Board of Education Regular Meeting, July 8, 2025

001civilized world is on summer break here. Um, but we few, we happy few. I am now ging this meeting. I'd like to welcome everyone here in the chamber and those watching via liveream and call the July 8th, 2025 regular meeting of the board of education to order with um our student trustees absent and uh trusty Bazo absent as well but all other board members here. Um and uh trustee Bazo is on bereavement leave. So uh our thoughts are with her. um and uh her husband uh passed after uh a lengthy illness. So, we're all thinking of her right now and um wishing her the best and uh we'll see her soon after the break. Um so, our first up, we have our pledge of allegiance. Uh we will we do not have color guard and

002we do not have our trustee student trustees leading us. So, uh we will have to lead ourselves here. So, please stand and join us in the pledge of allegiance. I will take the duty myself. All right. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please be seated. Okay. All right. Next up, we have A3, our land acknowledgement. Land land acknowledgement is a traditional custom that dates back centuries in many native nations and communities. Our land acknowledgement was developed in partnership with local Kumi leaders. Students from the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts prepared the following video to show our respect for the Kumi people who are the original stewards of

003the land our school district occupies. We respectfully acknowledge that the Kumi people are the original inhabitants and caretakers of these lands now known as San Diego. Despite the attempted genocide and ongoing impacts of colonization, the Kumi spirit remains unbroken and their traditions continue to thrive as they carry the memories of their ancestors who bravely resisted cultural erasure and fought to protect their land and way of life. In honoring their legacy, we pledge to uphold their cultural heritage and right to safeguard their sacred connection to the land for future generations. With gratitude and strength, we stand with the Kumi, embracing the past while forging a brighter tomorrow. Thank you, SDCPA. We will now move to item B, adoption of the agenda. We have a full docket tonight, including the approval of the 2025 2026 school plans

004for student achievement, final progress monitoring report on literacy and math, and consideration of an updated cell phone policy. Uh, do I have a motion to adopt tonight's agenda? Motion from Trusty Hazen and a second from Vice President Barrera. Uh, we have a motion and a second. We will proceed to the vote. Trustees, please vote. That motion passes unanimously. We are just humming along here. Uh, Miss Stoultz, uh, can you please provide information for public speakers about tonight's meeting protocols? Yes. Today's meeting of the board of education is a business meeting that is conducted in public and board members will not engage in dialogue with members of the audience. Board bylaw 1025 sets the time limit for public comment on agenda items at 10 minutes per side pro and con or 20 minutes total. Speakers will

005be able to provide testimony at the beginning of the appropriate agenda item or at the end of the meeting for non-aggenda comment. Please listen for your name to be called. Speakers are listed and called in the order received. When your name is called, please come to the podium to speak. Speakers participating via Zoom will be asked to unmute when their name is called. If you are unable to unmute yourself, we will call the next speaker. Please follow along with the agenda so that you know when your item is coming up for discussion. When you begin speaking, the green light below my name on the dis indicates that the timer has started. When the light turns yellow, you will have one minute remaining. A buzzer will indicate that your time has expired. If you have not

006yet done so and would like to sign up for in-person public comment, iPads are available in the back of the auditorium and in the lobby. Thank you, Miss Stoultz. Uh, General Council Green, under item D1, are there any reportable actions from close session? No. All right. I always ask that even though I know the answer. Thank you, Miss Green. As there are no management appointments to report under item D2, we will move to item D3. Dr. Beula, please provide your information report. Thank you, Dr. Person. Since last week, there have been many headlines about planned cuts by the US Department of Education, and we have received many questions about its impact on San Diego Unified. I want to let students, families, and our community know that we are in a holding pattern. And while there

007is no immediate impact to our schools or programs, funding could be lost. The total amount of federal funding that would be impacted is close to 13 million. The administration has 45 days, a clock that started last week, to submit documentation to Congress for approval. And if they don't, then we will get our funding. Our finance department is currently analyzing other non-federal funding sources that could be leveraged if federal funds are not dispersed. But again, at this time, there's no immediate impact to our schools or programs. And I want to let you know that our whole team is actively working on problem solving um proactively. Um the first day of school for the new school year is almost here. Um I know we're about to take a little summer hiatus from our um board of education

008meetings, but we have just a little more under a month to welcome our students back into the classroom. We've been putting a lot of work in the areas of wellness, math, literacy, and college and career readiness to prepare our students to be back in school. I just want to make sure and I'm going to probably say it every time. August 11th, 2025 is on everyone's calendar is our first day of school. Another way we prepare for the upcoming school year is securing all of the supplies and gear that we need to educate our students and help them enjoy our programs and activities. It's almost the new school year, so our athletic teams needed new gear. We recently received a shipment of high school and middle school athletic uniforms, but I want to thank Manuel Lopez

009Jr. who is the supervising stock clerk at our distribution and supply center along with his entire team that that they're dedicated to our district and doing all of this work. They receive the gear and the supplies. They tag it. They make sure it reaches its final destinations in our school sites. And so this is just a little effort to give um a thank you to all of the people that help us continue to support our students, especially in this pieces of of um great work for our kids. So check out this uh short video with new student trustee Alina Wyn from Hoover High School and her friend Kathleen Le Young from Mission Bay High School as they unbox some of the new athletic gear. [Music] Hi guys, my name is Lena. I'm your new student

010board member and today we are here at the San Unified School District warehouse to unbox and take a sneak peek at some new gear for the 2025 to 2026 athletic school year. Ooh, okay. So, already opening the sides. These are looking like it's jerseys. And if you are a fan of football or if you are a football player, this might be for you. So right here we have football jersey for Mir Mesa High School. It has the Adidas logo on the side. And I actually really like the fabric and the texture. It's really thin and it's mesh so you definitely won't overheat in it. Guess what? Skirts. Okay, so um let me try to open this one here. So actually these are cheer skirts/ lacrosse skirts. And this is really special to the district because

011it's for our new middle school athletics. Like in the corner you can see it says San Diego Unified School District. Oh, those are so cute. It's really like cooling. It's like not a mesh fabric, but it is like one of those um sports fabrics. There's also a stretch band here for comfort um in the skirt. And there's built-in shorts underneath as well um right here for the comfort of the athletes. [Music] So, in luck with you middle schoolers, we have more jerseys for you for your new athletics program. From here we have different colors which will coordinate with your school and it will also have your school mascot on it. [Music] Thanks for tuning in to this preview and thank you to San Diego Unified School District for their investment. Students can now start their

0122025 and 2026 athletic school year strong. Thank you. It's a great segment. We're going to have to start monetizing our YouTube channel. Exciting. One of San Diego Unifi's oldest schools gets a new and Thank you. And finally, uh, Trusty Bazo asked me to deliver a special message. As you may know, Trusty Bazo recently lost her husband, Dr. Dave Bazo. We're deeply saddened and send her and her family much love and light during this time. If you didn't know him, Dr. Bazo was a local physician leader who served as president of San Diego County Medical Society and the California Academy of Family Physicians, a distinguished educator at UCSD School of Medicine, and as a team doctor for numerous local athletic organizations. Dr. Baso did a lot for student athletes, especially if they didn't have medical coverage.

013He even helped design the protocol for concussions before there was one. At San Diego Unifi, Dr. Bazo would often be found serving as a team doctor at Maresa High School. On August 22, so in a couple of weeks, the Merame Mesa High School football team at their first game will do a tribute at a kickoff in memory of Dr. Bazo. Trusty Boso extends an invitation for all of us to join her at the end zone. The kickoff is at 6:30 p.m. And that concludes my report. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Bula. We will now consider item E1, approval of the 202526 school plans for student achievements or SPSAS. Dr. Beula, please introduce this item as well. So, this doesn't have um a a presentation um but I want to say I'm really proud of this

014work because we've been working towards making the SPSAS be very meaningful and very impactful. And so tonight for your approval um you'll have the 2526 school plans for student achievement and categorical budget summaries for 175 school sites across our district. This includes schools identified for additional targeted support and intervention or ATSI and comprehensive support and improvement or CSI along with the request for board approval for Ericson Elementary, Jonas Sulk Elementary and Henry High School to operate as a title one schoolwide program site. The purpose of the SPSA is not to function as a compliance document. Each SPSA is aligned with our local control and accountability plan and reflects the unique strategies each school has developed to accelerate student learning, especially for those most impacted by opportunity gaps. I know I have personally seen this transition

015where principles are saying, "Wait, you're reading them. Not only are we reading them, but we're actually monitoring them and making sure that we pay attention to them when we do our school visits." So this year's SPSAs are the result of deep and meaningful collaboration among school site councils and principles and instructional leadership teams, district colleagues and SPSA resource teachers who have provided targeted training and personalized supports and area superintendent who have reviewed each plan for coherence alignment and actionable next steps. We will also be um doing an in-depth analysis for trends and themes across our 1775 SPS and you will be receiving a memo with that analysis in a couple of weeks. Together they ensure that the plans are built on student data grounded in equity and aligned with available resources. All 175 sites have

016submitted SPS and budget summaries that reflect both state and federal priorities. The three schools recommended for schoolwide program status have met all federal requirements and demonstrated readiness to serve all students under the title one framework. Each plan has been carefully vetted for alignment between identified student needs, school goals, and the founding the funding strategies proposed to support them. Upon your approval, area superintendent, SPSA colleagues, and school site councils will continue to monitor and support the implementation throughout the 2526 school year, ensuring goals are tracked, progress is reviewed, and plans are refined on impact. With that, I ask for your approval of this item, and Dario Gutierrez, the director of our SPSA department, is here for any questions as well. Thank you. Thank you to Dr. Bula. Do I have a motion on this item? Uh

017Trusty Wyers Pain with a motion and a second from Vice President Barrera. We have a motion and a second. Miss Stoultz, are there any public speakers on this item? Okay. Do any of the trustees have questions or wish to um discuss the item? Trusty Baso, I'm Trusty Hazen. Thank you. Uh and thank you Superintendent Pagula for the work and really to all the principles and area superintendents and the entire team um that's supported the progress that's really been made with these SPSAs. Um it's great to see the alignment between district goals and LCAP um and then these school plans. Um I do have a question and it's something that's been this lingering question for me. Um and it's around sort of the order of operations. Um the adoption of site budgets versus um the adoption

018of SPSAS because when I look through SPS it looks like SSC's and ELAS approved budgets um in March but then SPSAS weren't approved by sites in April. And so I'm wondering if principles were able to develop their budgets after SPSAS were developed um or if that had to happen before because it seems to make more sense to develop your plan and your strategies and then build a budget around it. And it looks like our process is the opposite. And so I'm wondering if you can share how this works um with regard to the development of SPSAS and and budgets and if you think um the process should be reversed and if that's something we're working towards so that we can then develop school principles can develop school budgets around high impact strategies and not the

019other way around. Excellent. And then I've got one more. Yeah. Mic on. Yes. Thank you. Dio Gutierrez, director of SPSA department. I'm excited to bring the 175 plans before you today. As we talk about the school plans, we talk about, you know, several years ago removing that compliance uh documentation for it and we talk about the cycle of continuous improvement. So that being said, when we now have these live Google SPS that any schools site council member can look at it, they can actually look at it and refine uh their strategies, practices that are going to make meaningful impact for student achievement. So when we develop um our school budgets, we have some statutory guidelines. We have that March 15th uh notification that goes to certificated and classified employees. So because of that, there has

020to be this onboarding um pre-work that happens usually in January. Uh so that would mean if we would go back to develop the SPSAS first and do the goals that would mean that we would be doing the SPSAs for the 25 26 school year sometime like in the winter break you know November December. So that's we've always felt that's been a little bit early. Some principles say you know we want to look at the data that's coming in and see where we're at. So, as school site councils and school uh leaders develop their SPSA, we ask them that as they develop their SPSAs, their budgets, excuse me, as they develop their budgets to keep their actual goals in mind. Yes. Look at your data. Uh Dr. Moreno has some really nice dashboards that actually shared

021with school sites and school site councils. There's a public version of that. And so we say as we develop their budgets, take a look and see what's making an impact at school sites right now and what you wish to um do next year. So when it comes to the budgets, there is a mechanism for school site councils to revise and refine their budgets um at any time. The only time that they're actually locked in uh essentially would be for FTEES, our permanent employees, that once a school site council makes a decision to for example um uh purchase additional counseling time, they're we hold them account um we hold them to that. You know, we don't tell them we can't just go back and tell an employee like, you know, schoolside council long no longer chooses

