001Can you hear me? Mr. Lanier, can you hear me? Okay, we shall proceed. All right. Before we continue with the rest of our agenda, we would like to express gratitude for outgoing President Park. Thank you, Tracy, for your thoughtful leadership and as our president for the past year. I can't find enough words to express my admiration for your organizational skills, subtle humor, and unwavering commitment to achieving the best for all of our students, families, and staff. Many great things have happened while you've been president. To name a few, we have onboarded two great new trustees. We have charged ahead with measure-age projects. We have updated or adopted 42 board policies, which feels like a record. We have happily extended the contracts for our superintendent and assistant superintendent. Although I know I'm stepping into big shoes
002this year, I will find everything neatly arranged and organized and a smooth transition. Thank you for adeptly filling the role of board president. We have some presents for you, but I don't know if anyone else would like to say. I'll just plus one everything that Sarah said is a lot of what I was going to say. Thank you for your study leadership this year. I know it's not an easy role, and we've done it with calmness, courage, and thanks for leading us through the process of onboarding two trustees and then supporting my leave of absence. That's not easy to operate as a board of four. Thank you for leading us to do that and for getting us some good stead and handing things off smoothly. I'll make that a plus two, but also say thank
003you for your calm and collaborative leadership. Because you're the first board president that I had a chance to serve with and kind of watch up close, you will always be sort of the default before all needs to be. And so thank you for setting such a high bar for everyone who's going to come after you. Yeah, same thing, just echoing. Thank you for onboarding and being patient and going every time, explaining things in very much detail and yeah, keeping us all organized. I would like to say a few words. Tracy, you've led our district as board president since 2025 with positivity, with focus, calmness, empathy, and purpose. You've put aside your self-interest and service of the best interests of the people you represent, our community, our educators, staff, and students of San Carlos School District.
004I asked the executive team to share some comments. Hans appreciated that you protected the good work we're doing as a district by staying at the policy through 30,000 foot level rather than getting into the weeds and leading with compassion and kindness, which are hallmarks of San Carlos School District. From Amber, thank you Tracy for your service and for leading with steadiness, thoughtfulness, and trust. Your leadership reflected confidence without ego and a deep respect for the expertise of staff. Your positivity and warmth left a lasting impression. We wish you continued happiness and success in the future. Jen G says Tracy consistently approaches her work with intention to learn all of the perspectives and seeking to understand before being understood. We are grateful for your leadership. And Ralph says thank you for your outstanding leadership this past
005year and for making me feel so welcome in San Carlos. Your support from the very beginning and your thoughtful approach to guiding the district have made a meaningful difference and I truly appreciate working for you. For my part, you've been a thought partner and a coach and because there were so many consistent themes, we have two illustrations of all those comments. One of those is using symbols on the keypad and one of them is a leadership haiku, so I'm just going to give those to you. Thank you. I think there may be one other card. Can I say something? Yes. Okay. So it's been a real privilege to serve as board president this past year and it's definitely more work as president, but you know it was made way easier and more enjoyable thanks to
006all the people that are in this room. We really appreciate it. Thank you to my fellow trustees for always being so prepared and engaged to best serve the district. And I would say the staff, the district staff, extremely responsive and also really deep in knowledge. I really appreciate everything that you brought this past year. And then of course the collaboration and leadership with Jennifer this past year has been a real highlight for me. And I also really want to thank Veronica for making it so seamless for me to serve as the board president. So I'm excited to continue to serve the district as a not president. And very excited for another great year on the board and having Sarah Kinahan at the helm. And I know she's going to be really well for the 2026
007year or so. And of course I'm still here if you need anything. Oh good. All right. Thank you. Thank you Tracy. I will check for any public comment on this agenda item. I don't see any hands raised. So we are going to take a short recess to do some pictures. I don't know. Did anyone want to make a public comment? They just teared the photo off. I just wanted to make sure. Don't want to start off by leaving anyone out. Okay. Yes. Five minute recess. Okay. Thank you. Our return from our recess. And now we move on to item 4A, the spotlight on excellence. And we're going to welcome principal Theresa Fox to share about Mariposa and some of the work of the AI task force. Well, I am just really excited to have my
008colleague here. Theresa, well, first of all, has been an unbelievable principal at Mariposa. And she and I started our tenure here together. So I'm also pleased to report that from the very beginning, she was a close ally in understanding the promises and also the cautions around artificial intelligence and generative AI and has been instrumental in the leadership of not only our leadership team related to AI, but now it's working closely with Drew Galati on a teacher advisory team. And so we're going to get a two for tonight, which is about Mariposa and the good work they do there, but also some insights into the work that we're doing with artificial intelligence with our teacher pilot team. So over to you. Thank you, Dr. Frentress. Thank you, board of trustees. I want to give my just
009thank you to Tracy Park as our former board president. All right. It's always a pleasure to be here. It's always an honor to get to shine a spotlight on Mariposa staff and students. I'm controlling from here. Okay. Okay. Hang on just a second. And in particular, just our amazing staff and students. As I've spoken before to the board, everything we do at Mariposa begins with the strategic vision and the learner profile. And that begins with putting the learner at the heart and go ahead and go to next slide. Yeah. So I love you've heard me say this before. I'm going to say it over and over again, but I love that we have two old schools at San Carlos that are dedicated to the needs of nine, 10 and 11 year olds. I think it's
010really amazing the program that we can create by tailoring to their curiosity, their desire for voice and agency, their desire for growing independence leading into middle school. So you've heard me talk about our programs. I won't go into them, but I do just want to share my favorite statistic at Mariposa is that when we look at the rosters of all the kids participate in all these different things, it's 85 to 90% of our students every year that participate in one of these programs, one of these activities, most of them as leaders and if not as a leader, then as a participant. And I think it just speaks to the great programs that we create here that really tap into kids' individual interests, help them find their village and their people and set them up for
011success in middle school. You've also heard me talk a lot about project-based learning and I'm taking Dr. Frentress' advice to heart here because I can talk for hours about it. If you want to know more about the current state of PBL at Mariposa, there is an appendix to the slide, so feel free to look through those at your hearts to light. There's a cute little video segment in there too, but I do just want to say, you know, this is our fourth year of implementation and I just continue to be blown away by the high quality of work that our students are producing and the ways that our teachers are diving into inquiry meaningfully, authentically with students last spring. It took it up another notch, another level, and I'm really impressed, really proud. Next slide.
