001Good evening everyone. I'm calling the meeting to order at 6 30 p.m. We are very excited to be welcoming many folks to our meeting today. Our regularly scheduled January 15th meeting of the San Carlos School District Board of Education. I will note that trustee Sarah Casanego is absent and please note everyone that a recording is being made at the direction of the board and the recording may capture images and sounds of those attending the meeting. So first we need to approve our agenda. Board members or Dr. Francis are there any changes? I'll move to approve the agenda. Thank you. All in favor? Okay and then before we proceed I'd like to review a few guidelines to help the meeting run smoothly. During tonight's meeting there will be time for the public to comment on matters
002both on the agenda during each agenda item as well as not on the agenda towards the end of the meeting. Please wait to speak at the appropriate times. We also ask that if you are raising concerns or any information about students please refrain from sharing any information that may expose a student's identity. This is a public recorded meeting and we are obligated to maintain student privacy. If you'd like to address the board here in person we ask that you fill out a blue card which are over on that table and if you are online please use the raise hand feature. According to our board bylaw 9323 each speaker will have three minutes to address the board unless changed by the board. We appreciate and support stakeholder input at our meeting and have established these guidelines
003to make sure members of public have a chance to express their thoughts and opinions and the board can conduct its business effectively and efficiently. And now we will turn to our spotlight on excellence featuring Tierra Linda Middle School and all these amazing timber wolves that are here with us tonight. So I will turn it over to you. Thank you. I'm so proud to introduce our site leaders here. We have principal Chiru Nalade and AP Ada Lee and all their amazing kids and families. Thank you for being here but I will turn it over to them or the rest. Good evening everyone. It is an honor to be here and it is an honor for us to lead Tierra Linda. It's a very special place so it's a pleasure to be spotlighting some of our incredible
004teaching and learning that happens in our middle school. You can go to the next slide. So learners are truly at the heart of everything that we do. Our work is grounded in the district's learner profile and the center of that learner profile is the learner our amazing student body and every work that we do intentionally focuses on building relationships getting to know the students and meeting them where they are at and no matter where they are in their learning journey helping them progress in the learning journey. So as we were thinking about the spotlight we thought it is best for us to hear from some of our student representatives. So I'm going to invite first of all our eighth grade leaders to come up and we want to make sure that we include their voices
005and hear from them. Hello everyone we're eighth grade web ambassadors that currently attend TL. My name is Ethan Song. I'm Liam Berman and I'm Milutronis. Right now we are going to discuss on exactly who we are and what makes TL special. Starting off with our core classes at TL everyone takes history, math, science, English, advisory and PE. One thing that makes these classes really fun is that most of the teachers understand that we're teenagers and growing young adults who love to socialize. So they're really flexible about where we sit in class so we can collaborate with others and learn how to work in groups. TL offers elective classes and seventh and eighth graders can choose up to two classes if they want to look up early to take a zero period. Some of the elective
006classes that stand out or are special to me are Spanish art and speech and debate. I've been taking Spanish since sixth grade and I feel like I know that I know the language much better and I can conjugate verbs much better and I can form sentences very well. The art program at TL is much more than just painting and ceramics. If one was to want to become an artist when they're older then this is a good jump start to have when you're a young adult and the TL speech and debate program is one of the best in the area. They've won many tournaments and speech and debate really helps young adults express themselves with good reasoning behind it. Moving to the additional programs that are offered at TL we have our web program which stands
007for where everybody belongs and the point of web is to make sure eighth graders help sixth graders and their families feel like they belong at TL and in the San Carlos School District and with that comes with that comes the leadership skills and mentor skills that we all learn. We also get good relationships with the sixth graders. Then I also really love the spirit weeks because the spirit weeks and student socials because they're a great way to help help meet new people and meet new people from your school and you get to learn new friends and meet new people and it's great way to just join our school. We also offer camps like Westminster Woods and the band and orchestra which is great ways to improve your knowledge of the environment and also just have
008a good time. I also really love our Garza sports program because we are taught by professional PE teachers and coaches there and they teach us good skill sets to in a variety of sports such as basketball to track to flat football but my favorite thing that is offered at TL is the Bridge Math program. At the Bridge Math program it's an extra opportunity for celebrators to improve their math comprehension skills in order to take more challenging courses in high school and college. One additional program that really sticks out to me is the Healthy Cities tutoring. As a student I really struggle with math and I've had a tutor from Healthy Cities since sixth grade and my grades have risen and I feel like I'm really understanding the concept of what we're learning in each chapter
009much more. Now we could go on and on about what makes TL so great but just to wrap things up one of the biggest reasons why TL is so special is because of its teachers. The teachers here are really good at helping us learn and grasp the concepts quickly. They allow us to feel confident about the subject and whenever a test comes we always feel very prepared on what is to come next. Thank you. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts so thoughtfully. I know it is kind of unnerving to stand up here and share your ideas so you guys did a great job. Thank you. What you just heard from a couple of our eighth graders about student engagement in four classes, the choice of electives, the sense of belonging, the flexibility is
010exactly what we hope for for every learner at TL. So with all of this in mind we want to share out some of our data that showcases that the experiences that some of the students that are talking about is not just fun and engagement and teachers let us choose our seeds. This really converts into meaningful and measurable impact on student learning. So if you look at our data from the last three years, the growth that we have made in our state testing for English language arts, for our math scores, for our chronic absenteeism, for our discipline, all of this data indicates the climate and culture at TL so we are super proud of this work. I'm running this. Thank you. So if you look at our English language arts data and see that 70.3 students
011improved their score from the prior year. For our math, next slide, 73% students improved their scores from the previous years, makes us really proud and when we describe the learning environment, our teachers work really hard to create the environment that the students are thriving in. So the gains, can we go to the next slide, we have science data as well. So the gains in performance across multiple standards is because of a very strong tier one instruction. So this is the instruction that all students get in the classroom. The classroom practices that teachers are using and then we have small students, small group student support, like a tier two support, a small group of students who need some extra help. We have tier three support, students who need some extensive help or one-on-one instruction and all