022that. But there is a mechanism for schoolside councils to make any revisions for any of those non-salary costs uh during the 2526 school year. Thank you. And then my second question is um you mentioned counseling. I noticed in looking at some of the elementary SPSAs um that they're subsidizing uh the costs of counselors to the extent that they didn't receive sufficient district funding for an FTE. And I'm wondering if this is a high impact strategy that we're recommending uh to advance our wellness goals um at the site level and if it's something that we should be considering as we adopt the new budget. I know dollars are really limited. Um, but if we think that this is really essential uh to improve student wellness, what is it that we're going to do to ensure every

023site has access to it whether or not they have available site funds? So, I don't know if we're noticing this trend. I heard there's a there's a memo coming, but uh is funding counselors something that you're seeing more and more of or at least that we're seeing at a lot of sites? I'm I see Dr. Moula wants to answer the question part. I can answer it as far as like allowability and when it comes to state um reviews anytime they see counseling they've never questioned it. They recognize the state recognizes that counseling is uh supportive of student achievement. And so when it comes to school funding, school site councils or school leaders have that sitebased um determination as to what they want to use. Certainly, I could I could see that many of our school

024sites wish to fund counseling, but it is we hold school site councils. It is a decision for title one funding. It's it's between parents and staff as far as like what what they wish to funding uh for the upcoming school year, but we want to hold them that it's recognized theirs. But counseling has always been supportive by uh any of our reviewers and auditors, right? And I mean, I believe in having a counselor at every school and I know that and I also know we're leading through times of austerity. So it is important for us to take a look at the trend and theme but I'm going to say the tren trend and theme around student need and student need especially at the schools and I know we're currently building a continuum of care when

025we think about our wellness goal and think about where we're going to have to put in more supports. So this is an ongoing piece like I'm actually thinking about the work that of MTSS that we're leading the work with BSR the work with restorative justice all of those are combined in this wellness piece and so we're going to have to take a look at what we do. Thank you. And I think it would be great when when this memo comes that's analyzed um these SPSAs understanding what difference we think um counseling is making not just on wellness but I think on on all of the goals and are we seeing certain trends in schools elementary schools in particular that have an FTE counselor and is it something we should consider ongoing counsel trusty we came

026uh that's what the superintendent and I uh discuss today. The fact that I'd like to see kind of a summary trends and and where we are. I mean, how 75% of the schools spending money on this and um anomaly situations, what's going on with that just for our total interest. Uh, and you mentioned that Lincoln is going to be working, the Lincoln cluster is going to be working on special education and piloting um an issue. So, it just would be nice to know what the the bulk of the schools are working on as a collective group rather than just isolated individuals. We know that they have to uh go to their own schools and work with their own community and so forth. But what overall what has happened you know as a result of that

027now so that we can get a yes an idea what's going on and what I'm appreciating is that principles are really collaborating a lot more to do some of that work and so we'll be able to identify as well like I I think about point um when I think about La Hoya I think about social emotional like supports um and so I I know clusters are working together on that so you'll be see um uh so I'll just say, you know, first of all, thank you for the discussion tonight. I I was having come out of some some of this the SSC, SGT stuff, the improvement, the systematization that's happened over the last three years is like wild. I mean, I couldn't even back then find the SPSA. I mean, for our site, I mean,

028it was crazy. So, I just want to congratulate you and I assume Roman's been part of part of some of that work as well and I would echo my colleagues comment about it would be great if we could do some coding of some of these interventions and then get some data on that coding. Um, but I I just, you know, it's not until you see see it right there that you realize how powerful just having the information. Like you could be a parent and say, "Oh, this is what my site's doing. Let me see what other sites are doing." And it's right there. It's I mean, I feel silly being shocked by it, but having seen how it was just three short years ago, it was like it's night and day. So, I want to

029thank you for the work uh you've done on that. So, um that's all I have to say. And with that, it looks as though we've exhausted board comment. Um we will now move to a vote. Um we are now moving to approve uh our SPSAS. Uh, all those in favor, please, or whether you're in favor or not, please cast your vote. All right, that motion passes unanimously. All right, with that, we will now hear item E2, the progress monitoring report on literacy and math. Uh, Dr. Moula, please introduce this item. Okay, I have a lot to say on this one. Um, I I want to begin by saying thank you to the the entire team that has put together not only an infrastructure to support our goals and guardrails, but also the board of education

030for adopting goals and guardrails and and making sure we're centered on our work. And so tonight, our team will be presenting the final interim progress monitoring report for the 2425 school year in both literacy and mathematics. This report will also highlight projected CASP rates based on current data collected within the Smarter Balance system. We plan to use the learning from this past year to better inform future interim goals as well as strengthen our assessment and data literacy practices and that's what I want to really lean into. Um this was a year that we took this work on. We showed um we made a great deal of progress. We have a lot to celebrate and we still have a lot to continue to do and to refine. Um and so I think that again leaning into

031a learning organization. What did we learn? What can we move forward? What do we need to improve upon? That is the spirit that we're moving forward here. Before we dive into this report, I want to highlight three essential reflections from the progress monitoring reports that have occurred over the past year. First, as I have mentioned before, progress monitoring is not about compliance. It is about learning. As a district and as educators and as leaders, this mindset is critical. Our purpose is not just to track numbers, but to refine instructional practices and accelerate student success. You've heard me share this story before, but I really loved when the teacher said, "I now have this data not to grade the student, but to change my practice." And that coming out of a teacher's mouth was just beauty

032to my ears. I I loved hearing that. Second, the progress monitoring is more than just looking at numbers. It is how we use that data to inform instruction, differentiate based on the needs of each learner, and set growth goals that are realistic, attainable, and prepare our students with the skills they need to achieve proficiency in the critical areas of literacy and numeracy. Our strategies and actions must be intentional, grounded in data and research-based. Instead of relying on qualitative anecdotal evidence, we must dig deeper and hold each other accountable for not only analyzing this data, but doing something about it. Now we're neck deep in that. Um I just was debriefing with a couple of members that are actually looking at trends and themes and then saying what can we find are best practices that tie

033in to our lowest rates like what are researchbased practices? What does clearing house say? Where's the research here? So that's currently happening. Third, we're paying close attention to the types of assessments we're using, what those assessments are telling us, and if those are the data points we need to help our students move forward. After piloting piloting several different assessments, collaborating with our classroom educators and site leaders, we now have a much more in-depth understanding of the data our educators feel is the most impactful on student outcomes. From data collaboratives led by our area superintendent in partnership with principles to educator conversations and PLC's, we're hearing from our schools which assessments have been the most beneficial for informing instruction and supporting each child's individual needs. for example, I know we sometimes got a little frustrated that

034there was a few um I readies and then also the fast. We're now moving forward with one platform. So again, you know, I kept saying that we're getting closer and closer and tighter and tighter. We are um so cast scores are not officially released until mid- November. However, given the data that is currently available within the Smarter Balance system, we're able to predict what our rates will be for the 2425 with a margin of error of only plus or minus one point. In the area of English language arts, we're projecting a plus 12.6 distance from standard, which is 2.4 points higher than the anticipated growth needed to reach our goal of 18th growth points by 2030. In math, we're projecting, remember this is the weird negative thing. In math, we're projecting negative 18.8 densis from

035standard, which is 1.8 points higher than the anticipated growth needed to also reach our goal of 18th growth points by 2030. Although we did not meet our goal for Spotlight students achieving significant growth in ELA and math for 2425, we're seeing a higher percentage of our spotlight students by student subgroup achieving significant growth between the fall and spring administration of our local assessments than their non-Spotlight student peers. I think that's important to note. These successes underscore critical truth. When instructional practices are strong, when teachers collaborate in professional learning communities, and when data inform strategy, our students thrive. Moving forward, we're going to focus on three key areas. Strengthening instruction through peer coaching and support. Continuing to partner with the University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership to further develop the capacity of our site principles

036and instructional leaders and agents of change. I'm going to pause there because this is kind of a sticking point for me. when there's whenever there's a coaching model, I believe that there should also be a coaching certification alongside. And so we wanted to make sure to offer learning right alongside the University of Washington and the Center for Educational Leadership in order to provide this kind of support. Grounding our work in data, so strengthening our data and literacy assessment practices through the use of real-time dashboards to inform instruction, provide targeted interventions, and monitor progress for all students, and leveraging common curriculum and assessments. moving to one district-wide assessment for grades 3, eight, and ELA and KA and math while simultaneously launching the new K2 statemandated reading difficulty screener that will give us even more data to

037meet our students where they are what they need. So over this past year, we've done a lot of learning. We've listened to our educators, to our students, and to our families to better inform our instructional practices, how we communicate progress, and most importantly, how we take an assets-based approach to learning. And as one of my dear colleagues says, our first attempt at developing interim goals and guardrails is possibly wrong and definitely incomplete. But that is the beauty of this work. With each lesson learned, we get stronger and we move forward. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to three of our colleagues. Nicole Dit, deputy superintendent of instruction, Dr. Delrosio, our executive director of data insight and system support, and Dr. Michelle Kazari, area B superintendent. Yes, you're our colleagues. Join us up

038here, please. Thank you. sharp. You guys looking sharp. You guys You guys look like Reservoir Dogs. You guys are stylish, man. You are. I'm I'm buying it. All right. Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to share um our final interim progress monitoring report for both literacy and math. Um, so I just wanted to take a moment to remind us of what our interim goals are. You can see up at the top that is our overarching um, six-year goal that we set for improvement on our CASS performance in ELA. And then our interim goals reflect the local assessments that we were using to monitor progress in growth specifically for our spotlight students. Um, as Dr. Beula mentioned, we had three different assessments that we were utilizing um this year. The first was for our earliest

039learners in kinder through first grade. Our second was using the fast um a reading assessment and then the third was using the I Ready reading assessment for grades K through eight. And the reason why we had that variation is because we did have some school sites that were already committed to using I Ready had invested a lot of time and effort. And so we wanted to give them the ability to continue to use that assessment while we used a second assessment and also gave us the opportunity to compare the two to see like which one was really giving us the results that we needed to monitor impact on student outcomes. So with that, I'm going to turn it over um to Dr. Dr. Del Rossario that's going to dive a little bit deeper into the

040data first for literacy. Thank you uh Nicole. Um good uh good evening board. So um some qualifying statements as uh Dr. Beula shared this is not our official results. So I want to make sure uh just briefly that folks understand that our if you look at the blue line that five uh point 6.97.2 too. Those are official dashboard results that this year uh public release will be November 15th and then uh 2026 they'll be released October 15th and that's when uh it'll settle there and we'll be getting those official results October 15th. With that said uh we've had the opportunity to look at our raw data score and compared it with the prior year data score in terms of DFS. And when we've done that over the last 3 years, what we note is that

041that difference in distance from standard from one Smarter Balance year to another, it lines up within less than a point. So we have a high level of confidence that uh our growth in English language arts for this year is will be 5.4 points uh plus or minus a point. With our goal being three points, uh we feel very uh confident that we're going to reach that goal. Uh as you could see from the dotted line, uh that 18 points of growth over a six-year period, uh we intentionally chose 3% as a uh reflection of our values that we are working on continuous improvement, incremental growth over time. You know, this is difficult work of improvement. um looking at the data, being informed by our strategies, constantly reflecting, and we believe that if we do that,

042we could meet that prerequisite three point uh growth mark every year. Uh we also intentionally pick three points annually because the way the state of California measures growth, anything less than three points, they consider it like maintaining. So if you're 2.9 to negative 2.9, they'll say you maintain. But when you reach the threshold of three points or more, they say you've increased. Uh when you reach 15 points of growth, which many of our schools did, uh they say you increased significantly. That's just the semantics, the common language that we used. And if you look at that 6.9 to 7.2 2 between 23 and 24 uh that kind of maintaining of growth. Uh you'll see in that middle column where it says change in DFS from 22 to 23. It's it was kind of a a

043mixed bag. You know, we saw some promising growth with our students with disabilities, but we if as you remember, we were discouraged to see uh a decline with our black students, uh very stagnant growth with our Hispanic students. Now when we look at our new data in terms of change in distance from standard uh so that column on the far right represents what we're projecting for each one of these groups for the 25 data set and uh all across the board we see increases in all of our groups. Uh particularly encouraging is that growth with Hispanic students and I know that all of you are thinking what's that attributed to? And while there's more to unpack and more to dig into, I I think what Dr. Bgula spoke to is really uh true that we're