012All right, so project-based learning helps us achieve a lot of our goals, particularly with the learner profile. All nine of those competencies are addressed, taught, developed, nurtured, assessed throughout our project-based learning units. But this year, we are not only working on it through project-based learning, we have a district-wide effort to really focus on each domain within grade mix. Next slide. And you can actually go ahead one more for me. All right, so I know you can't read all the fine print on this. Really, I just need you to look at the colors and know that that blue section is our kind citizens. This year, we're really targeting that for TK through second grade. That's when our youngest learners are learning how to be a citizen at school, how to be a kind friend, how to
013exist in a community, communicate, collaborate with others. We build on that, and then students come to us in fourth and fifth grade, and that circle in the middle is really that sweet spot of self-aware learners that we're seeking to develop in our fourth and fifth graders. That's the age where they can reflect on their learning, they can set goals for themselves, they can track their progress, and it's just another one of those ways we develop that agency and that ownership. Next slide, please. So at Mariposa, really developing the self-awareness includes helping students do some self-assessment. Where do you think you are? Then doing some instruction and some skill building and having them self-assess again afterwards. The slide on the left, the picture on the left really shows what those durable skills are within self-awareness. So
014those, we teach them explicitly and we practice them with students. Next slide. This year, our fifth grade teachers took it another level. So we start every year within a PBL unit on identity and belonging. This year, they worked self-awareness into it, and our fifth graders worked in groups to dig into the durable skills, figure out how they were going to teach the fourth graders. So literally second week of school, the fourth graders were meeting with the fifth graders and learning, here's how you build these skills as a student. And you can see, be okay if the plans change, ways to calm myself down. I ask questions to understand adaptability at school. And not only were they teaching about these skills, but they're also creating the norm for here's how we operate at Mariposa. We work
015together in groups. We share our learning with other people. We get feedback from other people. So right away, just helping to establish that piece and growing their own self-awareness in the process. Next slide, please. I also just want to highlight beyond PBL, beyond our learner profile implementation, just other ways that we enrich learning at Mariposa. Last year, we brought the Walk Through the American Revolution to both Mariposa and Arroyo. And it's amazing. We're getting ready right now. Our performances are in January. So if you come to Mariposa anytime the next week, you will see full battle scenes and props and sets. They're super excited. Another program that we've been using at Mariposa for the last, this is our fifth year, is Technovation for Girls. And I am super proud of this program for the way
016that it fosters innovation and problem solving and just those technological skills and confidence in our girls. I want to highlight, if you can go ahead and play for me, this is one of our fourth graders from last year, Anya. Perfect. Thank you. So part of what I love about Technovation for Girls is that the girls identify a real-world problem and then they use technology to design an app that will help to solve that problem. For the last two years, they've already been integrating AI into their apps and figuring out how do we leverage AI in a really positive way that helps improve and change our community. So Anya's was an entry that made it to the quarterfinals. The girls compete against thousands of other girls from around the globe. And this was homegrown right here
017in San Carlos by a San Carlos mom. So I love that we keep this program going. This year, it's going to be facilitated by fourth grade Arroyo teacher Sam Erickson. And I think it's really going to thrive under the leadership of a certificated teacher. So I'm excited for that. Next slide. All right. So in our strategic plan, the learners at the center and the next ring out is the educator. And all that amazing stuff that I just shared about Mariposa is not possible without our incredible educators. And we are fortunate that we have teachers who love 9, 10, and 11-year-olds. That's why they are at the school they're at. And so that can look like joining in on Rainbow Day for Spirit Day, doing a masked singer skit for the student-led talent show. I've got
018video footage. It's pretty priceless. Or dressing up as storybook characters for Halloween. Our teachers really love and have fun with their students. Next slide. But they also spend a lot of time growing and developing themselves as educators as well. They know that being a teacher is a process of continuous learning and continuous improvement. And so beyond all the work we've been doing in BBL and learner profile, another thing we've been exploring is artificial intelligence. And what does AI look like in our education setting? We, you know, we're in a period of rapid technological change and an education that can sometimes be scary, right? It definitely brings challenges with it. But I believe that soon teaching with AI will be just like what we used to say about teaching with the internet, right? It'll be another
019tool that we use along with books, along with video, along with art, along with all of our hands-on supplies. And that will just be part of what excellent teaching and learning looks like. So our teachers have been working on updating their knowledge. We did a pilot last spring with Codmico at Magic School AI, just teacher-facing. So our teachers began exploring these tools. What does this look like for me as an educator to improve my practice? Maybe find some efficiencies in my workflow. This fall, we also had some teachers start piloting with students. So using a student-facing math and writing tutor in Codmico and in Magic School AI, a student-facing writing chatbot. So one teacher created a chatbot that impersonated a school principal. So the students could put in their arguments about why phones should be
020allowed at schools or to listen. And how the chatbots argue back and refine their arguments. So they've also been using to get some feedback on their writing. Next slide, please. One thing I just want to highlight here is how quickly this is spreading through our schools. We have a few key explorers, AI explorers at Mariposa, but they shared out a few tips to the rest of our staff in November and our participation and exploration shot through the roof. So you can see Mariposa is leading the district right now on this particular tool. And you can see all the different tools that they're using, right? A lot of different pieces there. Next slide, please. All right. I want you to hear from the kids. I went through some fifth graders who have been involved in these
021pilots and said, tell me what you think. Go ahead and play. I'm hearing from a couple of fifth graders from Ms. Alger's class in fifth grade at Mariposa. So what do you guys think about using AI in the classroom? Yeah, I think that it helps you. Some people think that AI will do all the thinking for students. The students will have to. What do you guys say to that? It doesn't help you write out the paragraph. It just helps you give examples and give information. That's not about helping write the whole paragraph. Well, like giving you the example. Okay. What did you find? I put in some stuff and it helped me. It helped me like really, I think. Did it give you some suggestions that you chose not to do? We included that we
022thought it was still pretty good. Right. So that's a key part of what I'm hearing from students and teachers who are piloting is that students aren't just taking verbatim what AI is giving them. They're actually taking it, thinking about it, applying it, integrating it. And that also AI, especially through Magic School AI, it's not giving them the passages. It's not doing the writing for them. It's giving them some things to think about, some places to jump in and stuff like that. So the kids for sure are big fans and teachers are getting really excited about it as well. All right. Next slide. The next spring in our expanding circle is our supportive community. And of course, all these amazing programs would not be possible without our community. And I'm so grateful for PTA and SCUF,
023whether it's bringing back the color run. That was really fun to have that returned by Linda Mariposa and Tierra London last spring. Our fall cleanup day, every cleanup day, we have so many family members and students come out to support us. And they helped us convert one of our science storage room into our new maker space. So I am grateful for all the ways our community supports. Next slide. Our multicultural night was, again, another great hit. Our family movie night. All these things that helped to build that sense of belonging for students and families. We worked really hard to build it within the classroom and out on the playground and in our programs. But we know that our families also need that sense of belonging, feel that sense of connection to our schools. Next slide.
024This year, we're doing another book study. We did one last year during our PTA meetings. It was really successful. So this year we've been diving into the disengaged team and really thinking about how do we partner together as schools and families to support our students through their different modes of learning throughout their years at Mariposa and Tierra London. Next slide. And the last part of community engagement I want to highlight is just that it's not just PTA, right? We've been partnering with the city of San Carlos, the San Mateo County Office of Education, Sam Trans. Thank you, Boris, for joining our safe travel committee. Thank you for taking us to school. So on tonight's agenda, I think there's an approval item related to a grant award that we got to do a feasibility study. We
025improve our ingress and egress and part of being at Mariposa and what are the possibilities for it to be a very constrained piece of geography. Yeah, but I'm grateful for the ways that our community really partners with us too. Okay, last slide. And I just want to end on what a banner year it's been for Mariposa. This was only our sixth year as a full school having fourth and fifth graders. It was our second time winning the Distinguished School Award. We also won the Kemp School Award with a royal for our PBL implementation. An amazing year and I look forward to continuing it with all of your support. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you Principal Fox. I love the vignettes with the kids. The Technovation app was especially awesome. So thank you so
026much for sharing an idea. Thanks for being here. Thank you. We will now move on to item five, our consent agenda. The consent agenda contains items that are routine in nature for which no board discussion is anticipated. So we act on them with a single vote. Check for public comment. So can I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? I need to move. Okay. Thank you. And now we move to section six, our information and discussion items. The purpose of these items is for information discussion only. No board action will be taken. Staff will present and then there will be time for clarifying questions. So starting us off will be Hans with our teaching and learning update on the 2025 California school dashboard. Okay. Well, thank you President Kinehan. Congratulations. Hopefully I can make
027it through this without too much interruption and fighting off nasty colds. I appreciate your patience with me while we go through that. Tonight as sort of our annual tradition, I have the chance to go through the latest California school dashboard, which was, it's 2025, technically it was released in mid-November about a month ago. And it is based on last year's school year. So in some ways it's old news. What I'm going to tell you tonight, a lot of which is not going to be a surprise because most of the dashboard is based on measures that we've already discussed this year or given an early update on. So, but overall the results were really positive. Again, good news overall for the achievement of our students and then the other areas in which the dashboard dives into.