012of that is built into our program which is leading to some strong gains in one of the measures that we look at, state testing and our internal benchmark testing already. So I know board members have seen a lot of this. When we look at our strategic plan, we have some descriptors for what we aspire our San Carlos school districts learners to be. And we bucket it into kind of three categories and under each category we have some skills. We know that it is important for our students to learn the content but we also know that it is more important for students to develop the skills that they can transfer from one content area to another or take with them outside of the classroom. This school year at the district we decided that we are going
013to focus on specific buckets for different grade spans. For middle school appropriately so we want all of our students to be curious problem solvers. So we see the evidence of students taking ownership, problem solving, having a growth mindset to continue making progress. So speaking of ownership and having a growth mindset at TL we are very proud to offer 15 different clubs. I know that some of our other schools such as Mariposa, I know that they are student-led. We like to call it teacher facilitated with student-led. So that means that teachers open their classrooms once a week and even after school during lunch or after school and students can come on their own will to join a club. Some of the clubs might include the puzzle club, the speech and debate, the math club, the robotics
014club. So as you can see we have a wide variety of clubs who a lot of it for a lot of our students go to to make connections with a variety of other students. And I will just expand on that. Our robotics club this year in addition to after school has also kind of then led into some parents hosting the robotics club at their own houses and they do once a week every evening and we have another coach who coaches the students at a parent's house where everyone gathers. They have dedicated space because whatever they are building requires a lot of space. So it's so nice to see our kids passion and then parents supporting that passion and helping kids continue to work on what they like to do after school hours as well. So
015as we can all imagine the progress that we see or the engagement that we see or the learning that is happening in school we have a strong community, a strong workforce, our amazing amazing teachers that are the backbone of our school. So our teachers are leading the learners through a variety of experiences and at the same time teachers understand more than ever that we need to continue learning. The pace at which our world is changing is like none other. So we are spending a lot of time reflecting and thinking on those and providing teachers an opportunity to choose the areas in which they see themselves grow more in. One of the ways at TL we are doing teacher professional development is book clubs. We offer teachers a variety of books to choose from. Some books
016are you know how do we support the next generation. Our kids who are growing up with a lot of social media, how do we make sure that we understand where to support students, what their areas of growth are, kind of understanding the learner variability in the classroom and the range of learners, how to be a happy and resilient person and how it transfers into the classroom teaching or if their kids are not engaged for whatever reason how do we work with this engaged teens and pre-teens. We also are partnering with the county office of education bringing in some experts to work with our combined middle schools to help us support our learning. So every professional development follows up. We follow up with teachers with a feedback form so teachers can tell us how productive or
017unproductive the learning was, what can we do to strengthen it for the following time. And then next we have our third layer in our learner profile, our amazing parents and community members. Next slide. And we are incredibly grateful for the support that we get from parents in so many different ways. We are grateful for SKEF and PTA for helping us do so many things to enrich the learning in our classrooms and in our school. So without their support our school wouldn't be what it is so we're really grateful for that whether it is the multicultural night or teacher hospitality luncheons or book clubs that we organize and parent speakers or guest speakers come and speak with our parent community. These partnerships make us really strong community and enrich our learning. And lastly I would like
018to close by highlighting a new event that TL hosted for the very first time, our entrepreneur fair. We had 70 students who participated in this optional event that required many many hours of work after school. There were 29 teams and this entrepreneur fair kind of really highlights and showcases everything that we are talking about, the durable and the future-ready skills that we want our kids to learn and then take it to real life. So I'm going to invite, I wish I could invite everyone, but I'm going to invite one of the group from our entrepreneur fair and they will come and share their experience with us. One up seventh grade. Hi, I'm Vivi. I'm Olivia. I'm Ellie. I'm Grace. We represent the seventh graders at TL. From the entrepreneur experience was very unique and fun.
019We learned so much about businesses and other important life skills. The fair was also very inspiring to see all the creative students at TL. We learned many things during the entrepreneur fair. We learned people skills, money managing, business ethics, organization, collaboration, leadership skills, goal setting, decision making, and flexibility. Our business is called Lotus Crochet and while we're creating this business, some of the questions we asked were something that we can all do or help with. What is something that people will want to buy and what is a creative idea that others most likely won't have, likely was something that would make our business special. Some of the members in our group knew how to crochet already so they came up with the idea of starting with a business related to crochet. I found a cute
020bag for a crochet frog which gave us the idea to sell our flaws. This is our Max Scott tip and an example of one of the hats that we sell. This is also another one of our things. Some challenges we went through during the fair were finding time to meet with each other, staying on task and managing our time wisely, sharing the materials we needed between houses, pricing our frogs so that they were not too expensive and not too cheap. Some things we would do differently next time is our group could make more products because we sold out pretty fast. We could also be more organized at the stall and remember to bring our supplies. The fair was also a bit chaotic. There was a lot of people that we had anticipated so it was
021difficult to stay organized. Another struggle was that people learned to pay with different methods like cash or VIMO. We also had to manage our change. We needed a bit more space since there were five of us and we had a lot of like stuff for our business. It was also a bit overwhelming because it was loud but overall it was like really fun. While creating our business we went to mentoring sessions and they were both really helpful. The first mentoring session was taught by high schoolers from Carlemont and they taught us how to make a pitch video. After their lesson we wrote a pitch video script and the mentors helped us make changes in the script that greatly improved it. During the second mentoring session a group of parents came and taught us about the
022many aspects of creating a business and it helped us improve the cost of our products at war. Our experience connects to our learning as a middle schooler at TL. During our time working towards the entrepreneur fair we had to stay organized, focused, and on tasks at school. We needed to work with numbers like calculating how much money we had and how big problems. We needed to work together as a group to get our work done just like working together in a group during the school project. Thank you for listening. Thank you everyone for letting us take so much time. I know we took more time than was planned and allowing us to bring our students to share some of their learning. Thank you. Thank you for being here web ambassadors, entrepreneurs, principal Gulati and AP