044looking at data like we haven't before. We're looking at these results. We're planning intentionally and I hope that uh by the end of this presentation, you'll agree that that it's a result of intentional work that we're doing with our data and assessment literacy. So now our interimm goals this this is where um statistically it gets kind of uh noisy. Uh some of the reasons being uh so if you see our interm goal we're looking at kindergarten and first graders taking the early reading assessment. And last year which was our first implementation year 23 24 of spotlight students uh we had uh asked site leaders to identify 15% of students who were spotlight students and um while sites did this was uh before we had a data department and what we discovered in the process is

045that without clear criteria that initial group it had a lot of variation. So for instance, some sites during the 2324 school year only selected students with disabilities. Other sites only selected students that did not have disabilities thinking that the students with disabilities were already receiving support. Uh some site leaders informed us that they only selected students with moderate to severe disabilities. Some sites really focused on gifted students that were underperforming. So that wide array uh was really uh made it challenging to compare one group of growth versus the other group of growth. What we saw is that at the that for the 24 25 school year um something uh my partner Dr. Mareno and I did very early is to really clarify the criteria for selection of spotlight students and we're trying to focus on

046our goals of improving literacy and we wanted to focus on the students uh that were spotlight students that were most uh at risk. So we intentionally chose the students that were farthest from the standard and the criteria was we provided sites with their spring assessments both our district benchmarks standardsbased report cards and their spring CAT scores and they had an initial list and then they had their fall uh district benchmark to finalize the selection of their spotlight students. So that's a practice that we intend to continue so that really we're comparing apples to apples. Um another uh data point that um we see here that stands out is um that this is only kindergarten and second and uh Dr. Mareno and I have some questions about the fidelity of our spring assessment because by this

047time all of our teachers already knew that this is the last year that we're using early reading. Uh as Dr. Buggoula mentioned, we have a new uh reading difficulty screener that we're implementing. So, those were just questions that we had that we're digging into to kind of get to the trends because it seems counterintuitive and you're going to see this um in the other slides that uh we're not seeing the growth that we would uh want with our interimm goals while our overall go growth in CASS is improving and that's another reason for us to really think about our alignment and just continue the learning that we've been doing thus far. So goal 2.2 is also fast brbridge but the assess the screener is a reading and it's for grade levels uh 2 through 8.

048Uh again some of the things that uh we want to highlight is that our spotlight students uh what this is measuring is what percentage of spotlight students made significant growth. And where last year our 23 24 cohort it was close to 30% of spotlight students making significant growth. This past year we saw a number that was 25%. Um but the same uh applies. So what I explained is we had a different C uh criteria for selecting spotlight students which may contributed to some of the um unexpected results that we're seeing. Uh additionally something that uh we noted is that uh many of these groups are below uh 25%. Where overall we're at 25%. How does the math math? And we went back to double check. And no, this is what it is. What this tells

049us is that our um two or more races, our Filipino, our Hispanic spotlight students, our white uh Hispanic students are scoring more in the range of 30% up to 38% of Spotlight students um making that significant growth target where many of our historically disenfranchised groups continue to uh not make that progress. So, even spotlight students, we see some distinctions. um they're they're all spotlight students but distinctions based on race and and other stat other uh factors. Now 2.3 is those schools that uh administer the I Ready assessment and as you can see it's a much smaller N size. It's like a quarter of the size compared to the fast bridge. And in this past school year, the I Ready schools were disproportionately concentrated in areas of uh higher poverty. And we saw kind of a

050reverse of what we saw in others where it seems like the spotlight students were achieving at um less percentage were meeting that significant growth target than all students. And that was uh not the same results that we saw in fastbridge, which is the majority of the students taking Fastbridge. Uh there's a lot of uh reasons why that may be so, but uh it's most of our analysis points to what the schools that have I Ready and the concentration of poverty at those schools. So, if you are a spotlight student at a school that has high concentrations of poverty, it's probably a steeper hill to climb than if you're a spotlight student in a school that doesn't. And and those are just factors that we have to just be honest with ourselves and really uh think

051about. Um, another thing that's important to note that we've learned along the way in our journey is that this for I Ready, we set our significant growth target aligned with what they call stretch goals. Uh, I Ready identifies a stretch goal is the pathway for a student to reach proficiency and it's typically you have to be like in the top 25% compared to other students with a similar start score to reach your stretch goal. But we also learned along the way that that is based on 180 days between the first no 160 days between the first assessment and the second assessment. Uh we have cast we have other factors. We have aund um 76 schools. So we set three-week windows. We set our spring window before our cast testing so they're not overlapping. And we

052come to realize that many of our students between their first assessment and their second assessment, they only got to about a hundred about 80% of those 160 days if that makes sense. So because they tested before their cast window and that's the way it was set up. So uh moving forward, we really want to align our data with what's happening on the field. So instead of saying, you know, what percentage of Spotlight students met their stretch goal, we could set it so what percentage of Spotlight students met 80% of their stretch goal because they got through 80% of the days before they got assessed. So it's just a matter of of of learning by doing. Thank you, Roman. Um, so we're going to move into the math portion of our progress monitoring presentation. Yes. Can

053I um Trusty Hazen mentioned are there spec any specific questions you have specific to reading just so that maybe we can briefly Is it is it all right if we briefly take a couple questions that are specific to reading? So not general questions but just ones that are specific to this as opposed to in contra distinction to math. Yeah. No, no, just Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. know my hope was that we can talk literacy and then hear math and then talk math after that's um fresh in our mind and I I guess overall you know I'm really excited um to hear about all the work that I'm looking both ways that everybody is is leading um and to see that on the whole right when we look at these projected CASP scores um that we've

054we've beat the target that we said and so I think it is cause for celebration recognize it is preliminary. It is our best projection um but really appreciate all of the work um from everybody in the room but really from from teachers and principles and all of the students who who did the work. Um so really congratulations to everyone. Um I think this was the hunch we had that if we're focused and if we stick to it um that we will see this level of growth and I think as as you described it we set the the three um point distance from standard growth goals um and I know the last couple of years at least year and a half I kept asking do we think it's going to accelerate right are we going to

055see a couple points in in year one and then it'll get bigger and bigger and it looks like and it's early that may be what we're seeing which is really exciting as we think about the future. Um, in terms of literacy, um, I am interested in digging in a little bit, um, into, um, some of the nuance and I think you spoke a little bit about this incredible growth um, we're projecting for Hispanic students, right? This seven almost eight, you know, point growth. And I'm wondering, do we have any sense about the why? I know you said we don't maybe we don't know but like what are the things that that we think are happening and particularly as you look at um the schools where that growth happened what are the things you know school

056starts a month from now so what are the things that we are recommending folks do more of differently better um what contributed do you think to that growth or is it just that we had the data at our fingertips and and that was it there's I I definitely want to acknowledge that there's a lot more work to do in analyzing the data and uh at the time that we pulled this data we had 97% of our cast data back. So it was a a very large numbers um sample uh but we still have to dig into what are the programs that those schools are using, what are the geographical areas, what are the the clusters to find these macro level um trends. But um with that said um I think what we start hearing like

057anecdotal uh data in my mind it's it's it's qualitative data but it's data and if you keep hearing over and over and over we have the data at our fingertips. We're able to better plan our strategies. We know where the students are struggling. We're more intentional and purposeful in the groupings. And at the same time we see growth in these schools. uh in a group that's historically farther behind, I think they tend to be more primed to make progress and Hispanics, I think, is representative of that group. And we saw um very healthy gains in Hispanics in both um English language arts and math. So I I think there's something to be said with that, accepting that anecdote as qualitative data that's supported by the numbers, the quantitative. Thank you. And then for goal 2.1

058and you spoke to this question about right where we see this 25% of spotlight students achieve significant growth but none of the subgroups had actually gotten to that 25 um% level and then you describ white Filipino two or more races made significant growth. Why aren't we including like why have we chosen not to include um that those data points? Yeah, that's something we could definitely um include in in future presentations. Uh we have historically used the same template where we focus in on those uh groups that are historically uh performing at the lowest levels, but I think it does paint a bigger picture. Like for instance, in the English language arts where um 25% of spotlight students made significant growth um Hispanic students was 20% but like Filipino students were 38% and white students were

05931% of spotlight students. So it was those differences that ended up you know getting to 25%. Yeah. Yeah. And I think because I think it's important, right, as we think about interim goals and we think about spotlight students, if the focus and priority is spotlight students, the students that are furthest behind, um, then we should be looking at all spotlight students or considering is there only a subset of spotlight students we're interested in. And so I think when we come back together to look at those things to understand and then also I think there's an opportunity for us to to think through for those spotlight students um that may be experiencing more significant growth. What are the reasons why um and which of those might be replicable which which might not because of manifestations of

060poverty and we have to think very differently about the work. Um I'm wondering do you have any sense? So, I'm I'm trying to get a handle. We don't have this applesto apples data um in terms of the fast because of how we define spotlight students in 2324, but do you have a sense if we were to use the same criteria in 2324, do we know about where that same where that group of students would have been? What I'm getting at is do we think there was actually growth um among if we use the same criteria among spotlight students both in um K1 and then the upper grade literacy or are we looking at something that's about stagnance? So I can help to respond to that. Um I think one of the things kind of that

061Dr. Dolar was alluding to is that we know that we're doing something right because we're seeing growth for CASP, right? But I think we still need to do a lot of unpacking on how do our interim goals correlate to that growth because we weren't seeing like similar growth or um similar goals met in interim and so what exactly does that mean? And do we need to look at it differently? Like do we need to draw like a closer correlation between what we're looking at for the local assessment interim goals and what we're looking at as it correlates to the overall goal. So that's still some work that we need to do um as we further dive into the assessment results. Yeah. Because I guess what I'm getting at is we may have actually seen growth,

062but because of the criteria we I mean you were describing gifted students or other students because of the criteria we used last year, our baseline may be completely inaccurate. So I would just push us before we throw away this interim to really think through if we were to use the same definition of spotlight students and the same criteria in 23 24 what would that number have been are we talking about would have been 15% and then whatever actually growth just consider like if we're using the same criteria for spotlight students then there will be students that rotate in and out of that group just because of the criteria set. So those are also some factors and some considerations moving forward. And I know that the to to get closer to the question too, I know

063we have the discussion around how do we build cohort data because I think it's important to kind of look at spotlight students around cohorts and that's not built yet. So um and to just acknowledge um the interimm goals and the overall goals are separate. We're looking at two different cohorts and their performance at over two different years where our interim goals were looking at our spotlight students progress from fall to spring. And there is the question that we have is whether those two things are correlated. What I've uh shared with the board in the past is that they aren't necessarily correlated. If I'm ignoring all my students and only teaching my spotlight students, I could make my interimm target, but my CAT scores could fall apart. They're only related is if we really adopt that

064theory of action that if we get to understand our students that are most at need and we design with them in our hearts and minds, then we're going to provide access for more students. That's the theory of action that we're that we're operating under. With that said, um there are other ways that we could either look at our interimm goals uh to make adjustments, but there's a lot of evidence that the strategy sound by using data, by identifying students that need the most help, by ensuring that they get extra help that scores go up broadly. That's there's evidence to suggest that and I'm looking forward to um talk about the math because because we're seeing the same patterns in math and um Roman unless there's additional questions specific to literacy why don't we take this

065opportunity I have a literacy question. Okay. Yeah. Um, you know, I was glad to hear you say that about identifying our spotlight students accurately because we could probably all write this report without even looking at the data knowing that we've had the traditional groups to not achieve and to really focus on on the Filipino population. when you say it's going in and out, it may be just a a bad period for a group of students and then they come back online versus a group that has traditionally not succeeded uh not been successful. And that's why I love what you said about the um the Hispanics because we know traditionally they've not been a group that's achieved at the high level and yet now you're beginning to see that trend change and this that's why I'm

066look interested in what's happening with the African-American because they've traditionally they've been those groups that you talk about if we can figure out what's going on with them. I'm sure we'll reach a lot more kids because we've gotten those who have not been successful repeatedly. So, I I'm really interested as we move forward um in what you're saying about the spotlight students and really honing in to see if we have apples and apples versus some tangerines in there that are throwing the um the apple pudding off or something. Apple pudding. No, apple pie. Maybe make that an apple pie. Okay. Thank you. Uh why don't we move to math and then we'll have some general comment. You got another literacy question. Okay. And far few very few math because we don't have any baseline. Um

067so I'm curious. The four CEO schools um I know it's at the end but this is literacy related. um grew 16 points in distance from standard in ELA compared to the five points for all other schools. And I'm wondering how will quantitatively monitor success for that cohort of CEL schools? Um are there growth targets? How will the superintendent and board know that this strategy is working and that it should actually be taken to scale because it's so small right now? So, what are y'all doing and what are we going to continue hearing about this because it looks really promising based on the data. It is really promising. Um, and I'm going to have a lot to say about it in just a couple minutes. Um, what I will say is this gives us a baseline.