028I think last year we were really, really excited in this year. I was like, I'm still really excited. It's just, wow, it's hard to maintain the level of growth that we had. I think last year we had, it's 22 of 23 in this year. It's 24 of 35. We went up two indicators. We'll get into why that was. 74.8 points above ELA in standards or 84.6 rather is an enormous achievement that not very many school districts can boast to be quite honest with you, along with another increase in math to 74.8 above standard. Remember that the dashboard is based on distance from standard, not on percent proficient. Most of the time we're doing our presentations, we look at percentage of students that are proficient or advanced on CASP, and this is based on distance from
029standards where they base the rating. So this is strictly based in growth for every student group. Declines is the way we want to go in chronic absenteeism. It can be a little confusing. It counts as a gain even though it was a decline. So we had an increased decline again in chronic absenteeism from 6% overall to 4.6% overall. This is actually lower than we were pre-pandemic, which is really impressive. And then again, we had measurable gains for some of our most vulnerable students, including students experiencing poverty, students learning English in almost every area, and receiving yellow, green, and blue in just about every area that they can. Suspensions and chronic absenteeism again are just wonderful areas of gain, and we continue to have more student groups that end up in the blue or the green,
030or even in the yellow as opposed to orange or red. One thing I want to remind you all about it, before I go through the specifics of each area, the dashboard is multi-dimensional. So it's two-dimensional rating. So we have a rating for growth, and we have a rating for overall. So you might have a really high level of achievement in language arts, for example, but if you don't maintain or grow in that area, you can actually be yellow, even though you are a really high level of distance above standard. And so in that two-dimensional sense, there are five by five matrices that we generally don't show in this presentation, but they're available online, and you can go in and see how much growth is necessary to maintain blue or green, or what will put you
031into yellow. But that two-dimensional piece can be a little bit confusing, so it's important to point out. Highlights here, I won't read the slide to you, but we did have a decline in our English learner progress indicator. And we'll talk about that a little bit more when we get to that slide. And we have two new indicators for students experiencing homelessness that was added. It was previously, I think you had to have 30 students in that area, and that threshold was lowered to 15. And so we now receive ratings. That's where we have 35 this year as opposed to 33 last year. So our language arts results, again, I mean, we had growth for seven of eight students groups. And it's just overall very impressive to explain a little bit about the slide for those
032of you at home and even for some of us in the room. The at-standard indicator, again, that's how the dashboard for language arts and mathematics is calculated, not based on percentage. So we had six students groups that whose results were above the at-standard area, and we had two that were below. And the two that were below, however, increased significantly. Students with disabilities going up 21.3 points from distance from standard and 30 for students experiencing homelessness. The only area that declined was for English learners, and yet they're still above the line. Another a little bit clarifying piece that's really important here is when they say English learners on this slide, it's current English learners and recently reclassified English learners together, as opposed to the EL progress indicator, which we'll get to later, which is just students
033that take the summit of ELPAC, some of whom have now been reclassified. So it is a different group of students that we're talking about when we're talking about English learners on these slides, as opposed to the indicator for English learned progress indicator. Again, in math, seven of eight groups, impressive growth, the new indicator for students experiencing homelessness, we had a small gain for them, but clearly they remain far behind the other groups. We just feel like, you know, one of our favorite things to say is teaching causes learning, and these are indicators that teaching causes learning. In other words, our students are benefiting from all of the things we're doing in terms of professional learning for our teachers, in terms of the instructional materials we use, the lessons that students are experiencing are really resulting
034in these gains. This is not by accident. And, you know, experiencing continued growth also requires that students want to come to school. So, you know, in either language arts or math, we feel like it's an indicator of those initiatives that we're really deep into, still showing good progress. So now we're going to dig deeper into the students learning English piece. And down in the corner, you can see in the right hand side here, this actually indicates growth for recently reclassified English learners. So those students actually grew in that category by 8.8 points, that is the distance from standard. So there is a positive amongst what looks like a very negative slide. Up in this area here, you see that what we're after is more kids being in the purple. And you can see last year
035in 2024, we experienced a pretty huge increase, right? It was much larger than anything we had experienced before. And then we increased, we experienced a decrease this year. Remember that this is just students, only students that take the summative LPAC in both 23-24, so in spring of 2024 and spring of 2025. So it's a very finite group of students. And it is comparing their scores. Did you maintain, in which case you end up in the teal color? Did you improve, which is purple, or did you decrease, which is the pink? And last year, we experienced many more students maintaining and a few more students not making progress in pink. So the natural question is, well, what are we doing about that? And we've immediately went to work on this and took this data to principals
036as well. We were digging deep to find patterns for students that were not making progress or are maintaining. We've also started a new initiative. It's really exciting, but it's really at the beginning. This lesson study project with Stanford is at the very beginning of, we have eight teachers that are participating in that project. And it's a partnership between us and Stanford, not unlike those that we've had before. But it is unique in that it's a small group and it really does dig deep into designing lessons. And our lens for this is designing lessons for students learning English, specifically as a target. And during that time, they'll have an opportunity to observe a lesson in each other's classrooms, observe, see what they saw, watch students report out. It's really exciting research-based work that shows great gains
037in terms of each teacher's learning and specific growth targets that they want to implement. And our hope and our goal is to then expand it as we move forward in future years. So that's an exciting piece that we're delving into. But most importantly, as principals work with their teachers and identify these students, I'll give one example. Last week, earlier this week, actually, we met with Theresa and Mindy, about four or five and some students that need further intervention. And one of the first things we did was say, how they do in LPAC. What does that look like for those students that are in the category of learning English? And so that's becoming, not that it wasn't before, but it's even more important at this point in time to look at their progress on this particular
038measure. Moving into chronic absenteeism, this looks wonderful and it is wonderful. Everything on this slide is pretty amazing. Granted, we're still red and homeless. And yet that level of chronic absenteeism, most school districts would die to have their students experiencing homelessness have that low of a chronic absenteeism rate. And it is an area that Megan Vizier, our director of student services, works regularly on with our community liaison, Jenny Salazar. Those students and families are regularly on their radar and they reach out to them on a regular basis. Every other student group is, it's amazing that everybody that grew are maintained. We have no other student groups in orange or red. And as we said overall, our overall number went from six to 4.6 percent. And yet, again, this is old news, right? This is through
039the end of last school year. Our latest tally on attendance does show an uptick in this area. And so we'll talk about that in a moment here in a couple of slides. Suspension rates, again, to have a 0.1 percent suspension rate overall is really unfathomable. And yet it is really important work because we know that students being out of class is not productive to learn. We just know that. We also know that studies have shown that suspension is not an effective intervention in that it does not change the behavior. It does not increase the students' want to be at school, which is really what we want when we're doing any sort of discipline, right? We're hoping to mitigate the issue and help the student improve. So our work in restorative practices, our work in positive
040behavior intervention support at every site is really showing gains in this area as well. That's not to say we don't have suspensions because we do. There are things that aren't suspendable and they do end up with students being suspended from class. And yet we're really exhausting all other areas that we might intervene with the student prior to having a suspension. And again, it's research-backed practice and it's really important to note that it's more experiencing great gains in this area. And it relates directly to sense of the moment. It really does. And that's what, if you read any research on it, that will show brightly in that research. So here is our latest outcome slide on attendance. And as you know, we've just seen a tremendous growth. If you look at 21, 22 at 96.9%, that
041was the first year back. So pre-pandemic, we touched 97 maybe once in between 2016-17 in the pandemic. So getting to 96.9 that year was really exciting. And yet we knew it was because students were so excited to come back to school, period, and families were. And travel was still impossible at that point. It was very limited. And yet we continue to see impressive gains from that point. We had a decline in 22, 23 when travel opened up and folks were able to interface more. And then we've seen growth since then. That last column, 25, 26, is through just prior to the Thanksgiving break. And we did see a minus 0.2% decrease from last year at the same moment in time. As is the case for all of the groups below, you see we're seeing an
042uptick in every area except for students learning English, who had down a little bit of a decline. Important things to note when we're doing this data, this is a moment in time, right? Chronic absenteeism is literally one of those things that changes every 10 days. This data was taken on day 68, I believe, which means that a student that had missed six days when it was taken is not chronically absent, but a student that was absent seven days is, because remember that's defined as 10% of the school year. So at any moment in time, this data changes. And so in 20 days, we could get different data that says something different. The bottom line is we know that there's been an increase in absenteeism. And we're really addressing that with our leaders. And we talked
043about it at every meeting, literally the last four meetings. We brought it forward and said, look, we've really got to get as active as we were back here in 22, 23 when we were trying to affect this number from 95 to 96.2. And principals are airing us. You may be experiencing this if you're out in the community and you've gotten a recent letter or a phone call or whatnot. The other factor that's new is the number of TK students we have, as opposed to, you know, if we go back to these numbers in 21, 22, for example, we had 90 TK students and now we have almost 300. And we know that TK students are not attending at the same rate. It's literally a point to a point and a half lower in attendance from
