 2021 policies, come out of review.

Division counsel Robert Falconi said the VDOE was still reviewing comments from the public review period last summer.

“It’s possible they may revise the model policies or issue them exactly as they are. We don’t really know the answer to that so I think we would need take a wait and see approach before we do anything with the new model polices,” he said.

The 2022 model policies state single-user bathrooms and facilities should

“I saw that ironworkers were true artisans, but then going to a high school with no career and technical offering where it was all ‘college is the only thing you should do.’ I was living in one reality in the family business and living in a different reality in high school where career and technical education were devalued,” Kaine said.

Kaine said it was his first time visiting the Academies campus since it opened.

“The quality of it sends a message to teachers and students that what you are doing is important,” he said. n be available and accessible for all students.

The division adopted Policy 8040 Aug. 11, 2021, to be in compliance with the model policies that centered around rights of transgender and gender expansive students. Under the policy, students are entitled to have access to restrooms and locker rooms that are “sanitary, safe and adequate” and that corresponds to their “consistently asserted gender identity.”

In 2021, just after Policy 8040 was implemented, the division spent $427,000 on the first round of renovations to convert spaces to single-user bathrooms. In all during that time, six high school, four middle school and two elementary school restrooms were converted to include new signs, shower curtains, door hardware and hygiene product dispensers, according to a presentation.

The policy and subsequent regulation also state the division should create single-user restrooms available to all students in a ratio that is appropriate for the school’s enrollment and can be accessed by anyone without special codes or keys.

The School Board’s proposed construction plan in 2023 allotted $10.9 million for restroom renovations. n

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