068We, this was a new approach that we tried. So, uh, we wanted to see if it worked and it did. Um, so we didn't have target goals for the cell schools. Um, we knew that by design we were trying to change outcomes through leadership coaching and now we have data relative to all schools to talk to it so we can set those goals for next year. Um, but I'll lay out our plans for next year because it shifts a little bit. Awesome. So, moving over to math. Um, similarly, you'll see that our overall six-year goal um for CAST progress is listed up at the top as Dr. Dr. Bula mentioned it does look a little strange because we're talking about a negative point spread here. Um so you can see that we're trying to move

069from -23.6 um to5.6 there. I do want to highlight that for interim goal 3.1, we actually put a pause um on that pilot because as we were hearing that there would be this new state mandate for a reading difficulty screener, we knew that we were going to have to reassess um our assessment use overall. And so instead of piloting something for just a short amount of time, um we decided not to have to train a bunch of folks to do that pilot if we knew there was the potential for a shift the following year. Um so we did not do a pilot of the K1 fast early math. Um but we did have our fastbridge math for grades two through eight um that we pursued as well as again our I Ready math assessment for

070grades K through eight for those schools that were choosing to use I Ready. So this next uh set of slides will move a little faster, but there's one thing I I really want to point out. We're using the same um metrics to project out our results. We're anticipating a 4.8 increase in distance from standard for all students. You know, Masome's point, but we are projecting that we're going to meet our goals. So, uh, Dr. Bula asked a great question a while back when I shared this with her. Is is have we done this before? So, we the state's been publishing, uh, results for the dashboard since 2017 using the same metrics. you need at least three points to be considered an increase. So I went back to 24 23 COVID 19 181 17 and what

071I can tell you is that it's never happened. We've never had a year since 2017 where we've met that three point threshold in both ELA and math in the same year. So, so that's something I think we should really take pause and celebrate. Um, if these numbers hold up the way we anticipating um, you know, there's increases in both ELA and math that meet that threshold for the state calling it an increase. So, you know, bravo to everyone. Um so uh with our grade 2 through eight fastbridge um we saw uh 31% of our spotlight students achieve significant annual growth. Uh again you'll see that trend where none of those are at 31%. Uh the same the same thing applies as what we shared in ELA. the students that are not there uh tested uh

072had above 31% and that 31% is a result of all the students aggregated together of students making significant progress on their fastbridge math assessments and we could go to the next one and these are our um percentage of spotlight students making significant growth in I Ready and this is grades 2 through eight uh we saw 26% of students uh making significant growth based on those stretch goals. um similar to English language arts um all those most of those with the exception of African-Americans uh were below that 26% but I think it's notable that 29% of our African-Americans uh made significant progress in the I Ready schools which is higher than uh what we saw overall for the district average and um turn it over to Michelle. Okay, thank you. And I just I want to

073echo the celebratory uh sentiments. Um this is very exciting and want to honor just the collective work that it takes to have gains like this. It's our students, it's our teachers, it's our principles and I'm here today um not representing area B, but the whole area superintendent team um and to talk a little bit about how uh we believe that these gains were by design and not by chance. Um, and it wasn't a hope and pray at the end of the year that we've done well, but we we knew this was coming because we've been alongside our leaders and in our schools um, making sure this work is happening. Um, I'm going to back up a little bit and just provide some context for some of the acronyms and words that we've been using. Um,

074on this slide you see the Center for Educational Leadership. Um, what that is, it's the nonprofit service arm of the University of Washington's College of Education. Um they are nationally renowned for providing contextualized embedded coaching, training and support at all different levels of an organization. Um and as you know a couple years ago the area superintendent team was pretty new. Um and so Cell taught us how to be area superintendent. Um and most importantly how to be area superintendent that are instructional leaders and what that looks like. Um, and so I can say I'm personally grateful for the experience because often in education we get a key to a building or a classroom. Um, and so this uh job embedded experience was transformative for my team but we can see it in the data as

075well. Um, a couple things to know about cell the center for educational leadership is they are uh the powerhouse behind two nationally used frameworks. the five dimensions of teaching and learning which is like the gold standard of what teaching and learning should look like in the classroom and then the four dimensions of school leadership which you see up here. So kind of our big theory of action is when we invest in these four dimensions of school leadership then we are going to um see data towards our student outcome focus goals. So that's that's the uh way we were operating. The area superintendent team had about a 17-month experience with the center for educational leadership that started at the springtime of 2324 and then moved into the last school year. And in addition to that, there

076was central office training as well because if you notice, we're looking at learning and teaching environment that's in the classroom, but resource management, we just talked about it. That's SBB, the budgets, SPSASs, how central office organizes those things to be um accessible to principles. Um creating equitable school communities and collective leadership. So this is um how principles lead their schools, how teachers teach in their classrooms and how area superintendent create communities of practice and learning for um our leaders. So again, we have this unique experience and part of that job embedded experience is each area superintendent selects a leader to be their cell principal so they can practice all of these job embedded coaching techniques. So several months ago I was here highlighting principal Canon. So that's an example of um one of those cell

077principles. Um there was no additional resources attributed to what we call a cell school. It really was just extra coaching. um it meant your boss was showing up on a more regular basis um and sitting alongside our principles and trying to be supportive of them. Um so what it really taught us as area superintendent was how to be clear and focused and concise with the theory of action. So how do we help principles get clear about the outcomes they're trying to see in their building? How to stay focused on their selected outcome? Being a principal is the hardest job out there and there are so many things that pull at your time. So the clear more clear you are and the more focused you are, the more you can drive towards outcomes. Um how and

078how to align teaching practice and adult behavior to and culture to that outcome. So we say adult behaviors don't change or student outcomes don't change unless adult behaviors change. We were coaching principles on how to do that. Um before I address this slide, I just want to share what we did as an area superintendent team is we leveraged out the work we were learning in cell for all principles. Um and so um just like I sat alongside principal Canon and helped her develop a theory of action about five months later we did that with all of our principles. So we we lifted practices that we saw were having some immediate impact and started to take them districtwide. So it looks like data collabs. I mean we have a fabulous resource in this department that is

079putting data at our fingertips. But how we come around that data, how we model that with our leaders for our teachers was critical. Uh it's been the SPSA and SBB SBB refinement and support and alignment to to these goals. Um working towards the GVC alignment. So we we're working on that common curriculum but within buildings principles were working on aligning their teaching staff and then uh I would say probably one of the most important things is how do we provide evidence-based feedback to teachers like how do we actually see the g game being played and provide feedback to our to our staff. So what you're seeing on this slide um are our cell schools. So those were four the four elementary school three elementary schools and one middle schools that received that job embedded coaching

080from their area superintendent and then we received job embedding coaching from a cell consultant. So there's a lot of people talking sometimes um and we love this work so much um and we saw impact of that uh saturation of time that we added on what we call spotlight schools. So where the cell schools will have about um 12 months of coaching, the spotlight schools were taken on in about February of this past school year, they were identified uh mostly because their data suggested they were in need of some additional support. Um and also some other readiness factors like if you just got the keys to your building, I might not say you're a spotlight school. So we just wanted to make sure it was a school where work could take hold. Um and the work

081was just like the cell work. It's contextualized and job embedded, right? Nobody shows up at a school and says, "We know exactly what you need." We get alongside a leader and say, "What do you need? What do your students need? And how do I help remove barriers, whether it's internal to the leader or um external to our system to help you see see um your outcomes through?" Um, and we're really excited because it's working. Um, and it's not it's not a bunch of extra people or a bunch of extra resources. It's really, like I said, a saturation of time um alongside leaders, which means time alongside their teachers. So, what you see in terms of the data is all schools we saw that average change of distance from standard of 5.4 in ELA and 4.8

082in math. Then we compiled our cell schools. So these are the schools that had about 12 months of coaching and you could see the change in the distance from standard that we saw um and I want to say as a result of a lot of amazing things that happened but it's not by chance that those schools had more data gains. Um then our spotlight schools which had a much shorter period of concentration um they were almost all in the area of literacy also showed notable gains in the distance from standard when we compiled all of them together. So um this is just quantitative data. Uh for a moment I have to talk about qualitative data. We saw engaged teachers. We saw leadership teams that were fired up about learning. We saw efficacy like wow we

083can actually set out to do something and it changes outcomes for kids. And I think uh burnout is real. And so investing in the hearts and minds of our people uh believing in themselves and the collective makes a difference. Um, we also saw cluster and cross-sight collaboration. I'll I'll lift up um um Dr. Sora in area D. He had his all his spotlight schools working together. So, they were like pushing each other and driving outcomes together. And then we saw leadership development. I mean, leadership matters. The principal in the building matters. And so, investing in them and just even showing them that we invest in them matters. Um, and we can see that in the data that's here. So on the next slide, we couldn't get through this presentation without highlighting like holy cow, we

084had some schools that did amazing work. Um when we talk about um increased significantly or significant growth, we're talking about 15 points in distance from standard or higher. So these schools have had that significant growth in both ELA and math. Um and so we we attribute this to a lot of different things, right? But some of this focused leadership um the work that we engaged all principles in um and it's worth noting that six of these schools have had a leadership change in the last two years. So I think we're doing a good job hiring leaders um that are aligned with our values, our belief in using data, our belief in equity um and getting alongside our educators um and supporting our our students. So this leads me to our next steps which we're very

085excited about because we believe we're on to something and if we're on to something our goal is to do more of it. Um and I want to go back to that idea of saturation, right? So what we found is being focused worked and being extra focused had bigger impact. So now we're thinking about how do we do that? Acknowledging that we're going into a time with less resources. So I was on a team of seven, now I'm on a team of five. Um and um but I think we have an amazing plan of how we're leveraging those resources. Um and one one piece of that is moving into that team of five. Um each area superintendent now has that TK12 fully aligned cluster so we can start to see how this work articulates across all

086of the levels. Um one of the things we're most excited about are leadership coaches and Dr. Bagula mentioned it earlier. Um what we want to do is um twofold. We want to grow this work but there's one of me and 35 principles. So the chance the the likelihood of me being able to do this with every principal um isn't there but the likelihood of other principles providing this support to one another is there and it's deeply aligned to our values as an organization. Additionally like we want to provide training and learning opportunities for our principles. We have amazing leaders that are ready for their next step in their professional career and this provides a formalized training opportunity for them. So in contract with the center for educational leadership, a group of 26 principles who um

087all had to apply for this role are going to become leadership coaches and like this starts like in two weeks. So we're very excited. Um they're going to be leadership coaches. They're going to receive training from the center of educational leadership much like the training we received. So they're going to get they're going to do job embedded walkthroughs. They're going to walk in each other's schools. They're going to learn about theory of action and they're going to be a touch point for what we call a community of practice which be a group of about five to eight other principles that have selected to work with them. So we did a lot of engagement with principles um and AASD at the onset of this. So, we designed this with a lot of feedback from what principles

088want to see. Um, the hope is we can replicate this work over and over. We're building a bench of leaders that know how to coach other leaders and I'll tell you from my work that's not easy. Um, so, um, that training is really critical. Um, we also are investing in our associate principles. We know they they function as partners to our principles. So, we have associate principal institutes coming on next year. They'll be working on a problem of practice. We'll be building their sense of community. We're really trying to remove that one-sizefits-all structure. So, we used to like pack all of our leaders into a room and we're like, "We're going to tell you what matters in education. Instead, we're saying we're not doing those kinds of meetings. You're going to be at your school

089with a group of principles talking about what you need, demonstrating the work you're working on, and getting job embedded feedback." Um, we are staying true to our data collab. So with um access to all of this incredible data, we are bringing principles together regularly. We're continuing that practice. We see evidence that it works to look at data. Um and we are investing in our TK12 alignment and also um in our GVC, our math adoption in elementary is very exciting for us because it means we're going to all be teaching the same thing in the same way. Um and and again, I can't say enough about um what it means to invest in people. And so um these 26 leadership coaches, it's not just a role with a stipen. It's a belief and investment in their

