001I would like to welcome everyone watching on ITV and Via live stream and call the October 25th 2022 regular meeting to order with all board members present this is crowded up here today it's good we will begin today's meeting with a moment of silence in remembrance of former near Mesa High School student Brian Mendoza who recently passed away we express our most sincere condolences to his family our vice president will make some remarks thank you Dr Whitehurst Payne and thank you everyone for being here with us this evening before we get started we did want to share a few minutes um just to talk about Brian so Brian was a student at Mira Mesa High School he had just graduated in June of this year he was currently right now a freshman at CSU San
002Marcos he was selected this year for this to be the speaker at large for the senior class at graduation and delivered a very engaging speech I was there it was um it was fantastic he was very honored to be selected um Brian was selected uh because he just he knew he had a big heart um he loved his community he loved his family for and Friends he was very caring ambitious and also very resilient he spent the last few years really working hard towards his goals in high school and was pursuing his passions particularly in the area of cutting hair he even joked during his speech that he was he wanted to cut Jeff Saban's the principal's hair um so he'd given many haircuts to friends family members even neighbors and he also would cut
003um hair he would also provide haircuts to homeless people that didn't didn't have money and also at community events Brian was shot and killed he died at 18 years old he left so much potential and life and loved ones behind he was a special young man who made the decision to better his life and he was doing just that he was what going getting his car to go to school that morning when his life was cut short so please give us a just a moment of silence for Brian thank you for that thank you all for listening to his family our condolences the army JROTC color guard for Morse high school is here with us now and we ask them to come forward to present the colors please stand for the presentational colors Investments I
004pledge 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 forward thank you please be seated I would like a motion to adopt today's agenda please move thank you Dr Mike second thank you trustee Baza I would like to have the students to vote first definitely hi thank you and please vote electronically for the rest of us that passes unanimously with the students concurring with us now we're here today's meeting of the board of education is a business meeting that is conducted in public and board members will not engage in a dialogue with members of the audience board by law 1025 sets the time limit for public comment on agenda items at 10 minutes per side
005pro and con or 20 minutes total speakers will be able to provide testimony at the beginning of the appropriate agenda item or at the end of the meeting for non-agenda public comment the list of public speakers is attached to agenda item B2 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 Zoom does not allow staff to access your personal device to unmute a speaker please follow along with the agenda so you know when your item is coming up for discussion if you would like to sign up for public
006comment iPads are available in the back of the auditorium and in the lobby thank you next we will have a student presentation today from New Orleans middle school and we have here students who will do this Jocelyn frestal and Peyton zosko would you please come forward to the podium and introduce the student presentations hi my name is Payton shotko and my name is Jocelyn frausto Peyton and I are both 8th graders at Maryland's Middle School in La Jolla we are the creators of the sixth grade Wheel video we have personally experienced the Dynamics of the wheel for us half was online and half was in person being on Zoom through the pandemic is very different compared to what sixth graders encounter now rotating through the classes allows students to enjoy different atmospheres and learn while
007having fun my favorite part of the wheel was the health rotation when we got to practice CE CPR and using the AED I enjoyed the music rotation it was super fun and the projects helped me learn a lot about music thank you for our time to speak and without further Ado please enjoy the sixth grade wheel presentation thank you [Applause] foreign [Music] thank you [Applause] hello and welcome to Mueller's Middle School my name is Jeff Luna principal our students have put together a wonderful presentation for you that will feature our sixth grade steam exploratory wheel we welcome you to come out and see this program in person but until then until you have a chance to do that here's a little bit about our program [Music] hello my name is Emily Newman and I teach
008the music section of the wheel my name is Robert Wood and I teach Tech tools here at Maryland's Middle School hi I'm Suzanne Serafin and I want to talk to you about the health and wellness portion of the sixth grade exploratory wheel so art 6 in exploratory wheel is a class for kids to work with all different kinds of Art and Design making materials and tools try different approaches for making art so it's a mixed media course students also participate in Art and Design challenges where we emphasize skill building creativity and originality good mindset took it to work by themselves in Partners in groups to solve creative challenges and they're going to be making art that responds to their personal interests sometimes um to maybe concerns they have in the about the world and their
009unique perspectives they have on different so the music wheel is a place where students get to explore music and how it affects their lives some of the topics that we cover are instruments from around the world we look at musical vocabulary as well as musical notation we focus on different genres of music as well as music Through the Ages so text tools is designed to introduce students to the basics of various Google apps that they may use while they're in school as well as helping students to get organized in their Google classroom and everyday life wellness and mindfulness so I spend about three weeks on that with journaling and rotation and yoga and trying to give kids some tools to help them with anxiety and just just Middle School in general and then we jump