044the other grade levels. So it is having a greater effect on our overall number. So at those P3 schools, again, there's a concerted effort to reach out to families and say, you know, please, if you can read, if this is vacation or this is optional, try not to take it. And they're really outreaching to the students for the importance of early learning and how important it is to be in class and the correlation between being there and learning. So that is what we have to update and we'll bring some more updates next month when we do at least a portion of the LCAP Mid-Year Report, which is another statutory-required report that we've given you that updates on areas in our LCAP. Obviously, all of these indicators are also in our LCAP. So this is really
045sort of part of that mid-year update as well. Happy to take any clarifying questions. Steve, any clarifying questions? Question and comment. I'm just wondering when we'll next get it. Maybe, you know, this is part of that, what's next, but an update on students learning English and just, you know, if it makes sense for future agendas and that we hear about them more often over the next few months than we might otherwise given the data that we saw and the different things that the staff are working on. We'll have to hear how that's going. Sure. And then I can't remember if we heard anything about this at CSBA last week, but do we know, is there any consideration at the state level of considering TK attendance differently in terms of its impact on funding? I mean,
046I know there's this sort of ADA versus enrollment discussion. That's a different thing versus TK in particular. Nothing that we're hearing. I'm not having legislation or any advocacy for that in my groups. But the fact is they were in preschool before this. Yeah. And so, and many times they, you know, especially if you were to pay preschool, you just didn't go. It's just, you know, and if this is your oldest child and you have two other younger children, there's a lot of logic to it. And I know it's happening. I did, there was another superintendent in one of the presentations I went to who mentioned the same thing. I mean, it's a, it's just four years old. They're a little bitty. So there are different considerations that happen for different kids. I'll just have a
047comment that, you know, thank you for the thorough presentation. I think it's useful to walk through each category and really get an understanding of where some of the differences are and kind of where different groups are currently and what we're seeing. And I appreciate that for every area where it's like, okay, well, eight groups are doing well, but one really needs some help. There's an answer to what we're doing about that one. And so I just really appreciate the presentation and all the information you shared. All right. Thank you so much, Hans. I really feel like I understand the intricacies of the colors in the dashboard and how they get to those first better notes. Thank you. All right. And moving on to our next item, which is an update to several board policies. This
048is our first read of these. And I think I start out passing it to you. Actually, I'm going to pass it to mega BCA, who met with the steering committee and considered these social fights, all of the updates on it. Well, thank you, trustees for your time tonight. I'm bringing forward five policies related to student services for first grade and discussion. Two of these policies, mental health and the district school review board are proposed new policies for San Carlos. The first one I'll review is the district school attendance review board. The purpose of a school attendance review board, which I will call SARB, it's a long name to keep repeating. That's why we use acronyms, is to provide students with ongoing and unexcused absences, intensive guidance and assistance once resources have been exhausted at the
049site level. So this policy really codifies the process of the development of a district level SARB. Really the purpose is the school sites are working with families to address attendance. You'll see a mention in this policy about behavior as well. As Hans shared in his presentation, if a student is being suspended, they're not in school, that's having a big impact on learning. Or if they're having behavioral incidents where they can't be in class, that can have a huge impact on learning as well. So SARB can be used to address behavioral concerns in addition. So this really would allow us to have a district level SARB where we would pull together community resources and try to give further assistance to families to support their students getting to school. And then it would allow us to make
050referrals to the county level SARB if needed where we can get further community resources to families. The next policy is student records. Really the updates to this policy is to reflect changes in law. A couple of noted changes are with the collection or disclosure of documents regarding citizenship or immigration status of students or their family members. Another big noted change really is around protection of students' digital data. So really also outlines prevention and responses to cyber attack on student data. The next policy is bullying. There are a lot of changes to this policy. Mostly from the CSBA recommendation. There's a lot of removal of language from this policy that we have existing. Much of that language has now been moved to their recommendation for the administrative regulation. So following the approval of this board policy,
051we would then update the administrative regulation where a lot of the language around staff training is moved into the administration. Administrative regulation over the board policy. One change we made based on the CSBA recommendation is our committee really felt it was important to keep the definition of bullying and cyber bullying in our San Carlos school district board policy. So you will see that there. The next policy, this one is new for San Carlos, mental health. This policy would codify the practices we have in place and San Carlos school district's commitment to student well-being. This policy outlines requirements for information for students and staff and training for staff. In addition, this policy outlines the process for mental health counseling and referrals. All right. And then the last policy is suicide prevention. This is an update as
052well. The policy directs the school district superintendent or designated develop and implement comprehensive suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention measures to protect student well-being. There is mention of the mental health plan and what that is, is each county is responsible for providing mental health services to Medi-Cal beneficiaries. And so in San Mateo County, mental health services are managed by behavioral health and recovery services. So you may hear BHRS thrown around. That is San Mateo County's mental health plan really to make sure that residents who have Medi-Cal or no insurance have resources available. And the key changes to this policy, what they've added is collaboration with county agencies to align district policy with existing community suicide prevention plans. As you may be well aware, San Mateo County does have a very high suicide rate overall. So there
053is a lot of work at county level. It also allows review of materials and resources to make sure that we're aligned with best practices. There's establishment of a school site intervention team and then establishing a process for school staff to maintain daily or regular contact with all students in event of school closures. This was updated by CSBA following the pandemic. So to make sure that adults were frequently checking in on kids, even if they weren't in school. And then also making sure that school-based mental health professionals maintain regular contact with high-risk students. So these are the proposed changes to the board policies. Are there any questions? Yep. And we did have committee members participate in review of this process, so if there was any additions. Tracy, did you have anything? No, I did have, I
054think we talked about the SARV. There's language in it that says the board appoints SARV members, but we were deciding whether we need to tweak that because we aren't actually appointing them, but we will be approving those that get appointed to the review board, is that correct? Yeah, the SARV does follow a very strict guidelines similar to the board, so it would be brought to for board approval. If there's anything else, I mean we did talk about, yeah, the bullying board policy and how a lot of languages will be in the AR, but the AR does not come. Any questions or comments? Maybe just a quick question for me, and thank you for going through all of them in sequence. Just because I noticed that the SARV kind of CSBA policy was adopted a while
055ago, so I'm just wondering what have we been doing for the past? Like why are they coming now? What's been the practice to date kind of help contextualize what the time is? Yeah, I would really, I would say following the pandemic, we hadn't had any school attendance review boards, and the county had even paused their efforts, so there was really kind of a pause post-COVID as, you know, it was taking a while for kids to get back to school. We were seeing great gains with our attendance improving actually, and like many districts, so we were really focusing on site level interventions, and there really has been a big shift I would say overall. There's even been recent laws enacted to really focus on supports instead of punishment. There used to be some punitive measures for
056parents if they weren't sending their children to school, and now really the research and practice is supporting getting family support, right, and trying to uncover the barriers to student attendance and overcoming those barriers. So really our focus has been at the site level, A, in messaging to families, the importance of school attendance, and then our outreach to those families that are struggling and have barriers and trying to figure out ways we can support them. So we have not been holding that district-level SARB at this time. The county did reinstate their county-level SARB last year and sort of told districts if you don't have this policy, you should get it updated as we're kind of revamping this process with the changes in the laws. Okay, I mean maybe it's a little nippy, but yeah, in the
057listing of like the different agencies involved, I would want to move all the law enforcement type agencies to the end of the list and lead with like child welfare, so in some of the lists that are included. So just from what you were describing is how that focus has shifted, and so even how it reads to me, it kind of leads with the law enforcement in a couple different places. So I guess there's a lot of feedback from this conversation. It's fine the lists are what they are, that's all good, but I would just reorder them to put all the law enforcement last instead of first. Okay, thank you for that. Comments or suggested changes? I have a question before us. I agree with that change. Do you want it to, is it okay for
058us to change it and then just put it on the consent or would you like it that we need? No, I don't have a consent. It's just a suggestion. It's for you guys to consider. You're moving it forward, but that did jump out to me. What else? I'm sure you can do with it as you want. I don't think it changes the substance. I think it's just kind of for a little bit of samanians. So are you clear on the requested edit? Okay, and I was to follow up on the discussion we had, I think it was related to the suicide prevention policy. You know, we know there are places in the law and then it comes out in the policies where it refers to grade spans that are either Puppets are full in grade
059span or he has only part of it and then go into high school. So I just wanted to, I would just ask before you bring it back to just double check those places then that we're listing as it sounded like the conclusion was we need to stick with what's in the law have that reflected in the policy, even if it says case six and we're cave ever. So should making sure that that's reflected accurately. Yes, I can double check that I for my remembering is we had discovered that the laws were updated at different times. So there was a there was originally as for suicide prevention as seven through 12 law and then it was added realizing that there were children younger than seventh grade also having you know, risk for suicide and needing prevention.