023Lee. We really appreciate the spotlight on TL. That was delightful. Thank you parents for being here on a weeknight. Thank you. Thank you. Our next order of business is our consent agenda. Did you want to get trustees in there? Let's go ahead. Sorry. That's okay. This is so jar-like. All right now we will proceed with our consent agenda which contains items that are routine in nature and for which no board discussion is anticipated. So we act upon them with a single vote. I will check for any public comment on the consent agenda. The room has cleared out and there are no fans on zoom. Okay thank you. Do I have a motion to move the consent agenda? Thank you. Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Great. Now we will take up the information discussion items
024on our agenda. These are for information discussion only. No board action will be taken. Staff will present and there will be time for clarifying questions. And so our first item is the 24-25 citizens parcel tax oversight committee report. So Ralph, can you start us off? Yes, thank you. So the measure on parcel tax requires an oversight committee to meet regularly and review annual expenditures to ensure parcel tax funds are being spent appropriately according to the original ballot language passed by the voters. It is the responsibility of the committee to present an annual report to the school board. I want to acknowledge and thank the work of the committee members participating and introduce Scott Jeffries to present the annual report approved by the partial tax committee on November 12th. He is joining us via zoom. I
025am. Thank you for your time. I am zooming in from Chicago where outside it tells me it feels like 12. So I'm happy to actually be inside doing this. So Ralph just went through a little bit of an overview of this. Just a reminder for folks, the intended use of the proceeds from this measure are to attract and retain qualified and experienced teachers, maintain small glass sizes, maintain excellent science, technology, engineering, math, reading, and written instruction, maintain hands-on science, math, technology, and engineering programs, provide art, music, libraries, and a well-rounded education. The committee meets twice a year. We most recently met on November 12th to go through the financial information that's in the report. I didn't know if you needed me to pull up the report. I'm assuming everybody's got it open in front of
026them if they can see it. So you'll see in there the total revenue for the year, just over $3 million broken down by parcels. For those of you I think most of you are familiar with, for those of you that aren't as familiar, there are exempt parcels every year. The number of parcels will vary slightly every year. The number of exempt parcels will vary slightly every year but stay relatively steady to help with budgeting purposes. And this year, eligible parcels are just over 9,000 in the calculation unless the administrative fees gets us to that just over $3 million in total revenue. And on the last page of the report, you'll see the expenditures broken down predominantly. They are funding full-time FTEs to the various things that we went through earlier, a little bit small class
027size, electives, math, music, PE, science, and then an allocation that we do every year for the charter school that is specifically focused on reducing the class size. You'll notice the expenditures are slightly greater, about $67,000 greater than the actual revenue that came in. And that difference then is funded out of other district funds to cover the shortfall. I think in the past we've had some times where we've actually had a little bit more money but it generally gets pretty close to what the total revenue breakdown that comes in. The annual report that you're looking at was reviewed and approved unanimously by the committee members who are noted at the bottom of the file as well and Ross, Betsy, Catherine, and myself with Ralph and Veronica in attendance. I'm happy to answer any questions, pretty straightforward
028every year but happy to answer any questions that everybody has and obviously Ralph's intimately familiar with all the data as well. Thank you so much Scott for zooming in with us tonight and sharing that report and thank you to the committee members for serving in that capacity. Are there any questions? Seeing none, I'll check for public comments. All right, well thank you very much. Thank you all, have a good night. Stay warm. I will, thanks. All right, and so now we will proceed to 5B, our teaching and learning update focused on the LCAP mid-year update presented by Assistant Superintendent Hans Barber. Okay, thank you President Kinahan. Much appreciated. Tonight I have the pleasure of reporting to you about mid-year data that relates directly to our local control accountability plan. This is a statutory requirement and
029yet as has been our practice for many years, we don't just do this tonight or next time. We've been giving you updates throughout the last several months. You might recall that we gave an update on state test scores in October, an update on SEL in November, and then in December we gave a dashboard update and all of those things are part of our LCAP. So there's a requirement, we did this by February 28th, where we have a couple of other up-to-date local measures that we're including and there are some other measures that are still in progress that as we get data we'll bring it to you, as has been our practice for the last year. Included in the appendix just for those in the public are some of the highlights from some of those previous
030presentations and then there's also a direct link, all of these are direct links to those presentations from previous board meetings. So ultimately we're asking you to frame your questions around those two questions. Are we achieving the LCAP goals and what actions need to be continued or tweaked? And this is not the only time obviously you'll have to weigh in on that. We'll frame those questions similarly in the next several months as we develop our annual update to our current LCAP and develop the 2026-27 update. So this graphic demonstrates the cycle, the LCAP cycle, and this is really the annual update LCAP cycle as opposed to a whole year cycle where we really sort of start almost immediately when the school year starts when we're developing new goals. Annual update cycle is really the key pieces
031are looking at data obviously and analyzing mid-year progress and then moving into engagement with educational partners and the arrows are meant to say that we do that sort of all the whole time. As you know we have some statutory groups that we put together, our district English language advisory committee, the parent advisory committee, we have some student groups actually that also get to weigh in by statute but we have a lot of engagement beside that. Obviously we work with PTAC, we've given presentations with SCAF, all of the school sites engage there, school site councils, etc. So it's really that is at the heart of this is what do folks think and what are they seeing, what are we seeing in the data and what might we want to tweak moving forward in that iterative process
032type of way. So you are familiar with these, you've seen them many times at this point, these are more succinct version of our LCAP goals rather than the lengthy ones that are in the LCAP itself. And as I said many of the LCAPs are, many of the metrics in the LCAP are in progress or they haven't yet been collected and you'll have the chance to give a lot of input in February and early March when we send out our engagement surveys for parents and students will take them and also one for staff. Tonight our focus is primarily on a few updates from LCAP goals one to three and we have a short update on goal five as well. Goal four as you might recall is more about facilities and how we're coming along on our