090leadership capacity which we can see from our work uh pays off tenfold. So uh we're really taking the lessons we've learned from our work with the center for educational leadership, from our work with our core values in our organization and we're taking them to scale. Um we're leading them forward and uh we are excited to see even more gains a year from now. Yeah, I just want to give a shout out to Dr. Escoedto because I I hope you notice the strategies that we're using. We're pretty much replicating um what what what we saw you be very successful and thank you for all the coaching and mentorship mentorship we received. We're seeing growth because of you two and I see um Trusty Whiters Payne. Thank you, Mr. President. Uh, first of all, I think you

091you started addressing some of my concerns. I wanted to know how the principles are feeling about this in comparison to previous years because I feel like they're accomplishing some good things. And the question is whether or not they're feeling it, too. I went to the um I think it was the week after school was out or the day after was out or something. There was some meeting that the uh principles had at least in district E and I think some of the others may have met and they were sitting there pouring over their results all excited about their scores and what had happened and planning what they're going to do for next year and I've not seen that level of excitement and energy at that point in time. Let's let's get in here and do

092it. Let's make these changes. So I maintain if you have a good strong leader uh and I my schools where they were talking about the spotlight principles I see that in them they're strong they are leading they know where they want to go they're leading the team they're joining with others just helping so I commend you guys on that because it's a different level of excitement that I've seen and uh folks were energized you it's the end of the year and you think folks are tired and they don't want to be bothered. Instead, it was just the opposite, like, hey, I've got to get in here and plan for next year and use these results as a foundation to spring forward. So, I'm really excited about that and I really do want to commend at

093least what I'm seeing in my schools in district E. Thank you. Um, Miss Staltz, I recognize I have neglected to ask you if we have any public comment. There are none. Okay. I intuited that, so I'm kept moving. Uh, Vice President Barrera. Yeah, just uh really encouraging um presentation, all aspects of it. And I just want to start um by thanking trustees Hazen and President Person uh for coming on to this board and really uh emphasizing student outcomes in a clear coherent way that I think established um you know a framework uh for us as a as a district you know to start to get on this uh on this road. Uh, and then of course, Superintendent Bagula. Yeah. No, and and and and Nicole and and our whole leadership team. So, you know, you've

094come into a relatively high performing district and you've taken leadership and you've made us better and I just want to thank all of you uh for for that. And there were a couple of uh comments that really stood out um from uh Roman and Michelle. So Roman, I think what you talked about, look, we know that there was a lot of um sort of moving parts in terms of the interim goals, you know, over this past year. differing definitions of what a spotlight student is, differing assessments. Um, understanding that, uh, you know, spotlight students in, uh, higher, uh, poverty schools are, you know, it's a it's a it's a bigger lift, you know, than than in, uh, lower poverty schools. But with all of that and and all of this is you know what um

095you're leading us to you know to to bring uh more coherence to in the coming year. But with all of that, what you talked about is our basic theory of action is so important. And yes, on both on two fronts that if we can start to get it right with the students who need most support, we believe that that's going to translate, you know, to all of our students. And we think there's evidence that that's happened this year. But also our responsibility as a school district is no matter what happens across the board that the students who need most support is our number one responsibility. Um and we've talked about from day one in our conversations around uh you know establishing our goals and guard rails that for our students that have no backup plan

096we we have to get it right. there's, you know, there's uh and that's and and so by doing this work um and and you know, we'll get better and better as we go forward and really appreciate uh you know, kind of the honesty and transparency that I think your quote uh you know, it's improvement science. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. The improvement science quote that it's probably possibly wrong and surely incomplete. Yeah. No, I I love that. And that means, you know, that's the spirit that we're going to keep getting better. But, um, but focusing on our spotlight students is actually a core value, you know, that we've established as as a district. So, it's got payoff in terms of overall, you know, results, but it's also it's it's the work that we need to do.

097And I really appreciate that. And then Michelle, your the way that um you're thinking about and uh you know about bringing this to scale again is just so consistent like you said with who we are as a district. So we've had the benefit of getting you know outside University of Washington to come in and help us improve. And now what we're going to do is we're going to turn that into building our internal capacity, you know, starting with um, you know, with our with our principles who've been already achieving success. I mean, that's that's not only of course the right way, you know, to scale up. Um, but it's that's who we are at our core. And that translates to our schools and our classrooms. You know, it's it's having um educators support each other

098uh to support their students but also to support their peers. So just really ex it's exciting really appreciate this work. Um, we should of course, you know, celebrate what looks like uh is going to be really great, you know, CASP results, but I think more than that, I think we should celebrate um, you know, the the culture and the structures um that we're just getting better and better at in in our in our school district. So, thank you all. Trusty His Thank you. Um, yeah, I think it, you know, agree with with everything, uh, Trusty Barrera said and I think it's really validating to see all of these hunches we had and I think researchbacked hunches um are are being I don't want to say proven right, but looks like um right they're right. and

099by really sticking to this commitment to spotlight students, right? Because I think back to a year plus ago when we were developing our board goals and and we knew would be a lot easier if we just focused on on all students, right? If we focused on, you know, how do we move the needle from the kids that are just below to get them um at at standard? And instead, we said, "No, that's not that's not who who we are. um we're going to do it the hard way and the hard way means focusing on the students who are struggling the most because they need us the most. And so I love that that that's what we've focused on and that we've seen growth, right? When we look at um some of the results for uh

100Hispanic students, for example, um right, shows us um what's possible and this is just the beginning. Um likewise I think as we look at this focus on principal leadership I felt you know for a little bit like I was like beating my head against like what are we doing with principles principles are so important you know Wallace Foundation says so and we know so um and seeing that that work is happening um and I think particularly in this time where we don't have lots of extra money to throw around right we can't you know buy every shiny thing out there, but that it really is about how do we use very limited dollars to invest in capacity building and invest in our people. Um that is going to yield the greatest results and you know

101it's it's cost-effective and it's most impactful which is doubly good. Um I'm wondering so just digging into some of the data so for goal three um when we look at the high level projections what do we attribute that 5.8 8 point increase among Hispanic students to when the year before there was no growth. That seems pretty significant. I like the um observation with literacy. I I I really think that we have to pay attention to what we're hearing from our school sites is that access to um because we we have students take these interm assessments and they're not that really I think um the mantra that Dr. Moreno has led in a lot of that work is that uh it's like if if you're just going to give the test so that we could report

102to the board like it it that's not the purpose like that we we are giving an assessment that tells us uh this student has specific deficits in these areas and that's a problem and and we need to plan to address that issue. Uh, I believe that Hispanics being a a a group that's collectively performing at a lower level, it makes them more prime for benefiting from that type of targeted support. Um, I'm also very encouraged by the work that the committee's done, also led by Dr. Mareno in selecting uh I Ready as our new assessment because um the challenge that we're going to have collectively is the the assessment that we've used previously was like a 20 minute screener and now we have I ready which is often given uh in bigger longer chunks over

103multiple days but the reason that is so valuable is that it gives you even more specific diagnostic information about what students need and in tandem with the adoption of a new math curriculum I just think it's the elements are there to just continue that growth. I think also one thing um Dr. Rosaro mentioned before like we still need some time to do a more in-depth analysis like our Hispanic students at particular schools having larger gains and what were some of the strategies that those schools were leveraging. Um I know you know in speaking with some of our principles and our area superintendents anecdotally we were seeing that when grade level teams and schools had a very dedicated guaranteed and viable curriculum that was being used consistency and with consistency and fidelity. They were seeing gains

104whether that was in literacy or mathematics. And so that's why we're really encouraged to have this new math adoption um next year for K5 because it will help to provide that guaranteed viable curriculum and focusing on supporting our educators and how you implement that with fidelity so that we can see those gains throughout the district. Thank you. Uh, I'm wondering, so speaking of math adoption, our middle schools had adopted a new math curriculum and you know, you know, we've long seen this dip in math achievement um in in middle school and and literacy achievement. And in looking at the bright spot schools, the 10 bright spot schools showing significant growth. There's only one middle school. And frankly, the report doesn't say a lot about middle school. And I'm wondering what's going on? What are we

105seeing in middle school? Right? We don't see disagregated data for 6 through 8 yet we know there is a lot of work to do there. Um so I is the new math curriculum proving effective? What are we seeing in middle school? What what does the board need to know about um what the data is showing us? So I again I think it's a a learning curve for us because if you noted in the presentation for our middle schools, none of our middle schools were using I Ready. They were all using the fast um assessment which is more of a screener. it's like a lot shorter of an assessment. So, it is a bit um tougher to do that diagnostic dive into the data with the limited amount of information that we are receiving from the

106fast screeners. So, we I think we're hopeful in transitioning to I Ready for our middle level grades that will give us a more in-depth analysis of how we're doing in certain areas and where we need to improve. I guess just a point of clarification, the bright spots though were not showing fast or right. They're showing the CASP results and right like so that's the data that only had one middle school and all the rest elementary school. So, I'm just curious as we look at these projected CASP results and the significant growth we're seeing in middle school and not or I'm sorry in elementary school and not middle school um is there going to be work to focus on middle schools because it looks like we are not seeing the same level of growth. I don't

107know if that's true. It's just the data that I have available. I think there's a lot of variables that we need to uncover with middle school when it comes to our ESPback data. Um similar to conversations we've had at the high school level. I think as students um go through their schooling, right, there sometimes is less value placed on uh performance of standardized tests, right? And so we do need to make sure that we're also continuing to educate our families and our students about the importance of these scores and the impacts that they have just even on funding and other um you know challenges that we see throughout the district. So I think we still have a lot to unpack there um when it comes to middle school and the correlation and I think that

108will be part of the conversation we'll have in the future and setting some of our um interim goals. I do get sorry I do get on a soap box please when whenever I advocate for schools for middle schools in particular um so I know governor put aside some money um to actually do some middle school support. I know SECCOE the county office Dr. Gloria CDC has spoken about the importance of middle schools. So, I do think we have this like large contingency that wants to do something differently. And please know I'm right there with I feel like I put out my soap box every time and go middle schools. So, we're on it. Fantastic. Um, and I guess just a a last question and this is again just helping me to understand and make meaning

109of of the data in particular. Um, I ready and especially because we don't have benchmark. Um, so we saw 26% um of Spotlight students do this stretch growth or significant annual growth. And I'm wondering how that 26% compares to the significant growth. Um, I ready do they report nationally what I what I schools um see in terms of the percent of students making significant annual growth. I'm just looking for is there something that we could compare to to know yeah 26% is actually pretty good or or not so great. So what I can say is that um the way they determine the stretch goal is they compare students that have a similar starting point and those students between fall and spring um they're on a there's a distribution of their growth and they uh expect

110uh somewhere between 25 and 30% of students to meet their stretch goal. Uh part of what we noted is that their analysis is based on a 160day period between assessments and the vast majority of our students had significantly less than those 160%. So we're going to work to ensure that uh we're tighter in uh how we set our goals so that they're aligned with those uh metrics. Uh we also uh are fortunate that um I Ready has um various statisticians and data scientists that are willing partners more so than what we previously experienced. So we're looking forward to also um you know learn from their expertise as well as bring in external partners that we have from UCSD to to do that important um third party validation. Thank you. And I guess just along the

111lines of I Ready, um it would be great to know just when data is reported moving forward because some of our schools I know well all of our schools now are going to be using the I Ready Diagnostic and a smaller proportion are using the additional tools sort of targeted tools available knowing of the schools using those tools are we seeing any difference and is that something that we should be exploring? So not for today but just as we're moving forward. Thank you. Completely agreed and it's something that um Dr. Moreno and and Daario we we talk a lot about return on investment and how do we really quantify that. So 100% appreciate it and agree. All right. Uh I'll be um as brief as possible. We've indulged your time here. Um, first of all,

112I want to um, first of all, I want to say I really appreciate the structure particularly with your I guess it's your penultimate slide in walking us through what it looks like, what these interventions look like at each of the levels. Um, sort of cascading down. I really appreciate that. It helped conceptually to understand the program you're putting together and as we talk about a lot helped for the meaning making in terms of I felt like it really closed out um in a very effective way what the interventions are that are um that are contributing to these outcomes. Um, I'll say to to Richard's point, I one of the first things that I think I said to Richard or what there's no instruments in this cockpit and created I created this crazy little spreadsheet which