060So then they updated the law to encompass K through six. So that is some of the recommendations from CSBA. But yeah, trustee Casanaga, I'm happy to look into more detail and confirm that these are the correct grades for our policy. There's one example says that this policy will affect K through six students, the county mental health and also be consulted. So I think one of the questions we had was well, if it's a seventh grader than the county mental health, does the kind of health plan not apply? I would assume it would, but we get to just confirm those things. So I think what we'll do is we'll put this on discussion for as opposed to consent when we bring this one back to suicide prevention. Yes. If we're going to do that, then probably
061the if we're considering different language, it makes sense. Thank you, Megan. Thanks Megan. Check for public comments. I'm already falling down. So now we move on to part seven of our agenda, the discussion and action items. The items in this part of the agenda 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 and comment and have a discussion. We'll then take public comment and possibly deliberate some more in the vote. So I got some mouthfuls here. 7A is the approval of a resolution. Do I have to read all of these now or when we may? Yes, and would you like me to get you a cup of tea? No, I'm good. Resolution number
062six, 25 slash 26 of the Board of Education of San Carlos School District authorizing the issuance and sale of not to exceed 75 million aggregate principal amount of bonds of the district by a negotiated sale, approving a bond purchase agreement, a continuing disclosure certificate, and an official statement for the bonds, and authoring other related items, actions. So am I handing it to you, Jennifer, or to Ralph? I think Ralph is prepared to introduce our partner from KeyJet, right Ralph? I am. Perfect, thank you. So this item is authorizing the sale of the next series of Measure H bonds. The resolution was prepared by our long-standing financial partners, advisors from ORIC and KeyJet, who have supported the district through multiple bond sales and reissuance. Dawn Fields from ORIC serves as the district's bond council. Dawn is
063a partner in ORIC's public finance group with over 30 years of experience, and ORIC has served as the bonds council going back to 2005. Dawn is not here tonight. Chet Wang is a managing director at KeyJet and a member of their municipal finance advisory group. Chet is a seasoned municipal advisor with more than two decades of experience in California education, and KeyJet has been advising the district since 2008. Our internal team of Dr. Frentress, Jennifer Gabri, Denise Lacroix, Chris, and myself worked closely with Dawn and Chet to review them and finalize the documents you have before you this evening. This resolution authorizes the sale of $75 million in Measure H bonds. At this time, I'd like to introduce Chet Wang, who will provide a brief presentation in relation to items 7A and 7B, and is
064available to answer any questions. Thank you very much, and good evening, President Kinahan, members of the board, Dr. Frentress, first and foremost, my colleague Jenny says hello. So as Mr. Cray mentioned, before the board this evening are two items, 7A and 7B, the issuance of Measure H bonds, and also a prospective refinancing. So we'll review the economic conditions, the prospective financing structures, and next steps should the board approve the resolutions. So we'll start with slide two. As an overview of Measure H, you'll recall this is your $176 million bond approved in March of 2024 for a tax rate of $30 per 100,000 of assessed value. We've accessed the first installment of series A bonds for $50 million. That was just about a year ago in September of 2024, which leaves us with $126 million left
065to issue, and the plan is for this next second installment of series B bonds to be for $75 million. So in looking at the district's assessed value, this is the value of all taxable property within district boundaries that will serve as the repayment base for the bonds issued for Measure H and the potential refinancing. The districts had incredible growth. In the 25-26 fiscal year, San Carlos School District grew 6.2 percent to an all-time high of $16.7 billion. Over the past decade plus, the lowest growth rate that you've had was 5.2 percent, and your long-term average is 30, 40 years, all about 6.5 percent. So very healthy growth. On the next slide is a snapshot of municipal bond interest rates. This chart's very fascinating because you approved your election in March of 2024. Interest rates spiked,
066and then they came down, and then you issued series A in that little dip. And then following that, you can see the huge spike in April of 2025. That was the implementation of U.S. federal tariffs, and interest rates increased about 1.2 percent from the time that you issued series A. Here we are just about ready to issue series B, but as luck would have it, interest rates have come down, and in no part due to the Fed. So in September and October, the Fed made its first two rate cuts of 0.25 percent each, and actually just yesterday the Fed made its third rate cut for an additional 25 basis points, and so now the Fed funds rate is about 3.5 to 3.75 percent. They are telegraphing at least one additional cut in 2026, but all
067of that can change depending on who our Fed chair is, what the economic conditions look like, but where we are right now, at least we are in April of 2025. Next slide, please. So what would this second series of measure H bonds look like? If we follow the certain assumptions of assessed value growth ranging from 4.75 to 5 percent, you'll recall your long-term average for 30 and 40 years is six and a half percent, and under today's interest rates were at about 4.7 percent. You can see on the chart to the top right that 75 million dollars of series B bonds is represented by the green bars, so we stack those on top of the yellow bars. Those were the series A bonds for 50 million dollars, and you can see we're still below 30
068dollars per hundred thousand in every single year of measure H. The chart to the bottom right is all of your outstanding bonds, and the district currently is at a tax rate of 68 dollars per hundred thousand, and so you can see measure H will just overall stack on top of your the table to the left is the prospective issuance schedule where we've issued 50 million for series A, we're looking at 75 million for series B, and series C and series D are moving targets. We'll work with Mr. Crane, Dr. Frentress, and the team on when you might need series C and or series D. Right now we're phasing them about three years apart to meet with the IRS spendout rule that you spend tax-exempt bond proceeds within a three-year time frame. Next slide please. So
069we talked about measure H. Item 7B is we're always looking at how can we save taxpayer dollars through a refinancing prior debt, and the district's had a great track that we're going over the past 20 years where you saved a million here, two million there, in total 12.6 million dollars of savings going back 20 years, and we like to look at the refinancings in conjunction with new money financing so that we can be efficient with staff time and also cost of issuance. So in looking at your outstanding series of bonds, there's two series that we're looking at. One currently makes sense, another is on the cusp with some considerations. It makes sense to authorize them because if we sell the bonds in the early part of 2026, again a lot might change where the 2016
070refunding may make sense to refinance, but authorizing it does not obligate the district to refinance. So similar to refinancing a home mortgage, we are replacing higher rate debt with lower rate debt. The difference is we are not extending the original repayment. So what do these numbers look like? And there's a ton of numbers on page eight. So the table under the green with the left, that's the refinancing of series 2015. You can see there's savings in every single year, and the refinancing of series 2015 currently generates $1.6 million of debt service savings. Under the yellow in the middle, those are replacing some deferred interest bonds. So you can see there are some payments where we are using the lower cost current interest bonds in years 26 through 30 where there were previously no payments. That
071means on a tax rate perspective, there are dissavings. So when we look at a combination of series 2015 and series 2016, you have savings of $1.9 million in aggregate, but there's four years of dissavings. And what that would mean is a tax rate increase in those years. This is why I don't believe currently the 2016s make sense to refinance. If by the time we sell measure H and explore this refinancing, we can minimize those negative figures. We'll work with district staff to say, this might make sense to consider, but on its own, the refinancing of 2015 has 1.6 million of savings. That's achieved on the very far right by reducing the interest rate by 0.86% without extending the term. And the 2016, should that move forward, would add an additional $300,000. And as far as
072the next steps, there's a few hundred pages of legal documents. It's the resolution, which is authorizing the measure H bonds for $75 million. It would authorize exploring the refinancing if it makes sense to refinance. And it sets the major parameters, the $75 million issuance amount, getting a credit rating from standard imports. There's also what's called form documents, documents that are going to be finalized when the bonds are sold, but that are currently in draft form. That's the preliminary official statement. That's the offering document circulated to investors. There's the bond purchase contract, the escrow agreement, the continuing loaner certificate. A lot of these documents, if you think about getting a mortgage loan, they're standardized loan documents. And then they're catered to you based on your affordability, the amount of loan that you're getting, your repayment terms.
073So that's what these legal documents are like, or it takes the standard set of documents and then tailors them in conjunction with us and with district staff as to your financing plan. $75 million for measure H, refinancing of series 2015, refinancing of 2016. So that's how ORD prepares the documents that are before you this evening. So should you approve those two resolutions for 7A and 7B, we would work with district staff to update the district credit rating sometime in late January to position the offering document to go out to investors in late February, selling the bonds in early March, and then delivering bond proceeds and or refinancing savings at the end of March. So with that, welcome. Any questions you may have? Start off, any questions? I assume for the discussion we should stick with
074number A, which is the non-issuance of series B. Questions required? Okay. Let me see if there is public comment. So we are needing a motion to approve all four documents that are attached, or are we just approving the resolution? Just the resolution. Ah, that's much more simple. Would anyone like to make a motion? I move approval of resolution 62526. I'll second that. One favor? Aye. And then moving on to 7B, which is the potential refunding. I did have one question. So do you do the issuance of the series B and the refinancing at the same time, or one and then the other? Same time. Okay. So do you want to comment on that? I have a question. Okay. What is the threshold for determining whether the refinancing of 2016 bonds makes sense? Is there a
075simple way to explain that, or is it a complicated sort of calculation? There is a simple way to explain it. So let's go back to page eight. And so legally, you only need to have a penny worth of savings, which you're not going to do a financing for a penny worth of savings, but there is an industry benchmark. So if you look on the tables to the very far right, you'll see a figure that says PV savings. That's present value savings. So if we took series 2015, it saves $1.6 million over a 15-year timeframe. In present value dollars, that $1.6 million is $1.17 million. And then if you divide that by the amount of bonds with the principal amount that you're refinancing, that PV savings is 5.55%. The general benchmark to do a refinancing is
076anything at 3% or above. We are above that benchmark for series 2015. For series 2016, you'll see that even though there's 300,000 of savings, we're at 0.6%. So we need a little bit of help for that to get up to 3%. Maybe just an ask. Since it seems like this is where we're giving you the authority to explore this and then move forward with it. When there is sort of additional analysis and decision on whether to refinance the 2016 ones, can we get a report back just on what that outcome was? And then we could just do that through a board update. Yeah, absolutely. Because sometimes this is really dynamic and of course we'll be in touch with chat and I can communicate that to the board. Thank you. Okay, I'm raised. So we need