033facilities master plan and you get a lot of updates on that especially as we're undergoing work related to the bond. And there also was some update in the SARCs that were part of the consent agenda that contained data on the facilities inspection tool. That is another important piece of data that we use in our LCAP as well to make sure that our facilities are in good repair. This is a slide reflecting current, well not current, but end of first trimester 2025. So mid-November data on reading levels for students in the school district and you can see that, let's talk about why we do this, we collect this because we have our state data and we could say our state data is great and we could say the dashboard data looks great and we know that
034that data is really based on students from the previous school year. And we like to use the term as we're getting in the LCAP cycle about data that's closer to the student because it's more action and this obviously is directly related to students that we have at this moment in time. And you can see that we're experiencing some fluctuations in our data. I highlight in second grade and fourth grade in particular where we're seeing a downturn in both gradables. Remember that this is only one of the reading metrics that we're using. We have several other pieces of data that we consider including the new reading screener but also a screener that we had used previously. And as a reminder we're we're entering an ELA, an English language arts cycle soon and we will have new
035materials within the next two to three years. And so in aligning that I just want to remind folks that those are important pieces to keep in mind as we move forward. The next slide really details what we're doing about what we saw which is much more important than looking at the data as what do we see in the analysis and what are we going to do about what we're seeing. First of all there's we talk a lot about tiers here in our meetings. You know we talk about the multi-tiered systems of support and those three tiers are something that we rely on in every dimension of learning. In this case this is an academic look and we really place an emphasis on universal instruction which is tier one and trying to be consistent and full
036implementation of things like the phonics program. Our new, you remember probably experiencing that, UFLY, University of Florida Literacy Institute foundations program, that's a mouthful, and we're really implementing that full time in every classroom. For the first time this year we've had good uptake previously but you might remember we adopted that in June and this is the first year where we want to sort of require to do something so we're focusing on that. In kindergarten we also have a different opportunity than we've had in the past. We have as you know as they're called early birds and late birds in kindergarten and our TK students actually all get out early and that gives us an opportunity to take TK teachers and push them into K classrooms. Previous to this year we didn't have, the numbers weren't
037close, we had maybe eight TKs and we have 15 kinders. This year we're pretty close where most sites have three or four kinders and they have three or four TKs and those teachers are pushing into, not necessarily to offer reading instruction, but it does give an opportunity for them to work with students as maybe that classroom teacher is offering reading instruction or other types of intervention that might be needed. Another important piece is we talked previously in our dashboard data about progress or in some ways in some measures lack of progress for our students learning English and we're also emphasizing best practice in all of our classrooms for English learners and we have a really great project going on that I just touched on last time and we hadn't even had a round of it
038yet but we're doing a partner project in lesson study focused on students learning English and we have eight teachers from across the district that actually participated in December and a chance to go into each other's classroom, into one classroom rather, where a lesson was designed specifically around a specific group of students and literally from the outcome, from the onset of let's develop this lesson, taking through the lesson, how it was developed, watching the lesson, and then having a time after to debrief the lesson and talk about what we saw, into then developing the next lesson that will be in a different classroom at a different school site towards the end of this month. So it's a really exciting project that we want to expand and I would say that at this point we're dipping our
039toe in that and yet that project is really grounded in best practice in ELD. As is generally true at our sites, our principals continue to look at data really closely and share that data with their teachers and talk to teachers about what it is that they are doing specifically and what they are doing in sites around that data as well and then they in turn share that with us. We'll be making our rounds in mid-year goal meetings with every principal and then get a chance to say well this is what I'm learning about our students and this is what we're doing about that with our students. Also importantly, you're intimately aware that we've had a reading club, reading club is what we call it, it's really reading intervention and it's really been undergoing an evolution
040over the last several years from something that's really focused on um you know but previously when uFLY wasn't used in classrooms across the board that was the focus of the reading club and yet now that is happening. So it's evolving to become more personalized for students as we identify the need and recently previous to this year around now we'd start looking at kindergarten data. So kindergarten teachers would start giving their students the reading record assessment, running record assessment, reading data and we would analyze that data and then talk about what kindergarteners might be able to support and this year we have decided to make a shift to support fourth grade which we saw a couple of slides ago that fourth grade had a dip and we noticed that dip. One of the things we also
041noticed in that dip is of the we're serving 14 students in fourth grade so we're really drilling down the students that had similar needs A and B were the most in need of the idea of reading to learn and what skills are needed for that and in analyzing that data 14 students are being served and six of them are students learning English okay and getting back to our second grade data we have 26 students in reading club and 13 of those students were considered an English learner at some point in time during their career so you can see where that evolution is happening where it's it's more personalized and it's more this group needs this this group needs us this group needs this and using it thinking of it more as a district resource instead
042of a single site resource so those are evolutions that are undergoing there to help with the need that we're in. Shifting over to some current data and attendance we also had a little update in December this is even more up to date and we're seeing as you know we're seeing a slight dip in average daily attendance remember that average daily attendance is computed based on the average number of students that come to school in a day and chronic absenteeism is another measure that we use but remember that chronic absenteeism and ADA are not necessarily related you might think well students sometimes are out because they're sick and if they're sick and it's an excused absence it doesn't matter okay we don't receive ADA we don't it doesn't we don't doesn't go away on chronic absenteeism
043and yet let's say that a student does an independent study and they complete that independent study while they're away we do actually receive ADA dollars but they're still not in school so when we think about chronic absenteeism if they're they're not in the seat on a school day they're absent as opposed to average daily attendance where there is some way to recover some of those funds that go with it. Our chronic absenteeism rate through the Friday before break was 7.4 if I gave you that number today it's actually low because as we go remember that chronic chronically absent means they're absent for 10 of the school year so students that had seven or eight absences and since I had seven absences but we were on day 73 are considered chronically absent well when we go