113is now I will say completely um it's completely ineffective because what you've actually created is so much better than my 60% solution. So, I want to thank you for that. And I want to say the the richness and and the other thing um when we first came in, I did a site visit um with Michelle and I we were kind of just making small talk. I said one thing you would focus on and you said differentiated instruction or differentiation. And I think the counterpart of of of the focus on data is that what it allows you to do ultimately is differentiation. You differentiate the sites, you differentiate the teachers, you differentiate right down to the student. And so I want to sort of honor that insight that you had two years ago or whatever that

114was. Um, and I also want to point out that Richard when I was like we don't have any regression analysis of what's what's what's causing differential outcomes and Richard's like oh it's principles and I mean I don't you know it's more complicated but I mean that is a major element of what it is and we can see that from the data and I will just point out uh my colleague Trusty Wirep is very proud of her subdist and I don't get an opportunity to ring to sort of celebrate principles in my subdist um but I do see but I do see here Bird Rock which to get a 20 point increase when you're already at 50 points above it's like wow and I will point out we got a new site leader so principal Banatau

115this is and I would say all the time in La Hoya cluster meetings to parents I'd be like well you know Bird Rock's really they're underperforming like if you just look at demographically in terms of what the what what you're looking at they're underperforming and I think Dr. Dr. Banitau's demonstrated that in fact with the outcomes he's seeing those interventions are showing what it looks like to have the adequate performance. And I would also say these growth measures are so important because again so much of these achievement scores are just Zillow scores translated into academic terms. But growth is something completely distinct. We can now see with a site like Bird Rock, its scores are always high and you could basically sit back on your laurels and say like, "Ah, yeah, we're getting good scores

116without recognizing that you're actually underperforming relative to to where you we would anticipate you would be." And now we're seeing what what it looks like to actually perform or outperform relative to what what we would anticipate. So, I just want to say in relation to that, and I also want to recognize the role of the area superintendent reform that we implemented, this that this board implemented in consultation with our staff when we first came on. It was they were all every I mean I think I had four area superintendents. There was no conceivable way that you could generate the true leadership you needed to actually take work off the superintendent's plate and and to allow the area superintendent to thrive. So these the first step was that the reforming the system so that you actually

117genuinely had a subdist or an area and then the second was to staff it up and thank you to the county for for for helping us out with the process where we really got the very best area super we could possibly get. So in the even more so to a certain extent the best investment you can make as a principal actually given that we have five area superintendents now with the additional reforms the very best the the best bang for the buck is your area superintendent. So uh I want to just say what superintendent superintendent yes superintendent. Yeah we got it. Um, touche. Um, so um, and I and I want to say the other side of this is so much of this is aligned with be best practices that we know from around the

118world and and a big part of that is this. I mean we in education you we have various terms for it but this is a train the trainer modality where you take you take you you really believe in the fact that we are all imperfect and that training and and growth is important and valuable. My example, this I just using my kids the other day. I play the same 15 songs on guitar that I played when I was 20 and I play them very well, but it is embarrassing that when you don't have coaching, you just, you know, and I shred it. My kids know them all, you know, it's like hear me like howling in in the in in the bathroom or whatever. Um, so training is real. taking our staff, treating our staff

119as in as as pe as individuals that are desirous of growth, that want to grow, that want to do the very best, that this is their career, meaning it's not just their job, but it's their passion, and it's a huge part of what they conceptualize their life project as being. So, that's a beautiful collaboration. I'd also say I'm trying now to like pull out some of the things you said so that they stick in my mind and for our for our all our listeners out there who are also Yeah. um uh peer learning. I mean so much of what you've said is about area superintendent learning from one another, principles learning from one another, teachers learning from one another and and and not just in terms of the benefits but in terms of how you

120manage limited resources where you cannot do everything top down. You have to actually rely on people to train themselves amongst one another. So that's a beautiful thing. Let me just say uh finally in terms of um I have three items uh in terms of um thinking about the goals per se and that is um I am concerned about our in our in our in our uh interim goals. I'm concerned about um the growth increasing. I mean to increase distance from standard is one thing. you can do that year on year but to increase growth percentages that is percentage of students achieving um substantial growth at a certain point that starts to get utopian where 59% I mean is there anywhere and and I don't say it's good to have aspirations I'm concerned about a goal

121that's so utopian that it sets us up to perceive us as failing when if we got if we were able to achieve 40% growth oh My god, that's insane. And then hold it. We That's an amazing Whereas, oh, did you get 43 the next year? Guess what? They're not going to get for I mean, there's you you start to reach a limit of of just an inherent limit. No, I know, but I'm just saying I'm trying to protect your vision so that Yeah. Um I'm very positive. I'm like, this is very positive. This is I want to be able to celebrate when we get to 40% and hold it. That's awesome. Okay. Okay. we all agree to disagree. Um and um and then in relation to spotlight uh I'll say a interest a strange thing

122about spotlight on at different campuses. So there's the issue about spotlights sort of perpetually the crit because of the nature of the criteria and selection they're perpetually it's not a cohort that is improving over time. it is perpetually a a um a a cohort perpetually a group of students that are having challenges. So it sets certain difficulties around how we think about it and how we treat it and how we achieve growth because it's always a group that's having a lot of challenges in terms of of that. So I'm I'm concerned about that over time and how we think about that. I'm also concerned what I would maybe like to see I agree that it's good for us to target spotlight. I would also like us to see some interim goals that are about our

123main target because as you point out it may be that you have a theory of action that the spotlight moves the whole but that may not that may not necessarily be and for for the sake of our site leaders I would like them to also keep an eye on where we are in terms of actually achieving the the larger goal which is that growth overall. So I don't know if that means having a spotlight interim and a and a student body interim or whatever. And then finally, I'll say there's an interesting thing and this is similar to what we saw with attendance and enrollment. And when you look overall the district, you you you start to get a perception of what is what the possible is that is incorrect where you go we're losing 5%

124whatever enrollment every year, 1% enrollment every year. That's the re that's just we you can't stop that. It's inevitable. But then when you look sight to sight, you have sites that are going up 5% and certain sites that are going down seven. You realize when you look in the perception you got of the average is actually deceiving you in terms of what the what the approaches are that produce the outcome. But you see a similar thing with spotlight where I was looking at the SPSA in your great the great online tool you now have to look at SPSAS and in the SPSA for Tory Pines Elementary. My kids school I'm looking at their I mean this is really eye openening. I'm looking at their distance from standard for socio economic disadvantaged students, Latino students, and

125it's 85 points above standard. So some of that is there's with choicing you have a certain degree of sort of um you have a certain degree of selection bias where you're actually sort of in a sense I don't know what the proper term is but you're taking some high achieving students out of their neighborhoods which is actually not great in terms of overall the equity of the district but at the same time some of that may be associated with the strate the strategy of actually taking of reducing the concentrated poverty that that student is experienc eriencing and and in increasing the expectations that a student has and changing the peers that they they they may have. So I'm I'm concerned about what that does. What you alluded to this there are challenges around measuring growth

126without knowing really how spotlights if we say 15% spotlights a 15% spotlight at a school in which Latino students are 82 points above standard is a different spotlight student than a than some of our sites say south of 94 for example. So I I think we can do a little more work in understanding what those differentials are and how they're impacting the overall score, but then also thinking about what strategies are are are are involved in actually getting a site in which socioeconomically disadvantaged students are 70 points above standard. That's truly remarkable. So anyhow, sorry I went on at length, but I this brings up a lot to mind and I appreciate all the work um you've done on this and all the work that our superintendents have done in principles and all the work

127ultimately that our students have done to achieve this. My colleague says I'm worrying about things that I don't need to. So we will move on with that. I I have to say this because I always wonder why we in in my community we focus on well I'm at 30%. 30% of your kids are achieving. You think that's good because you you may be higher than other schools or even if you're getting into 39 I I don't like that. I don't like that you can achieve and say every child who comes in here we're going to do something for you. we're going to help you to move up and that's more than 30% of the kids. So anyway, that's another topic with that. Thank you so much for your report tonight and thank you to my

128colleagues for their comments. So, okay, I think we don't need that. Okay, good. Okay, so with that there is that's no report. So we don't have a vote and thank you for everyone that showed up for this item. Um we will now move to items F1 through F6 various agreements with our bargaining units. Uh is there a motion on this item? And I see Trusty Wer paying with a motion and trustee Hazen with a second. Um are we all present? Okay. Um let's see. We got a motion a second. Miss Staltz are there any comments uh public comment on this item? Do any trustees have any comments on this item? Seeing none, we will move to a vote. Uh trustees, please vote. That motion passes unanimously. It's kind of strange to not say with student

129trustees concurring. Um all right. Uh that then brings us to uh item G1, approval of representatives to the community advisory committee for special education. Is there a motion on G1? I see Vice President Barrera with a motion. I see Trusty H trusty Hazen with a head nod followed by a hand confirming. Uh I have a motion and a second on this item. Miss Alzo, any speakers on this item? Do any of my colleagues have any comments or questions on this item? Seeing none, we'll move to a vote. Trustees, please vote. That motion also passes unanimously. All right. Uh that brings us now to uh H1, unless I'm very much mistaken, approval of the proposed phone free school day policy in alignment with AB 3216. Dr. Boua, please introduce the item. Yes. So trustees, thank you.

130President Person, I'm excited to bring for your approval the phone free school days policies in support of student mental health and responsible use of technology. This topic has garnered a lot of attention. Um, and we'll cover the reasons why. In this presentation, what you're going to see is the phone free school act and the key related resolutions on this topic, our policy development and engagement process, which I think is very important. Um, the current policy and the new proposed policy and then we'll cover their engagement and survey findings. Um this is when I when I'll invite uh Trustee Cruz that's in the audience um to speak when we get to that portion and also our next steps um in implementing this uh policy and I believe I have the clicker here too. So I want

131to begin by saying that this is actually something that's been very important to us for the last few years. This is not something that came along with uh the governor's uh law. So, we paid attention to our US surgeon general talking about social media and the significant harm that it's causing to our students and children. Um, with that, um, we had a social media dangers resolution, um, by trustee Hazen and Trusty Patterson come in mind and thinking about how do we reduce that, um, that time away from social media with students. We also talked about technology addiction. Um, our two student board members, Kirano and Epo Mousen, brought that up in 2023. And then also this phone free act school act of 2024 which requires school districts to adopt a policy to limit or prohibit

132the use of phones by July of 2026 and engaging in district partners in policy development. So there's been a lot of things happening here um really thinking and paying attention to the technology use in our schools. So we do think it's important we want to make sure it's continued that we we press on it. But I also want to talk about our values. And so I know that last time we talked about the superintendent's evaluation, I talked about a value system about democracy and civic leadership and innovation and healthy organizational culture. And so we really wanted to take a look at how do we develop this cell phone policy with these values in mind. And so what that meant was that we were going to engage with students, right? Students are the actual users of

133the cell phone. They're the ones that are going to potentially receive the changes in the rules. And so what do they think? How do they appine? How do they make sense of this? and how do they understand this as a tool? Um, we also think about I mean this is the part that I'm going to say this as a parent. Um, parents are the ones that are buying the cell phones and so how do we um do this in partnership, right? If a parent purchases a cell phone, how are we I don't want to become the bad guy at a school site to then enforce some rules um with a tool that a parent provided. So, how do we make sure that we do this in conjunction? So, it was very important for myself to

134really talk to parent teacher um association. I met with the PTA a couple of times. They also the PTA leaders of our school districts then went out to their schools and led the same conversations with other surveys. And so really thinking about parent and and then lastly of course is our staff. Our staff are the ones that see the cell phones in the classrooms that have to uphold. So there was a lot of engagement with those three communities that we thought was really important. Um one of the things that started to that also started to come up is um like how are other districts going about this? So, I know I want to thank LA Unified for kind of giving us some of their their um ideas, but also thinking about and I'm going to

135be critical of this and I think my phone, you know, your phone kind of listens to you and then gives you algorithms. Um I know that there was a lot of like are you going to buy pouches where children put their phone into pouches and it locks up. Um that's about a $3 million investment. I didn't think it was going to be a worthy investment because I then started to get Tik Toks of students knowing how to break them out of the pouches and teaching other students. I thought, okay, that's not going to be a responsible use of time. And it's also not something that is going to be a learning um piece for students. I think after all, we all use it. I think they're biased. Each one of us has our cell phone

136out. And so, how do we actually make sense of this responsibility was a really important topic to discuss. I do want to talk about this because I had a lot of questions around like don't you already have a board policy that restricts usage and the answer is yes and it was adopted in 2003 and I want us to think about what our phones look like back then because when we texted you had to press a letter like three different times to find that letter and all of the technology wasn't there. So, first of all, it's to uh keep up with the technology change, but also during the pandemic and during those times when children had to um do schools online, teachers really l into the technology. Um I see teachers to this day use QR