077a motion for this resolution. Motion to approve 7B, resolution 72526. All in favor? Aye. Thank you so much, Chet. Thank you. Very informative. Yeah, really helpful. Thank you, Chet. Our best to Jenny and Aniela. We are moving on to 7C, which is the approval of the first interim report. So I will pass this off to Ralph. Yes, thank you again, President Cuninan. I have to look at the sharing. So thank you. First I want to say thank you to Chris for all of the hard work that he put in to get all of the work done in the back end and the accounting work. So he spent countless hours making sure everything lined up and everything balanced in the ERP system. So thank you to Chris for all his hard work. I know it's been
078two hours in a board study session recently, so I'm going to try and stick to my 10 minute allotment here on the board agenda, but I will leave time for questions at the end. So I could even think I'll work through the key changes since budget adoption, strategies we used to manage expenditures as one-time funds begin to expire, an overview of our multi-year projections, updates on our restricted funds and the implications of a parcel tax expiration in 2028. At the end I will ask for your approval of the first interim report as presented. The first interim is our first financial checkpoint of the year. It includes actual spending through October 31st and updated revenue assumptions. This allows us to adjust the budget based on the most accurate information available to us. Required certifications, both the
079first and second interim reports require formal board approval. The first interim we are submitting with a positive certification, meaning we can meet our financial obligations this year and in the next two fiscal years. Our budget cycle overlaps from year to year. The first interim covers July through October. At the same time we are finalizing the audit from the prior year and beginning planning for the next year's budget starting in January. This overlap is normal and part of the continuous cycle of the school district budgeting year. So this is a new slide that I'm presenting and it shows the overlap of the budget cycle from year to year and where they overlap. And you can see we are in December presenting first interim. This is the dark board and COLA. When developing the budget and interim
080reports we rely on school services of California dark board which provides key planning factors for us to use. One important factor is the cost of living adjustment or COLA. For 2026-2027 the COLA was initially projected at 3.02 percent but has already dropped to 2.5 percent. This trend of declining COLA projections has been consistent over the past few years. For San Carlos every one percent reduction in COLA results in roughly $300,000 less in funding. Changes from adopted budget. Since adopted budget enrollment increased by 86 students which includes higher than expected TK's number of students. We also updated the transitional kindergarten add-on from the conservative estimate we used in June to the current rate of $5,545. Together the increased enrollment and higher TK add-on generated about $1.4 million dollars the additional revenue which reduces the need to
081transfer from reserves. We also received a new one-time student support and professional development block grant of $871,000. Additionally several positions budgeted at higher salary steps were filled at lower steps resulting in savings and our actual health and welfare costs came in lower than originally projected again based on the budgeted amount for that and what employees actually chose as far as their health and welfare benefits. This is the revenue composition LCFF makes up this local control funding formula makes up 63 percent of the district's total revenue local sources primarily parcel tax at three million and the san carlos education foundation at 2.4 million contribute almost 19 percent these two local sources are a significant component of our overall budget this is our expenditure composition the largest portion of expenditures is employees and salary benefits services and
082other operating costs make up 19 percent our ending fund balance our combined ending fund balance is projected to decrease about seven hundred and eighty thousand dollars most of this decrease is on the restricted side where we intentionally use restricted balances before drying down from reserves the unrestricted general fund decreases less than a thousand dollars essentially remaining flat to the components of the ending fund balance the efficiencies achieved through our budget strategy have allowed us to increase the parcel tax uncertainty fund to 2.4 million dollars that's the lowest blue arrow on the screen while maintaining reserves for future tk enrollment needs we've also added the new student supports and professional development grant which is new this year and we're in the stages beginning stages of developing a plan for these expenditures that will align with the
083upcoming textbook at options we continue to use the one-time funds as such as the learning recovery fund these one-time sources will be fully expended by 2027 after which their associated costs become pressure on the general fund that's the middle blue line of the two hundred and five thousand you see there and this is important not only for the learning aspect and the belonging but for our funding so attendance has a significant financial impact the difference between 96 percent average daily attendance and 95 percent average daily attendance represents a loss of approximately three hundred and six three hundred twenty four thousand dollars for san carlos this highlights i think important attendance rates are not just for student learning but for the financial these are our overall enrollment projections we're projected to increase in enrollment through 2028
084followed by a slight decline these projections incorporate local housing developments but still involve uncertainty whether those actual projections come to fruition as increased enrollment or or not for the district our budget strategy has temporarily reduced expenses and i say temporarily because we're using restricted one-time fund balance followed by a slight decline no i'm sorry but as one-time grants expire in 27 and 28 the structural deficit will grow without additional revenue or expenditure reductions the parcel tax expiration in 2028 adds further risk if not renewed we have a structural deficit this year of 2.5 million dollars that's being addressed with a transfer from reserves that's our fund 20 account of 811 thousand dollars the rest of the structural deficit is being addressed with the use of restricted fund balance and that's 1.7 million dollars coming from
085that area in 26 27 that structural deficit grows to 3.3 million dollars transfer from reserves increases to 1.7 million dollars and we're still using the restricted fund balance of about 1.6 million dollars in 27 28 that structural deficit grows to 4.3 4.4 million dollars the transfer from reserves grows to 1.3.1 million dollars and you can see that their restricted fund balance is a little bit less of 1.2 million dollars in the out years for 28 and 29 that restricted and fund balance goes down to almost nothing and then our transfer from reserves will increase further that's also the year that the parcel tax is set to expire so if that doesn't renew we're going to see an even greater deficit an additional three million dollars we continue to meet the state minimum of three percent
086required for reserves over the multi-year projection of 25 26 27 28 through 27 28 the multi-year projection shows the decrease in ending fund balance year over year a positive development is the amount needed from reserves is lower than was projected at budget adoption in 25 26 for 25 26 it is 3.8 million dollars less than it was at budget adoption 26 27 that draw on reserves is one point or 2.1 million dollars less than originally projected and in 2020 27 28 it is 1.3 million dollars less than projected at budget adoption we still need to transfer a significant amount from 120 reserves in 27 28 and that would be even more in 28 29 as I described earlier if the parcel tax is not renewed our three percent reserve requirement equates to about three months
087of operating expenditures which is relatively small maintaining higher reserves helps the district manage cash flow especially because san carlos fluctuates between lcff and community funded status which affects the timing of cash receipts into the overall cash flow given the uncertainty around the parcel tax renewal keeping reserves strong is particularly important our other funds the majority of these fund balances have not changed since budget adoption fund 12 our child development fund is projected to end the year at 190 000 higher due to more accurate costs and realizing this cspp revenue from the additional students fund 17 increases by about 550 000 to support upcoming textbook adoptions when 20 shows a higher balance due to reduced need to transfer from 20 to support the general fund based on our budget strategy of using our restricted fund balance
088before our reserves fund 21 decreases by about 15 million dollars as measure age projects progress and we're paying off those invoices for measure age our key challenges we face several challenges with expiring one-time grants ongoing costs enrollment and ada volatility and increasing difficulty competing with surrounding community funded districts for staff due to the widening revenue gaps you also see the art and music instructional materials grant expiring in 2026 the learning recovery emergency block grant expiring in 2028 our ada is turning down as was described before part of that is you know the increased number of tk students which was described in Hans's presentation there are external factors that are also putting the pressure on the budget st college remains close to flipping in and out of too many funding stats we discussed that at length
089their board study session which affects funding and cash flow future revenues depend heavily on the governor's final budget and coal adjustments which continue to trend downward we also face uncertainty in the future of federal funding tk funding and increasing costs in areas like utilities and pension contributions this concludes the first interim report i asked the board for any questions and then to approve the thank you ralph questions a quick question about the the student support and professional development grant how much is that did you say $371,000 and is that this year that's one for three years to spend that and with the two textbook adoptions coming up we're going to make sure that that's available to have appropriate professional development for the teachers to be able to utilize those resources maybe i'll ask a question
090as well just removing our study session and sort of other prior information i just want to make sure i have this right in my head that what i remember is that in our kind of three-year projection previously we were fully drawing down fund 20 and then starting to tap down to 63 in sort of the near term and if i've i think i looked at this correctly but i just want to say that then have you tell me if i got it right or not is that now it looks like we at least for the three-year projection have enough in fund 20 as of sitting here today and knowing the restricted fund and all the rest of it but fund 20 doesn't get spent down all the way in three years we have a little
091bit more question essentially then that's correct with the same thing that we've been doing yes with all the strategies we're doing the savings realize the other efficiencies you know renegotiating contracts you know making sure that we are using that restricted fund balance first before dipping into the reserves that's absolutely correct okay thank you if i may also that we're starting to build a reserve for the parcel tax with any efficiencies we we find so that in the event any decisions are made here that um would cause us to need to fill that three million dollar gap that we have that set aside too thank you absolutely gives us a little more time to make adjustments i just had a comment that i like your um new slide the budget cycle i really enjoyed that versus
092the wheel this is shows you sort of are always kind of doing three things or you're doing three things at once it's a team effort we are um so and i also thought the presentation is very clear so appreciate that thank you Ralph chris thank you did you have any um i had one i'm sorry if i missed the explanation on slide 11 there's a blue arrow pointed at the yellow fee it looks like are those one-time funds or will there be renewed or how do we need to be worried that that funding is going to go away no yeah i'm sorry the blue line is really pointing towards these but bug is what enabled but i will talk about you know those are not one-time funds those are funds that are determined by our