044to day 80 they're no longer considered chronically absent however they're within one day of being chronically absent so it's a moving target and we spend quite a bit of time talking about this in our leadership meetings in with the same tone the bottom line is when students aren't in school we know that there's a direct correlation between whether they're able to learn or not and while ADA affects our funding chronic absenteeism clearly affects students ability to learn when they're not there we're really focusing in with our principles about why students are absent and knowing why they're absent and following up appropriately and we'll get it a little bit more into that in the next slide so what's happening with this again we know that's the data so what and what are we doing about it
045we also use a tiered system for attendance right similarly where students have access to all the same things so you know if you're absent you'll get a robocall I'm sure you've all received those before you might get a robocall especially in middle school where it's like your student was absent for period two and it's a recording you might get a personal phone call and for students that are really struggling in families we're really trying to drill down to the area of that personal phone call whether that's from the principal or a teacher or the site administrative staff and then meeting with those families again though with students that have greater challenges and families that have greater challenges we have a community liaison that we've talked about quite a bit here at our meetings and she
046really reaches out to those families that are most vulnerable and doesn't just talk to them about it but links them with services and drill down to the the reason you know the core reason that they're missing school what's happening and what might we do to intervene can we get you a resource can we connect you with someone does your student need mental health intervention what's necessary and she does a lot of that work that really does bring families back to school and feel like you know they're a part of something which ultimately is what we're trying to do next is professional learning which is remember that is directly related to teacher and staff learning and we recently you know in January the first day back we want to thank our community for allowing us to
047facilitate a day of learning with all of our teachers on January 5th and all the sessions that we offered that day I remember Jennifer saying this is amazing that all the sessions we're offering are directly aligned to goals or actions that are LCAP and it might seem sort of like a no-brainer to all of you of course they are but that's not always the case there was a high level of alignment between what we were doing and what we said we were going to do and I think that's a really important piece to point out that we feel as though what we're offering is directly aligned to the goals that we have in our LCAP part of that process is analyzing the data that we get from teachers I thought it was fascinating that Charo
048said we offer these during hers says if we talk to each other and we offer these like these sessions to our staff and then we surveyed it we have more surveys this year than we've ever had we're really trying to engage people on a different level so you see that we already have 468 responses we're only through January we have several more PDs to do more learning to do together and while the average rating is appears to be going down or the overall response rate to having a four or five to the question that is was this useful to my teaching practice you see the average rating is hovering around the same and we're we also have as we sample until we've restarted the professional learning committee to get even more feedback so this is
049aggregate feedback that we get in a survey the professional learning committee is then looking at that we're getting data on a different level so there is a a group of folks that has made up of our leaders and our teachers and we've been together three times and all three times we've gotten data that we didn't necessarily get as part of the survey it allows us to go deeper with input it allows us to think about what good professional learning looks like and most importantly allows us to say okay we think we hear you and we understand what you're looking for in that vein one of the most wonderful things that has come out of a that group and be a group that we've developed over the last several years that is the task force on
050artificial intelligence and that group for the last hour of january 5th was able to present individualized sessions in more in a conference format so there were three sessions that were offered at middle school for example there were three sessions that were offered at four or five three sessions that were offered in tk3 or tk2 and teachers could then choose which one they thought was most appropriate for them they were tiered similar to what we do with students they were tiered to well how familiar are you with this do you want sort of an overview section i'm somewhat familiar and i'm interested in this and then hey you have some advanced knowledge try this and um overwhelming response was positive um with really great feedback you see 83 as opposed to 62 percent said it was
051useful to their practice of 4.3 on a five point scale and this is one of our goals out of our professional learning committee is to develop internal capacity and um there's no better way to to celebrate that than to look at some of the comments that teachers made regarding the sessions um and some of the what we put here there were of course people that said i'm not really too sure about this whole AI thing right um i want to acknowledge that and yet there weren't that many after attending a session i think most folks felt like oh that i can find a way that this will be useful and healthy to save time for example or to engage or learn that i'm not sure about how to engage and also it gave them a
052colleague that they could reach out to and say and you don't want to talk about it there right and frankly we we ran out of time i mean they were so great the sessions were so good that we ran out of time so revisiting that is another important piece and this is a direction we'd like to have is to develop this internal capacity and continue this type of format it is a big lift having a conference style format and especially in a small district like ours and yet that that learning committee we feel like they're ready and they're they're willing and happy to help at this time and this was just a great uh first uh toe dip as we like to call in this in that direction uh lastly uh this slide is about
053community and family engagement which is l capital five as we mentioned before many of the metrics in this are currently you know underway one of the metrics is um uh healthy cities tutoring for example which was also mentioned tonight which was fabulous um another metric is one of the checks goals um but this is you know we feel like that is our belonging goal in a lot of ways and so we wanted to take a minute to highlight a lot of what charu and and the students at tl talked about about why they want to go to school what is it that's developing that sense of belonging um and also highlighting more of the work of our community liaison who really just steps in i mean i can't say enough about that it's like well
054a family's having an issue well let me reach out to them and find out what's going on um and can i link them with the resource and can maybe during uh the holidays there were massive drives that we had on campuses also a drive that she led first to for families that she knew really that she had direct contact with so um you know we feel like we're making really good progress in this school as well particularly in those areas so uh with that happy to take any questions um and um also remind you that as i said at the beginning this is not the last time we will discuss these measures um nor will you know it will culminate when we bring that final l cap for approval in june so thank you thank