137codes for syllabus um have them vote on specific things using their phone as a tool. And so, I think teachers started to kind of have this different relationship with technology. So, that's why it's so important for us to take a look at at what we have now. 22 years later um and how what that means. And so it was really important for us to take a look at that. Our new proposed policy makes some things very I think the the strengths of our policy is this. It makes explicit the phone use as prohibited in schools in all grades. Um so here's where it gets a little bit nuanced. High school students may use phones during lunch or passing periods, but all students may use their phones before and after school or on bus. So, as

138long as the phone use is not interfering with bus operations, there was a lot of discussions with students about middle school and high school and what that means and why can high school students use it during passing periods and not middle school students. And what the students said to me is they said, "Ma'am," and and they did call me ma'am, which I didn't like, but I get it. Um, we have internships, we have sports, we have jobs, we're responsible for for our siblings. Sometimes we have to pick them up. um we're applying for colleges, we're waiting for these decisions for AP scores. We would like to be able to use our phones. Um and then they actually said and in middle school, social media becomes a thing and they're very impulsive and so it's best

139that they just keep their phone. Okay, so I'm following we're following what they describe. Um we also a lot of parents thought about emergency situations. They said, "Look, if there's an emergency, I want to make sure that I'm able to communicate with my student." And I know as as a parent myself when my son was at language academy, they did have a school shutdown and I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, I want to talk to my student." I understand that firsthand. And so really thinking about how do we do this with emergency situations, health related purposes, especially anything um that is required under IEPs or 504 plans, and also the instructional use authorized by educators. And then lastly, we really wanted to, and I've said this publicly, I don't want children to get in trouble

140over a tool we all use. And so really thinking about what are the consequences for making sure that students are engaged. What kind of interventions will we have? And do our PBIS and our restorative justice um policies kind of fit into that. And there's been a lot of questions around, well, what are going to be, you know, the consequences? And it's going to be very normal. There's going to be verbal reminders and referrals to counselors and contacting parents and same thing. And what we hope is that we see students engaged um in this. And again, we asked them, we went to them specifically to design this in engagement um with our ser with with our community. Like I said, we did presentations with the PTA. I visited their um leadership meetings twice and then they

141sought them out. they sought the same sort of uh meeting out as almost a cascade out with their own community. Um we also had a few meetings with the student advisory board and the result was this new proposed policy. Once we had a proposed policy, we did a whole survey of whole community and staff. We received over 1,600 um qualitative data points which has actually a really good uh return rate. Um we had supportive responses. They outnumbered the critiques of the policy by more than 5 to one. We do have the raw data attached. So if anyone's really interested in looking at that, I'm a big believer in also modeling a feedback loop. I don't like being surveyed and then no one tells me the data or what they're going to use that data for.

142So we're trying to model that. Here's all the data, the rawness, here's the themes, and here's what we're going to do about it. The key survey themes, but there was a strong support for clear and consistent enforcement. There was appreciation for family resources with request to more. And I'm going to pause there. This was actually an idea from the students. The students said, "Can we offer articles to our parents or to our families about like how social media actually damages our our social development? How phone use hurts our brain development? Can we have some questions where we might have a dinner table conversation about what this might mean? And can we make sure that we give them to fifth grade families so that they know coming into middle school the rules." So, they came up

143with these and they actually even came up and Googled some scholarly research for us. So that was a great push from the students. Um there was appreciation for the family resources. There was interest in the consistency across schools. And so let me state this too because we had a prior policy. Um we looked at every middle school and they were all different. So um student board um student advisory board looked at all of the middle school ones and said, "Ma'am, why don't we have a unified policy?" And I said, "Yes, we should have a unified policy." So that again came from them. Yes, I know the ma'am thing was like, "Okay, I appreciate it." Um, and then we also got many thank yous and great um job affirmations, requests to implement the policy urgently, like

144how can we do this quicker than the July 1st date of 2026 that the governor specified, and then also calls to include elementary grades and prohibition, hence hence that um aspect of it. But I do want to invite um Trustee Cruz to come up here with anything he might want to share. But I want to share a couple of things that came out from the student advisory board. One of them was they said, "So we haven't pulled our cell phone out in this engage conversation because you're listening to us. We're this topic is very relevant and so if our class time was like this, then there would be no need to access our phone, which I thought was very poignant uh feedback for us as educators." Um and then the second one is when we

145started looking at the actual law that was that came from the state of California, our students immediately found the loopholes. By the way, they said why are we doing anything differently if it says here that a teacher or administrator can allow you to use your phone. So if they can then the variation is going to again increase. And I was like noted. Thank you for finding the loophole in the law. Um, but we also have to do something that makes sure that children are engaged in their lessons that and and you're also telling me that it impacts our brain and it impacts our development. So, it behooves us to be responsible and not have this, but um, Trusty Cruz, I just invite you. I know you were there at every single meeting and I thank

146you for your leadership. So, anything you might share with us? Good evening, Superintendent Agoula, President Peterson, Vice President Barrett, distinguished board members. I'm Joseph Cruz, former student board member. Uh, good to see you guys again. Unfortunately, my former colleague Quinton could not make it, so I'll cover his portion. When we spoke to the student advisory board, nearly every student shared that their school had a different phone policy. Some enforced complete bans while others were less strict. Uh, this inconsistency created confusion, unequal enforcement, and it made understanding the expectations across the district unclear. And so establishing a clear district-wide cell phone policy would ensure fairness, help build better habits around phone use, and allow students and staff to focus more consistently on learning no matter what school they're at. Furthermore, we wanted to speak on the

147phone policy difference between high school and every grade before that. Speaking as a former high school student, our level of responsibility was certainly much higher than that back in middle school. We might have to manage jobs, families like picking up our siblings, um, and other things like that. With that being said, our phones being less prohibited during certain portions of the school day is an acknowledgement of that higher level of trust and responsibility. Overall, this slide is a reflection of our district's commitment to having clear communication with our community and students. not only that, but engaging with them and using their feedback to help shape and guide our policy decisions. And it's just so important. So, thank you for letting me come back and thank you. Have a good rest of your night. Thank you

148so much. I appreciate it. Thank you. Good to see you. And now, because we want to make sure that this does get implemented in a uniform way, I want to um express appreciation to our communications department um who is creating a whole toolkit for every school site. So, every school will receive an update fax for parents. We're going to update that. We're going to have a clear website uh a website page with consistent information and familyfriendly articles. We have developed a principal toolkit with draft principal message to families, enforcement guidelines, FAQs. We also created studentfriendly posters which we will be giving to every school. And we will also continue to include messaging on dangers of social media and technology addiction resolutions. We want to make sure that if we're asking for schools to have this

149uniform policy that we provide them with all of the resources that they need in order to actually lead it through so that we continue to stay in uniform. Um so that's the cell phone uh or the phone free policy but wanted to make sure that you had all of that information. So thank you trustees for your consideration today to adopt. Thank you. Do I have a motion on this item? Uh I trusty Wers paint with the motion and vice president Barrera with the second. Uh Miss Stoultz uh are there any public comments on this item? There are none. Wow. Okay, that's consensus for you. Um do any of my colleagues have any comments on this item? I see u Vice President Ber and then Trusty Hayen and then Nope. Um, so I very much want

150to thank uh, Superintendent Bula for the process, the way that we went about uh, clarifying and and developing our our policy. And um, I've certainly heard consistently um, from the experience in other districts that the way you get to the policy is really important in order for the policy to succeed. And first and foremost, the engagement with students led by Joseph and Quinton um I think was just, you know, so important to get us to this policy point, but also to to um have something that's going to be workable going forward. So I wanted to just ask you Joseph a little bit when the conversation started um with the student advisory board or you know with your peers to where we got to. Can you give us a little bit of a sense of was

151there a lot of change? Were people pretty much there at the beginning or was was the conversation actually important in helping people evolve? Yeah. Um like Dr. Dr. Bula said literally first meeting we found that loophole right and yes this conversation with the students was definitely much needed um especially in figuring out what portions of like different phone policies from different schools we should take what we should keep or we should not and um just making all of that unity and making a singular phone policy it was just so important. So yes, students were a very crucial part and I'm sure Dr. Guly you would agree they played a huge role. I just remember I mean I want to say the student name is Samuel that we know. Yeah. Um he was very adamant of

152like this is a tool why are you taking it away from me and and so please know that it was a very lively discussion um which I really appreciated Chelsea Hayen. Thank you. And thank you to student advisory board members, all the students, families, educators, everyone who's shared feedback. And thank you for asking for their feedback and and listening. Uh I really appreciate the process. Um and that we're continuing to center decisions um on on that community feedback. Um, I also really appreciate in looking at the policy section five that talks about family resources, conversation starters, ongoing communication, all those things you referenced. Um, and I'm wondering, um, so the policy doesn't specify the frequency of information sharing. Um, I know there is a commitment to provide information. Um and I'm wondering just in terms

153of you know managing expectations um and ensuring this happens ongoing is the expectation that the actions in section 5 would occur at least once a year? Are we thinking a more frequent basis? But again when you are no longer sitting here and we're no longer sitting here and we want to make sure this is implemented with fidelity and and consistency. What are we thinking about there? I appreciate that and I I know I actually think that with the change of technology we're going to have to keep up with the research, right? Like right now we're talking social media and I think at at some point it's going to be about AI and GPT. And so I do think it behooves us to think about a quarterly um sort of way to really think about how

154does this continue to impact. I I I am also going to say that I mean we saw some impacts with social media and and I think it divided us. It it's very divisive. It's it's a fodder for misinformation. And so I think we we need to continue to also elevate those two topics as we look at into what AI looks like in schools. Thank you. And one of the other things I'm I'm sort of grappling with is I heard um Joseph and you you know describe um inconsistent implementation of the existing policy. And when I look on paper, these two policies, the old policy and the new policy are almost identical policies. And so the big question for me really comes down to implementation. Um, and I heard you say it's not worth spending $3

155million on cell phone pouches. And I you know I I agree but the question really becomes how are we going to ensure that every site implements this policy consistently when the last policy which was almost the same was not implemented consistently. So I guess what what's going to be different? I think in you know when we were talked about um goals two and three we talked about investing in leadership and support and coaching and so I imagine maybe it's the same thing but if you can speak to the work we need to do on implementation and how we'll be effective and that's why it was actually really important to develop that toolkit as well. Um, and this has taken I mean when you when you make change the way that we did with grassroots efforts,

156it's it's been an ongoing conversation with almost all of the sites, right? And so I know that they're aware, they've been surveyed, and so the awareness is one. Um, the want for change is two. Um, the communication is three, and then the toolkit is the fourth one. And so again, it's we're going to continue to communicate the expectations of it. I know that every educator has said we need a policy to do something. So we're actually also saying yes and here it is. Um now the enforcement piece I'm going to say we have to act professionally and make sure that we continue to enforce it. So it's how we communicate our own expectations as well. Fabia I think we have um some video of the resources the toolkit. Oh, okay. Here we come. Can I

157talk a little bit about these posters? Because um when we did the Aspen Challenge, many of our high schools um started to design spaces that were phone free. And one of my favorites was from Melanie C who said, "We're going for recess vibes." Um you know, go back to elementary school, play games, make friends. And then they actually sought out data and started saying like people made friends like two two new friends a week just from t putting their cell phone down and not staring at a screen but actually talking and playing games. And so I know I'm going to continue to not only um empower but also promote these notions of phone free zones and design by students about like how do we want to have that vibe and make sure that we're connecting

158as as people and with humanity. But I thought it was really beautiful that high school students themselves said we need spaces where we can just be ourselves and make friends without our technology. So it is a desire from them too. I guess so that sort of tease up my last question really well. Um, which is I worry about not or about providing um this additional access um to high school students and and not to middle school students specifically for the reasons that the LMEC students pointed out, right, with this no phone zone initiative. If we want students to be well and we know screen time and use of social media and not having face-to-face interactions interrupts wellness and and connection I'm stuck with what is the difference you know between 14 to 18 year olds

159as we think about their brain development and what they need to be well and and our uh students in middle school 11 to 13 year olds and I think particular particularly for younger high school students. I agree, you know, as Joseph describes um high school students being more responsible. I think certainly by the end of high school and we know, you know, brains are more fully developed, but our younger high school students may not be ready for that. And so I'm wondering if you can speak to, you know, to give me some confidence um about why we think high school students should be able to use phones during lunch um and and during passing periods, but middle school students shouldn't and how this aligns with our with our wellness school. I'm going to actually quote

160some of the students that I spoke to um and they talked about impulsivity. Um they actually said in middle school there was a lot of impulse to immediately post something or take a video and p and picture and post it and and there's it's a change of maturity. Now I know that as far as that goes I do also want to make sure that we have a welcoming nature of our schools to promote those phone free zones and and have it be studentled. I'm going to continue to press the student leadership piece um because again this really does impact them more than anything. Um, but I'm going to invite you next time the student advisory board comes together and let's pose that question to them because I want to actually continue. I don't think this

161is a it's a done thing because the technology is going to continue to evolve, but I think it's going to be an ongoing conversation because what I want to know is if we do this, okay, high school students, is it really useful? Do you really need it? Like, can you put it down? Like, I would love to continue that conversation myself with them. So, this is not a it's published, it's done, we're not going to look at it, but I think it needs to be an iteration of it. Um, and I and I I understand because I was ready to do no phone and it was that press from students and again, if we really are creating alongside our students and alongside our community, I'm I'm going going to have to go, yes, you're right.