093upp our unduplicated percentage counts and so there was a slight adjustment for that this year where they lowered the the threshold for tier one elope funding to 55 from 75 making more schools districts eligible for that top tier funding which means we're the the second tier of funding there's less available for districts such as ourselves that have less than 55 upp percentage and so right now that allotment is about 1200 dollars per student but um it was supposed to be 1500 dollars per student so we're waiting to see if they're going to make that whole and they're still trying to see if there's any other districts that are not going to be utilizing the funds that were allocated but at least at this time we should receive that and ongoing we should receive that a
094little less than we anticipated but um we will be receiving it yep did you want to i was going to but yeah um i just wanted to express appreciation to the staff for your continuous effort to find savings and think ahead to the risks and plan at least the things that we can control given there's so many things that we can't control um and sort of manage the reality of operating a structural a structural deficit and um the fact that with so relying so heavily on one-time funds as california makes school districts do um that we're just managing that in a really i think effective and detailed professional way so i appreciate all that you all are doing um given the realities that we face um and i thank you for adding the fund balance
095reserve numbers for the mip and we talked about that at the study session and those numbers are actually better than i thought they might be so right so they're not there's not that they're not the ones i've seen by far um in my time on the board so uh let's see i think that's it i just express appreciation for and you know hope that our community kind of understands the challenges that we face with the one-time funding and um supports the extension to the parcel tax thank you all right i think we need to move to a motion to approve the first interim um to approve the first and third second favor aye thank you all thank you all right and now we are on seven d the approval of the mou with csa the
096revised salary schedule for transitional kindergarten classroom aids that will be me sorry thank you sarah um tonight we're asking for your approval to increase in ranges for the tka position proposed increase for the tk classroom a classification reflects recent updates to the job description which we completed back in march and it also concludes negotiations for 2024-25 this was an item that was the ta was contingent on uh we feel as though the increase in ranges is commensurate with the increase in the duties and the involved in needs of the k program um with the approval um of the mou this position would move from range 25 to range 26 which is also keeps us competitive with some of our neighboring school districts haven't used us competitors that's time for your approval questions thank you to
097the negotiating teams for continuing to work on this yes much appreciated is there a motion to approve the mou and the revised salary schedule so moved okay we'll second in favor thank you and now we are on to you then e approval of school plans for student achievement take the view hon and that's me again right okay thank you sarah as you are aware each site develops and approves their school plans for student achievement in alignment with our l cap and updates their goals and actions annually based on district and site level data that they review they engage principals engage their staff or school site councils and in some cases pta and other groups as well as you read through the cipsa and speaking specifically about the goals which really are the heart of the
098school plans you see a lot of intentional alignment amongst the schools all schools have goals for math and language arts for example just as we do in our in our l cap and then you also see that they have either a seo social emotional learning or a sense of belonging goal and or an attendance in chronic after absenteeism goal based on what the data says they need or want and there's also a couple that have goals specific to increasing community involvement which is again that's our l cap goal five so the alignment is intentional and it's expected in a lot of ways as well and most of all we do give principals the leeway of making as personalized to their population as possible so tonight we're asking for approval of these school plans for the
099current school year happy to take any questions just wondering based on we heard a lot at csda last week about sort of death by reports and how at least there's some oh that the legislature will take some actions and there's not quite so much reporting that school districts are required to do is this kind of plan for this particular plan i guess something that drives create you know drives thinking from on our on the part of our school sites or is this something where this is all work we would be doing this is just a place that we have to put it because the state requires us to do so yeah i think it's a lot of it's some of both but probably a lot of the latter it's not as if principals wouldn't engage
100their staff or their side casual to do it anyway it's just it's a it's more formal process that's governed in order to fill out this particular document and have formally approved it's important also to note that if we were a title one school district you actually do these commensurate with your l cap so it goes at the same time as your l cap which has some advantages and some disadvantages obviously and the disadvantage for us i think is we actually ask principals to go and do their own l cap engagement commensurate with ours that we're doing at the district level which can help inform some you know nuances that we might want to add to our l cap as well instead of it being just purely focused on their school goals in particular all right
101and we need a motion to approve the eight school plans for student achievement and approval of the eight subsets second paper thank you now seven f approval sensing project at a rendal mariposa center and we'll bring up jim d thank you so tonight we are bringing forward a project that has overdue and we have some sites that have asked us to repair their fencing for a couple of years now we have consolidated the requests and put them into one rfp so that we would get the best competitive bidding process that is available so we use our hubca processes and we've received a healthy response to our rfp which was about five firms participating in the job walk and out of those five firms three submitted a competitive bid so we had the lowest bidder when
102assesses required and we are hoping that you will be able to the three projects and the scope for if you're curious is inside of the cup agreement that is in the board docs as well as so if you're kind of curious to see a visual of where these fences are going and that's where it's the timeline so we are asking for we do need to communicate with our central families that live and the property is adjacent so we're giving time for that making sure they understand the improvements that we're making but it also impacts some of them do not have fences and the fences are our fence is their fence we want to make sure that we have a proper approach to that and so we're also conducting a survey related to the property line
103to make sure that we are you know compliant and that those steps are happening in the background and but we also the other two fencing projects that are run are squarely on a property not in those extra steps so that's why we would want to make sure it's like within the next 90 days or 60 days i do believe in the rfp we put 60 days after notice of awards so that's for men um kind of put us on the time range but i think that's manageable we'll be able to get the message out we're prepared we've you know we're ready for that process to take place questions okay to the agreement with crusader fencing thank you second all in favor all right thank you jim all right all right seven g approval of form
104j13a request for allowance of attendance due to emergency conditions thank you so as you recall back on november 21st we were notified in the early morning hours shortly before school that the water main had broke on the alameda so that affected the three schools on that site which tiara linda mariposa and the charter school so this is a form when we have to fill out it's a j13a request for allowance due to attendance due to an emergency without potable water it's not safe to have students and staff on campus and we had no way to mitigate that or come up with an alternative plan because it was it was so close to the beginning of school so closing school for the day was the appropriate measure and in doing so we fill out this form
105it gets sent to the county office of education and then it gets sent to cde for final approval we want to get ahead of this and get this submitted as soon as possible with your approval because it takes them a long time to review these and get back to us let's take any questions public comments can i just make a comment about how quickly the district moved on that day um given how late notice it was all the um staff kind of came together and the teachers on those campuses and all the families were able to get their kids back into homes and you know that was really well done and um i just kudos to the team but i'm sure can we have i can often the approval of form j13a thank you thank
106you all in favor 27h approval of our board meeting calendar so as part of the board reorganization process we're required to approve the board meeting calendar the two things that have changed uh which we've discussed previously but are now on this revision are the board retreat on the 22nd of january which will be held at the skyway center at 4 p.m i know uh and then the topic has been identified for the february 5th study session uh the parcel tax feasibility but otherwise the calendar or the calendar meetings remains unchanged um although it is possible that one of the sessions will be cancelled in february but we will bring that back if that is the case i want to thank veronica for finding the skyway center i'm excited to try a new venue for our
107retreat see how that goes thank you any comments or questions okay a little comment no okay no approval of the board calendar okay now this is our final i believe action item which is to review our committee and representative assignments um so thinking uh for the new year we can consider any changes to existing assignments um if we felt like we needed to we could also our upcoming retreat assess whether any additional committees are needed and i can just run through what the committees are so we have the two plus two joint city and district committee typically the current board president and previous board president attend those meetings so if we follow that protocol then sarah c would roll off and i would roll on and then we have a role for an advocacy representative
108which i have been filling and i am happy to share and pass that along to someone um that has mostly entailed um staying connected to csba for they have their legislative action week in the spring when you meet with state elected officials i try to stay in touch with the same county school boards association and potentially go to coast to coast anyone else wants to take that or join me or i'm happy to keep doing it too thank you sarah oh thanks and you're all welcome to come to um you know to the legislative meetings they're they're pretty interesting maybe that's something we can talk yeah for this next year share about them um then we have our board policy subcommittee tracy and sarah c have been ably serving on that committee and then we
109voted on our representative for the county committee for school district reorganization thank you q for assuming that role do you know what you signed up for actually it comes when we get to board comments okay okay great um and then facility steering committee has been myself and boris keep going with that and then uh we have a representative attending ptac the parent teacher association coordinating council currently has been for us i'm wondering if q might be interested in that role terrific okay i think that's all do we need to vote on these i think you do um and uh i know that we're going to have further discussions about a couple of them but then we would bring back any changes to the board agenda in january or i guess february afterwards um how do