055you mons trustees questions well i had a question um so do we know why there is a dip in the fourth grade i know you said six out of the summer english learners but do you have any other ideas well to say that we're digging deep would be an understatement um we uh we've looked at a lot of different we have a spreadsheet that has literally 12 different things on it um we're identifying a variety of things and i think where we focused in on the students that we are serving are where there are many many nose buckets right so maybe they didn't do that well in the old pack and they also their reading level is behind and the reading screener said this and they're absent they're not absent okay so we're also looking
056at absenteeism as part of this picture that's another really important measure if a student isn't there they can't even benefit from the intervention so it's more about finding out what the root cause is right i'm really trying to deal with that i you know we have a lot of different ideas about what it is i think part of it partially is we knew at the end of last year that we had some students that did not get a really solid foundation in phonics they didn't get ufly and we knew that we were sending students to fourth grade more than we normally would that didn't have that foundation which is why we were eager to try to provide some support in fourth grade and sure enough after analyzing you know the recent data it certainly has
057come to pass and that's why we made the shift and then my other stuff is more about comments or requests i would love to learn and just it doesn't have to be now it could be when it makes sense but about the new screener and sure yeah can you remind me again of the grades in which we use ufly yeah kindergarten is second it is it is a foundational program that starts in kindergarten and then rolls to first and also second with you know that similar concepts being covered each year but getting more depth and doing some different activities so if you are in fourth grade and you somehow didn't receive all of the phonics instruction that you needed how do we help bring up that fourth grader and the skills well and part of
058what we're doing is to identify students that we think really need that and that might be something that the reading teachers that are going over to the fourth grade will do with them we also can build capacity within our own teaching staff to do some of those activities sometimes we struggle with age appropriateness for things like that right the curriculum is for second graders and fourth graders is sort of like all right this is baby stuff and that's why we're trying to really more personalize it too as the reading teachers go up and say all right let's get to know sarah what do we know what did i learn about sarah and my work with sarah but you know to say that it's it's certainly not we're not doing it across the board we don't
059have that great of a need where we do it in the class with every student thank you all right thank you very much that was very informative and are there any public comments this item let's see the interest right so now on to 5c which is the san carlos charter 24 25 audit report and first interim for 25 26 yes thank you again so as the authorizing agency for the san carlos charter it's a district responsibility to review the financial reports for the san carlos chart they completed their first in report and presented it to their board in december which was in in the required time frame we have reviewed the first interim and crafted a letter presented to the board in the agenda tonight this letter submitted the sametail office of county of ed
060as well for their review in conclusion based on the district's review the financial documents submitted san carlos charters 25 26 first interim and multi-year projections appear sufficient to meet the charter school's financial obligations for the current and subsequent two fiscal years based on the assumptions included in the enacted 25 26 state budget the san carlos charters annual audit report is also included and this item and there were no audit findings for the charter school for the 24 25 fiscal year this is an informational item and no action is required by the board included in your packet and i'll take any questions if you have any questions no questions thank you very much any public comment great and our last information item is 5d the sunshine scta negotiation proposal for the 26 27th school year and
061that would be me thank you scta has submitted their negotiations proposal which was attached to this item for the contract we have or the agreement we have with them each party can open two additional articles to salary and health and welfare and it's presented tonight you will review only as a matter of statute questions okay and then we will now move okay thank you to our discussion action items which will end with a board vote prior to the vote staff will present and briefly describe the decision the board is being asked to make board members can then ask questions comment and have a discussion we will then take public comment and possibly it deliberates more and then vote so our first is 6a are the san carlos school district negotiations sunshine proposal with the san
062carlos teachers association similarly to the previous item this is our negotiations proposal to scta for reopeners and again as a matter of statute our proposal is shared publicly and has needs your approval for us to move forward questions okay public comments no okay can i get a motion to approve the sunshine i'll move to approve second thank you all in favor aye aye great that passes and so the next is a 6b approval of the tentative agreement with csa for this school year the 25 26th school year and that's me again i think i have one more after this we're really pleased to have reached a tentative agreement with csea chapter 263 for the 25 26 contract reopeners the agreement includes a 2.25 increase in salary and raising health and welfare welfare benefits to current
063which are january 2026 premiums at the same rates that are listed in the contract currently it matches the same package as what scta received earlier in the year csea ratified the agreement hot off the presses on tuesday and we ask for your approval of the tentative agreement tonight the question their problems thank you for getting it done yeah thank you to csa partners we appreciate it great any public comment okay um might please have a motion to approve motion to approve the tentative agreement with cse that's certainly all in favor all right that passes well done thank you team and our labor partners okay now highly anticipated item 6c approval of the 26 27 instructional calendar hot off the press hot off the press in room and i want to point out this is a
064draft um so you have it in front of you um and it's uh it's clearly on their note um we are giving scta a little more time to collect all votes on this but we're presenting this for your approval and assuming that it is approved as is it would become active as soon as we get word and we'll post it publicly next week so we're asking for your approval of this draft 2026 27 calendar one thing i'd like to note before you vote is there really aren't a lot of changes from this year um the only real difference is a change in spring break and that was due to the fact that sequoia high school district also changed their week for spring break and we we like to align with that um so that families
065don't have to have splits get this any questions or comments on this item so the um teacher the mid-year professional day would fall the monday after dinner break any public comment on this item i don't see any we get a motion to approve the draft 26 27 calendar um to approve the draft thank you all in favor aye aye okay thank you thank you and now 60 is the district 24 25 independent audit report back to cfo rail yeah that's me again thank you so i'm happy to report that our independent auditor chavez and associates had completed their 24 25 annual audit within the required timeline and i'm also happy to report that this is a clean audit with no audit findings for the 24 25 fiscal year i'd like to thank all the staff