162Okay, that emerged. I agree with you. Yeah. So, I I appreciate the willingness to really pay attention to, you know, this policy for high school students because I think and I love high school students, but you know, the frontal lobe, right, is not fully developed. We know that heist. We know that 14 and 15 and 16 and 17 year olds are impulsive and we know that cell phones are addictive and so really appreciate that we are willing to to monitor this and I think right the the correlary to this policy and to the phone free campus is is also thinking about when you talk about re recess vibes right what are the other things that we are providing right so that they have the experience ma'am I haven't picked up my phone because what's happening

163in front of me is so fun and so engaging ing and so I challenge all of us um you know on our high schools campuses to provide those experiences too. So I appreciate the feedback. I am unsure uh still about you know whether it is appropriate um for high school students to have access during lunch but look forward to to hearing more um as the years go by. Um so if I can just say a couple of things here. Um, first of all, I'm good with this policy. I I already had to pick up a phone. I mentioned my daughter's phone from the office at Murland's uh for violating the substantially similar policy at Mirlland's. Um, she said she was just organizing her backpack. And if you believe that um but uh one of the

164things I'll say is I I think obviously to the extent that phones are displacing instructional time and that's our job is to instruct kids to the extent they're displacing exercise or socialization that's obviously problematic. But one thing I don't want to get lost in the conversation is using these phones is the future. It's a huge part of the future as well. And I and I go back to my own childhood when my parents and everyone else said stop playing computer games and um stop playing role playing games computer games and I eventually gave up computer games and my friends who did not give up computer games went on to make twice as much money as I do designing developing computer games. So um you know there's a way in which um as as we clarify

165where and when students can use it I would really encourage us to think not just in terms of prohibition but how do we integrate these phones into our instruction um and frankly into our socialization. I know a lot of people who yes is it preferable to have a coffee with a friend? Sure. Okay. but who have very vibrant social lives in part because of the these phones who otherwise would be by themselves and not having social lives. So I I just what I want to do is I do not want kids using phones in their classrooms obviously but I I want us to start thinking about that future in which my son they don't have a cell plans but I got a cell phone so they could start using it and they use it on

166the Wi-Fi at home. My son is doing insane stuff with AI and that I can't do that I don't understand. He's nine years old and he's navigating where to download it. They're popping up for approval because I haven't Wow. He is teaching himself how to do all this stuff and learning amazing things about the world. My daughter, I don't necessarily love her being on YouTube and the nonsense she's watching on YouTube, but she's making YouTube clips and she's they're laughing in the room with her friends and they're learning how to cut it and put backgrounds on and do sparkle and do their stuff. Um, so I just as we move forward with this, I think I'm supportive of this policy, but I also want us in to lean into how we how we think deeply

167about the role that this these phones phon phones and our other and social media are going to play in these kids' lives and how we actually help to give them the tools and the preparation to do amazing things with these with these tools. Um, so that's all I just want. Yeah, I just want to say that we make policy. We can always change it, modify it. I love the way you engage students. I mean, they're the ones out there and they come up with some pretty stringent things about their counterparts at the middle school. I support them, but um, that's me and my my preferences. But I I just applaud the way we didn't just sit here and make a policy. We allowed them. And I read some of the comments from the parents of

168those who called in. How soon are you starting it? I mean, it it's like folks understand that we have to do something and they need to start. Even when you go out to a restaurant, you just see people sitting there on their cell phones and I'm going, "What happened to conversation with going out to eat a meal?" Just hi, how are you doing? Looking at people and finding out what they're up to. So, I really am happy and thank you for coming in, Joseph, to help us out with this. We find that there's a problem. I'm sure we can come back and modify it and make some changes and adjustments, but that's what we do. We make policies based upon input and I thank you for thank you and all the students who participated in

169this process. Thank you, Trusty Wyers Pay. Um, okay. With that, uh, looks like we've exhausted board comment here. Uh, we will we have a motion in a second. We have had our comment. Uh, is there one last check on the public? Nobody's still there. Okay, great. With that, we will move. Thank you. Um, immediate pass. Trustee Cruz. We will move to a vote. Trustees, please vote. That motion passes unanimously. With our former trustee occurring, seems like. All right, we're rounding the final turns here. Uh, we will now consider items H2 through H6, 2025 26. charter school operations agreements, requests for allowance of attendance during emergency conditions, an easement uh to SDG& and resolutions authorizing issuance and sale of tax and revenue anticipation notes, establishment of an accounting policy and signing and filing of state allocation

170board administered documents. Very exciting stuff here. Um so do I have a motion on these items? Uh, Vice President Barrera with a motion. Uh, second from Trusty Whitehurst Payne. We have a motion, a second. Miss Stalls, are there any comments on these items from the public? Okay. Uh, a technical consultation happening here. Yeah, I'm just trying to clarify whether you're voting on H2 through H6 or H2 through H8. Okay. Through H8. Okay, no problem. I was supposed to review these and I did and I didn't identify it. So, it's both of our faults. Um, thank you, uh, general counsel. This is through H2 through H8. Let the record reflect. Uh, and is there maybe maybe H7 and 8 brought out a lot of public comments. Is there any public comments on trustees? I'll once again

171H2 through H8. Okay. Um, with that, we will move to a vote. Trustees, please vote on H2 through H8. That motion passes unanimously. All right, it's good. The cameras are packing up. You're going to miss the superintendent's consent agenda. Okay, we will now move to items H I1 rather through I44. The superintendent's consent agenda. Consent items are considered to be routine and will be enacted by one motion followed by a vote. There will be no separate discussion of these items unless the board, member of the public or staff request specific items be removed from the consent agenda for separate discussion and action. Any agenda item removed will be voted upon following the motion to approve the consent agenda. Does the board have any items they would like to have pulled from consent for discussion? Seeing

172none, um has anyone in the public signed up to pull anything? Okay. Uh therefore, we have the superintendent's consent agenda as it appears on our agenda. That is to say, I1 through I44. Uh, do we have a motion on this? Uh, Trusty Hazen with a motion. Trusty Wyers Payne with a second. We have a motion and a second. Uh, we will now move to a vote. Uh, board members, please vote. That motion passes unanimously. All right, this is it. We will now receive public testimony on non-aggenda items. Miss Stoultz, have we received any request for non-aggenda comment? Yes, we have three speakers on non-aggenda. The first one is virtual um on Zoom. Alexander Bissell, if Alexander is there, you can unmute. You can hear me. You have three minutes. Go ahead. Yes, we can hear

173you Alexander. Okay. Thank you. So, good evening members of the board. Uh my name is Alexander Bissell and I'm here as a father of four uh children, a concerned community member and an advocate for the health, safety, and future of Cadmin Elementary students. Um, AT&T is proposing to install a 70 ft cell phone tower along with the 281T telecom facility and a diesel generator with 54 gallons fuel tank at Cadmin Park just 100 ft from the school classrooms and playgrounds. This is unsafe due to the diesel emissions, noise, disruptions from the generator and maintenance and most importantly the threat of fire in an already vulnerable high fire safety area. CAD's worked hard to rebuild enrollment is rebounding since the epidemi pandemic. Uh student performance indicators have improved significantly in 2024 in maths and English scores

174are up. Uh absentee is down. This trajectory should be something that's celebrated and protected. Installing an industry industrial tower next door sends the wrong message to families. This project has been fasttracked while school has been out for summer. This is unacceptable. School personnel have a right to be informed and families deserve a right to have a voice in this process. As board members, you have a duty of care. I urge you to release a public statement opposing the cell tower. Demand full transparency from the city. Notify all Camden Elementary families and personnel immediately and advocate to the planning commission, city council, and mayor Gloria to stop this project in its tr tracks. Because if this tower moves forward, we the residents and families of the surrounding community will not be sending our children to Cadmin

175Elementary. We will move them to private or charter schools. We must protect our children. I thank you for consideration. Thanks very much. And we have two inerson speakers. Victor Ward, you have three minutes. Good evening, board and superintendent. Um, when I was here last, Mr. Canning gave um a presentation on new communication and some of the responses to that were one of the responses was from uh Miss Bazo, Trusty Bazo, and she said, "Well, can we build an app?" And Mr. Canning said, "Well, we're just not quite there yet." Of course, everyone in the district is devoted to educating students, not building apps, and that's what you should be focused on. Um, the other thing that he mentioned was that in the perfect world, you would have a situation where you were able to tap

176into some of the students use of social media and use some of that to advance the district. Uh, the reason that I'm here is because that's exactly what my company does. Uh, I have here a prototype. Uh, it's called Real Time. It allows students, teachers, administrators to upload their own videos. We have a an announcement section, a principal's address, important announcements. It allows for communication as uh Trusty Peterson just mentioned to move into the 20 year 2025. You know, education, I I come a little bit from education and a little bit from law. And both of those industries are paperheavy. Um but we don't use so much paper nowadays. It's more video and uh short messages to communicate things. So, um, a couple of, uh, things that I think, uh, are really fabulous with this

177is, um, like I said, it's the students can upload their own videos, which means it's a, it's related to media arts, and media arts is one of the disciplines that California Department of Education recognizes that fall under arts and music, and therefore, it qualifies for Prop 28 funds. So, you'll be able to get a fantastic communications tool while also educating students. Uh we're in talks with a few districts. I'm from uh Northern California, so we've been talking to people from Stockton to Fresno to Pomona. Um, but none of them have the attitude of this district, which I think follows what Superintendent Bagula has said, which is don't be afraid to try something new. And that's what I try to instill to people. Um, obviously we're new, but I think and you know, we're not asking

178to roll this out to 95,000 students. That would be kind of silly. Um but try something new pilot program with you know a few schools to see how that works both from the communications end and from the education of media arts. Thank you very much for your time and Arlene New You have three minutes. When a trusted adult vanishes from a child's life without explanation, that child doesn't just lose a teacher, they lose stability and trust. At Hoover, my students knew I would fight for them. At Emerson, my kindergarteners knew I accepted them. I brought in sensory tools, built community, and showed them through actions that their emotions weren't problems to be punished, but signals to be understood. And then I was gone. Not because I didn't care, not because I didn't show up, but

179because the district refused to support the very methods it claims to value. You removed the adult those kids had started to regulate with. You took away the space where they felt safe to try, to stumble, and to grow. You can't say every child every day while leaving disregulated kids with unsupported teachers. You can't ignore best practice and then punish the people who know better. You can't call yourself traumainformed while creating trauma through neglect. When I broke, it wasn't a private failure. It was a public wound. And every child who watched me disappear learned that safe adults can be taken away, too. They didn't just lose a teacher. They lost belief that the system was safe. The district let this happen to me. What does that say to the next traumainformed teacher? To the restorative justice

180team, to the kids watching quietly from the rug. It tells them not to trust. They lost someone who saw them. They saw that no one in power cared. The fact remains, letting teachers be abused hurts the kids. You don't have to like me. I'm not even sure I'm coming back. But if I'm not the kind of teacher you fight for, you're not fighting for the children either. That concludes non-aggenda comment. Okay. Uh thank you to everyone who spoke tonight for providing your input. Uh we take it seriously and u and welcome it. With that, uh we are about to adjourn the next regular meeting. We're going to take a summer break here and we encourage all of you to do the same. Our next regular meeting will be August 26th, 2025. So with that, this

181meeting is adjourned.