110we do this do we just vote on the ones where there's been a shift yes all right it's a two plus two and so two plus two would become um myself and tracy and the ptac representative would become q removed thank you second favor all right all right i did not check from public comment there are no answers thank you thank you for backing you okay we are moving on to item eight future agenda items um so i'll start just to talk about our retreat a little bit which is on january 22nd i'm thinking i'll probably reach out after the holidays to individuals to see about leading different sections but if you have ideas of things you want to bring to the retreat please let me know um we are thinking that we could incorporate
111some time to share out from the csba conference um if everyone has just a few highlights of what they learned that might be a good time to share that and then i'm excited for our study session on february 5th considering the parcel tax measure yes yes i will in january the board will receive audit reports on the district and also on san carlos charter you'll also receive and approve the school safety plans um and you'll receive the report of the parcel tax oversight committee right in january and then the study session as you pointed out will be on the parcel tax the board will receive the tracking poll results and learn more about the recommendations from the superintendent's advisory committee on parcel tax any questions or comments on coming agenda items now we move on
112to our communications portion of the agenda we begin with a 9a public comment we've reached 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 comments are limited to three minutes um we ask that if you're raising concerns about students please refrain from sharing any information that may expose a student's identity this is a public recorded meeting and you're obligated to maintain student privacy uh second please be aware 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 uh so do we have any public all right and then we move on to employee group comments so i believe dan will start
113with you uh good evening uh i want to thank tracy park for always having uh as a leader of the board for having a positive outlook and uh always being focused on teachers and students um and welcome sarah kinehan as president sounds like a big job anyway uh thank you to jennifer frentress ralph crane amber farina and veronica rickson for convening the superintendent advisory council um which is an exploration of a possible june parcel tax extension uh it's been a positive experience to meet with parents community leaders principals and explore um a parcel the parcel tax renewal uh jennifer has been an inspiring advocate uh for this endeavor always upbeat positive organized so i appreciate um seeing that and experiencing that um and then i also want to say that i appreciate our monthly meetings
114that angela notton and i have with jennifer frentress and hans barber uh we share concerns and challenges raised by our teachers um and i appreciate how jennifer and hans listen without defensiveness our meetings are always uh collaborative even when we're sharing difficult feedback sometimes and i like to wish you happy holidays uh to you and your families thanks thank you dan and i don't think i see csa representative so then we will move on to board member comments so i thought i would share about the committee for district reorganization because there was since the last time we met there was a meeting um where they so the representative representatives from the district vote for the members of that committee um that was the only meeting that they have a monthly meeting scheduled and it almost
115always gets cancelled that was actually the only meeting i think of the committee that's taking place this year um but what the committee does is evaluate and act on citizen petitions to change school boundaries um so i think statute empowers a committee to independently formulate plans for that but apparently in the last 20 years it does not exercise that authority so it's responding to proposals um in the last meeting i attended a couple years ago it was somebody in the guvlin skyline boulevard they wanted their parcel in a different school district it's currently signed so it's typically that kind of consideration um but then we also sounds like processes district applications to transition to by trustee area elections which is a change that's been happening over the last few years um but it sounds like
116because school districts are authorized to conduct their own trustee area rebalancing which has to be done for um they have to be the areas have to be population balanced the voting purposes but because school districts have the authority to do that i don't sound like the committee also doesn't often do that um so you will get put on the email list for those meetings so you'll receive notice should one happen it sounds like there will be more elections next year there's four-year terms and i think there's more people coming up than for term next year so that probably will be the thing that you would need to look out for thank you this alternate too it's an idea i think if attend if our first i don't know why there must be a statute statutory
117requirement for there to be a internet um and uh yeah thank you to all of our teachers and staff for um the push towards the end of the year i know it's crazy time and kids are hyped up on the excitement for the holidays um and also i just appreciate all of your artwork and everything you do for the kids in our district degree and happy holidays to all of you next um i guess for me a couple things i want to touch on uh first i really appreciate a chance to attend the csba this year as sort of my first one to get a sense of what what that world looks like uh and i thought for me at least the most eye-opening part was just being able to interact with a lot of
118other school board members from other districts get a chance to understand kind of the kinds of issues uh that they're dealing with and maybe kind of reflect on well what's going on in san carlos and i guess i came away with the strong impression that our staff does such great work that we're in a position to be able to be looking ahead and we're not putting out the day-to-day fires in the way that's what the districts are and so um i i guess i came away with great context and very much appreciate for how we do things here so i want to just pass on a lot of kudos to the entire staff team that helps make that possible um and then the other thing that i just wanted to highlight sometimes it feels like
119some of our after-school partners get a little bit lost in a shuffle but i'm really excited tomorrow uh the belmont uh san carlos after-school program at ea is having their winter sing which my daughter has been practicing for for months uh for uh and so she gets to sing a really cute song tomorrow and i just uh you know those those folks spend a lot of time with our kids and really do a great job of building their own community and really being part of the international environment of obviously beyond their regular school days so um just want to say give a shout out to them and um with that simply um i'll just piggyback on what boris said about cspa aec conference i just it's always i guess my fourth year going is that
120right and um every year it's you come back you're like oh san francisco district is so great and our board is great and you know the staff the superintendent we all work really well together and so you come back appreciating that even more and i just wanted also um shout out to veronica rixon for getting us the best hotel location possible right next to the conference um center and also organizing everything into a single one-pager which made it so easy to know where to go so just wanted to say we are an amazing trivia team it's like you severely drafted came in second place but he entered the pub trivia so that thank you sarah for organizing that um and i guess i also wanted to say that the board study session on the budget
121was also really well done so thank you to ralph hans amber megan chris jennifer um on putting together i forget anyone um putting together such an informative study session for us uh i guess that was last month and the last month i also happened to go to a randall heritage fair which is always a delight it's my third year going um and also the tl multicultural tlm multicultural night and both of those were on rainy days and yet everyone still turned up all the uh the parent volunteers and the students were really engaged i my son did not go to the tl1 but i i went with my husband um and it was so great to see and um yeah and then i think band and orchestra concerts are have happened at both of the
122schools and those are always so fun to see all that come together hard work of the um teachers as well as the students and happy holidays and come back with great attendance keep coming to school yeah yeah just say thank you to everyone involved in making this district just awesome and continuing to look forward and happy holidays so i also want to thank all of us for attending the conference and taking time away from our families and our jobs and other commitments i know it's a lot to take even if it's one day away um so but i feel like that team time is really critical so thank you all for making time in your schedules to do that and i also want to wish our community our staff our families a happy holidays and
123hope everyone finds time for rest and connection with their family and friends and with their traditions and i wanted to express appreciation for our school communities i've seen every school in the school newsletters and when i'm out on campuses leaning into helping our neighbors who are struggling this year um i think every school is doing at least something with their gift cards for families toy drives food drives even a pajama drive um and so i feel like we're really living out our values when we're doing that and our strategic plan of building community and kind citizens so thank you to our um school communities who have helped to organize those events pass it to you thank you and congratulations on uh your first meeting thank you our president yeah yeah it's exciting um also congratulations
124to ralph on his birthday though so smoothly i know exactly he said that earlier just bring me one more disaster sure man i feel good about it um i wanted to uh lift up a wonderful opportunity that san carlo school district was invited to which is to be part of a hundred million dollar proposal to the national science foundation that's been reviewed by therese fox and true galati they have been part of the ai leadership group with me like many districts we're inundated with a staggering number of new ed tech tools many of which are now driven by ai this grant proposes to help our decision making and we already have a teacher advisory group that's been working with us they've been piloting tools as you heard a little bit about conducting informal research on
125the impact of these tools but this grant would involve researchers from institutions like stanford and create what they call an ai test bed it's not unlike a big sandbox but a protected sandbox where there will be a faster more actionable data on ed tech efficiency and the ability to rapidly assess a tool's impact in is crucial i think at this point as we invest in solutions that can help student outcomes and then something near and dear to my heart is addressing the needs of students with learning differences many of those ai tools have promise there but we want to make sure that we're testing them out and because we have this teacher work group doing this work should this proposal be funded we're prepared to roll it into our existing work with tech tools as
126well as our policy work with the policy committee to inform all of that it's going on a sprint they plan to put this together in january at the end of january and so i'm pretty excited about that opportunity and i wanted to make sure that the board knew that that was something we're pursuing and then finally i'd like to wish all of you my colleagues on the government governance team and all of my friends in the room and team san carlos including dan linear and all of the family community and learners in our ecosystem peace and joy as we move towards 2026 my optimism for all that is possible in our collective future is quite high because of the number of people with whom i collaborate who are willing to put their shoulder to the
127work onward thank you all right and now the board will go into closed session to discuss items 14a and 14b as listed on the agenda are there any public comments on the closed session items being none we will now adjourn to close session thank you all happy holidays the board has included our closed session and we have nothing to report out so i am adjourning the meeting at 9 20 p.m