066that were part of this audit process it should be noted that this is hard work for the staff throughout the entire year to make sure we're in compliance and to produce all the necessary documents to confirm that with the auditors so with that clean report audit you have in front of you i ask for your approval of the 24 25 annual audit report as presented and prepared by chavez's questions question not a question but congratulations that's a big accomplishment of them with the entire staff so congratulations to the entire staff all right any public comments none and we have a motion to approve the second all in favor aye aye thank you and we've got three more okay b be uh item f approval of the inspector of record proposal no i skipped one i'm
067thank you i'm getting lost okay e approval of resolution and annual public report for developer fees 24 25 that's me again thank you so before you uh for approval is the annual resolution improving the annual and five-year developer fee report it's this responsibility to produce this report make it public and present it to the board the annual developer fee report as well as the five-year developer fee report this combined report shows a district expended revenues generated from the developer fees collected from new development projects within the attendance boundaries for the district all expenditures fall within the allowable uses for the funds which should be for capital improvements to accommodate new students as a result of any new developments in the area i also want to point out that this report was made available to the
068public on december 18 2025 and i ask for your approval resolution 8 25 26 approving the annual and five year developer fee report for you thank you questions all right public comments none um and we are approving the resolution which includes the report isn't it an exhibit or an attempt yes the resolution includes the report and an approval of the okay we have a motion to approve the resolution all in favor all right thank you thank you all right yeah the inspector of record proposal for a variety of projects yes thank you thank you so much we're excited to bring forward to you three proposals for the inspector of record and just to give you a little bit of background about we were able to conduct our request for proposals previously for our other project
069and then we have selected out of that rfp our recommended inspector of record that we selected is tim panelli and so he has been a part of our hfac hfac project inspections is required from the division of state park content to have somebody overseeing the project on their behalf to ensure the contractor is following all of the regulations and that the project gets constructed according to the plan's big group at the dsa level so the way that proposals are structured are for each of the projects separately so that you can see that the tier in the gym is its own dsa application number because if we were unable to include in the hfac project so that will be that small second step to finishing those projects and phases and then the tk expansion project is
070a 12 month schedule and so that is for the first 12 months schedule where there are three active schools be having construction for 12 months and so that reflects that on the second phase of that tk expansion project will require another proposal because it will only at that point have one school left for that second phase with the four classrooms at heather school to be completed and the building envelope project is going to happen over 2026 and 2027 so that fees for all of those schools and projects so we are grateful i'm very much forward to you tonight and and hope if you have any questions thank you any questions i'm interested question i'll ask it looks like in all three the owner lists himself as the inspector right and so i just want to
071make sure does he have you know is there enough time in the day to do all three scopes excellent question boards and he does have um someone he can he can use if he's out of town so there's that we experienced a very smooth experience with him he happens to be local so there's um some benefits to him having just be being in the area so he's able to you know allow for the travel time between all of the schools and all that we did have that discussion so i have a question about the tl gym yes does that also include the classrooms yes that is um something that we are doing as a maintenance project and so does it require at the same time because it's under the threshold of expenditures so any other
072questions all right public comment so we will need an approval of the proposals from panelli construction motion to for the approval of the inspector all in favor all right thank you thank you thank you all right uh now we are moving to item seven future agenda items i want to i'm sorry i thought tonight yes board policies okay um this is a second reading of two of the five policies that were brought to the board on december 11th at that meeting we reviewed and there were a few requested minor edits clarifications to these two policies and more that we would say yes i think um director vza prepared some comments just as a reminder of the um issues that were raised by trustees yeah thank you so much for the time tonight and um as
073president kennehan stated these are two policies that were brought work in december and we had some minor suggestions or clarifications to review tonight so the first one was the school attendance review board policy and that was updated to reflect the trustees desire to to move the mention of law enforcement to the end of the list of community services i remember the trustee looked in and suggested that change so we went ahead and made that change um again keeping the law enforcement on there but just moving it to the end of the possible community agencies we might partner with or collaborate with when forming a school attendance review board or seeking resources for students who are struggling with attendance the second policy was the suicide prevention there was a request for further clarification guidance on the
074section referencing education code 215 um the question was about the grade spans it's something we always kind of struggle with when uh there's mention by cspa of grades k through six um and we go through eighth grade um so this policy uh the recommendation is to really match that ed code the ed code specifically states that it is for kindergartens through sixth grade but this does not include san carlos school district from following the practice for seventh to eighth grade students and what that ed code references is that we would be um coordinating and consulting with the county mental health plan if we are seeking a referral for mental health or services for student grades k through six who is medical right and uh trustee park has been part of the committee so i don't
075know if you have any further input or comments about these two changes thank you any further okay good comments none okay uh we need a motion to approve these two word policies i need the people of what else second one i don't know i have to say them out loud but what policies second all in favor all right all right thank you thank you okay um seven future agenda items well we have a retreat coming um and i know that uh agenda will follow but the focus will be on governance responsibilities and following that we also have a study session that's coming up on the fifth of february it's a big study session to consider whether or not the board will recommend a resolution or a parcel tax measure to extend our parcel tax and
076that would be then considered at a meeting on the 12th of february that those are the big things that are coming on the board stock i just want to thank everyone who is taking pieces of the agenda for the retreat uh it's shaping up really nicely there will probably be some pre-work so we will try to get that out to you well in advance sometime next week we will have a good time at the skyway center and then now we move to the communications portion of our agenda and we begin with public comment this is the portion of our meeting set aside for comments from the public about matters not on the agenda but within the subject matter jurisdiction of the board under board by-law 9323 comments are limited to three minutes unless changed by
077the board first we ask that if you're raising concerns about students please refrain from sharing any information that may expose the student's identity this is a public reported meeting and we are obligated to maintain student privacy second please be aware that the provisions of the brown act prohibit the board from engaging in a discussion with you or with each other on your comment regarding a non-agenda item to ensure procedural fairness for all members of the community we can only discuss an issue if it has been publicly noticed on an agenda in advance engaging in a spontaneous discussion or even responding would be unfair to others who might have wished to comment but were unaware the item was being addressed for these reasons we will not be responding to comments made on non-agenda items please know
078that we are listening and taking note and appreciate what you have to say we will be happy to keep you posted if and when the item you're speaking about be on the agenda and discussed by the board and now that i don't see any comments in the room if there are any who wish to do so on zoom it's time to raise your hand you know okay and now for employee group comments we will first start with dan good evening and happy new year this is a the start of the sceph readathon when our all of our students are kind of competing with each other as classes to see who can read the most minutes and it's a fun way to engage all of our learners some kids do raise money for sceph and some
079kids also just participate without doing so so it's a fun time to encourage reading reading that's done in the classroom and out of the classroom can be counted and so this is a fun event this is also time when we're teaching our kids about martin the king and of course that's always based on where the kids are in terms of their age but i can't think of a more important time in the history of our country in my life that we're teaching about peaceful protest and standing up for what's right and yeah being a good citizen by using your voice to vote and when laws are unfair to try to change them and standing up for people who are discriminated against so this is a really important thing that we're engaged in right now so
080yes all right thank you thank you dan now uh kamala are you having trouble unmuting the unmute her try veronica is trying to facilitate that is your audio connected right there now it worked it kept telling me i couldn't unmute myself um so i also um i'm very excited about sceph readathon our librarians are working very hard and um getting the kids excited about reading um i'm also very happy that we passed the that we got to vote on the ta on tuesday and that you guys voted on it tonight um our members are excited about getting that done before summertime so it's great to do that this year a little bit earlier um and i think the other big thing with us is that there's a lot of sickness going around and um everybody
081is working really hard um a lot of staff members are becoming sick and so we're not having subs all the time so everybody just feels like we're working really hard but there's also the good things with the readathon and passing the ta so that's it thank you so much for joining us tonight and now we will move to board member comments start i can go um this week i attended the parent session uh with utk again it was my second time and stem after going through it for six months so it was uh definitely felt more real and thanks for having me for that and um i think it was it's always good um there's a lot of anxiety and excitement um as the first time dk parent as well so it was very thoughtfully
082done and just the intentionality behind that whole even though it's just one first of many sessions um i think it was very well done thank you for the team okay i can go um i just wanted to commend that this this happened a month ago but again there was some water pipe issues at tl narcosa and how quickly everyone so flexible and the district staff who came to get the water solution all set up and and you know everybody who was affected by the families the teachers you know we we everyone kind of pivoted so quickly and made it work i just wanted to commend everyone who's involved with that um and then that evening there was still the tiara linda entrepreneur fair which still happened in spite of the issues with plumbing and it
083was such a uh pleasure to be a part of that and i bought a lot of things now i'm not sure what i'm gonna do with all this stuff but i have the things i just thought it was great um and it definitely flexed a lot of the kids skills in areas that we can't do in um during school so i thought that was great um and then i guess i attended the csba webinar was on monday about the governor's budget so now it's learned a few things there um which sure someone else covered better than i can so um uh yeah and then i guess the last thing i wanted to say was it's like the um foreman out for judging for ropes um which is a great um experience or the you who's
084tuned into this club signed up to be a judge i will be my fourth year i think being a roach judge so i always um find it to be a delightful experience maybe every year i'll just start by that rope ropes was very fun last year let's see if i can squeeze another year of that in this year as well um and maybe just for my comments uh building on uh what what dan and kamal were talking about with readathon i just want to give a big shout out to skev and then all the readathon uh bta leaders who are helping put those on uh without that event um i do think it's you know just my daughter woke up this morning and the first thing that she did was grab a book which like
085has never happened in the history of you know her entire life i think uh and so um it really does do an amazing job of getting kids excited about reading uh and so i'm very appreciative of all the work that goes into putting on this big event and it's also fundraiser which is great also very very important part of it uh but just having a little extra motivation for kids to read i think uh it last year really helped kind of with getting ability to read and this year it's building excitement for reading so it's really great to watch i'm going to yield my time over to dr frenchess okay uh well first of all let me just say that we did learn a lot about the governor's budget uh the last couple of weeks
086but uh because ralph and i will be at a conference uh tomorrow and saturday where some of the pundits uh and state board folks will be to help us sort of tease out the details in short we know we have a deficit uh whether it's the laos 18 billion or the governor's three it sort of doesn't matter it's a deficit and also as we demonstrated in the study session uh that uh the cola that they had you know given us to build our budget on is getting chipped away but i feel confident that our team is positioned to weather again a crazy budget and so i'll learn more about that and show that because what i'd like to do is focus my comments in honor of school board appreciation month uh extending gratitude to all
087of you you sit at the dais at least once a month for a board meeting uh but people are not aware of the countless hours uh behind the scenes meeting on committees um meeting with the public of speaking at the utk event um attending school events going to csba conferences etc on behalf of our children uh and our whole school community our district celebrates a supportive board focused on the important work public school system are i think the bastion of um uh democracy and as dan pointed out things are challenging times to be leading i think in public education and so we're very glad we're very grateful for our trustees and um in case you missed it we did uh put out a nice thing on social media to um to honor all of you
088and i feel delighted that we were able to start with our youngsters who could share all the reasons they love to be a part of our school so thank you we will now go into close session to discuss items 13a and 13b are there any who wish to make public implement on these closed session items okay we will now adjourn to closed session uh the board has now left closed session and i will reconvene the open session there were no reportable actions taken on the closed session items 13a and 13b so i will now adjourn us at 8 46 p.m