010into nutrition which Can't Get Enough nutrition we talk a lot about reading labels and making good decisions from there we go to first aid and CPR we have actual CPR mannequins that we use we have AED trainers defibrillator trainers that the kids also very Hands-On lots of lots of practice with CPR and aeds Visual Voice and we also kind of analyze How Art and Design reveals and impacts human values music class is a place where students get to explore music and spend a little more time with it in a environment that they don't they're more mostly focused on their academics so it's a chance for them to take a break from the hard-hitting academics and have a chance to explore their creative side so Tech can be intimidating so we've kind of taken the approach
011that we like Tech tools to be that of a casual one students are encouraged to help each other and share their various strengths and with their classmates things such as sheets Google Sheets Google Slides coding various students come with a lot of expertise and so we encourage them to work with each other and share these strengths with their classmates focus on your health your Wellness learn you know explore and um and so to give kids that opportunity it just makes me happy I love giving that opportunity foreign I love teaching art six wheel because we just get to explore so many different art making materials so it's kind of fun to be able to draw and paint and collage and sculpt and assemble so I think that's the most exciting part for me is that
012where we get to do all the different kinds of stuff all right music has opened a lot of doors for me uh personally and I love that I get to bring some of those experiences to my students it gives students a chance who may not otherwise have gotten to explore music in school a chance to explore music and to see if it is a passion for them as well I like being in the classroom with the students I like the casualness of it I enjoy being able to teach students skills that they potentially will use for their school career if not the rest of their lives I think the wellness is the biggest the meditation and the journaling giving them those tools to sort of help them with it with just getting through middle school
013that's that's really my number one thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you for that and there is life after Middle School really on Saturday Roosevelt Junior High School had its I won't say what number Reunion but my first class they're still meeting so there's life beyond and they're doing good things thank you all for coming I'm talking to the students the parents but no thank you you did a great job thank you for coming to us and with that let us move on I would like to welcome District staff member Kate McDevitt and Madeleine Moritz National advisor for Whole Health whole Child Health Alliance for a healthier generation and ask them to come to the podium for the presentation Kate would you like me to go first or are you going to go first sounds
014good okay hello San Diego Unified School Board and superintendent Jackson thank you for having me here today to celebrate the health and well-being achievements of San Diego Unified Schools my name is Madeline morich and I'm a national advisor of whole child health with the alliance for healthier generation It is Well documented that health and learning are interconnected schools function best when students staff and teachers are happy and healthy over 15 years ago healthier generation pioneered an award program to recognize schools that exemplify best practices in key measures related to Children's Health such as serving healthier meals and snacks and offering high quality physical and health education over the years this program has been refined to reflect our understanding of the many inter interrelated variables that contribute to whole child health America's healthiest schools recognition is
015this prestigious annual distinction presented to schools that have demonstrated remarkable efforts to prioritize essential physical mental and social emotional health needs of students staff and Families this year healthier generation is expanding the award program to meet schools and districts where they are recognizing excellence in nine key areas family and Community engagement nutrition and food access health education local wellness policy physical education and activity social emotional health and learning staff well-being tobacco-free schools and school health services today I am excited to announce that 18 San Diego Unified Schools were awarded recognition in the last year which means that each one of these schools is a leader in at least one of these health and well-being topic areas this award is really a testament to San Diego unified's commitment to creating healthy school environments when healthier generation
016first partnered with the district back in 2014 we worked with a small cohort of schools to implement best practices with regards to nutrition and physical activity and over the past eight years we have seen the district Double Down On Wellness initiatives to expand Wellness programming to every school in the district and go beyond just physical health but really support social emotional and mental well-being as well in just two years we have seen the number of awarded schools increase from 10 to 18 schools as a National Organization healthier generation is uplifting San Diego unified as a leader in school Wellness this district is truly at the Forefront of what is possible to create a healthy school environment where students staff and families can thrive so please join me in recognizing the following schools in their achievements
017in whole school health and well-being and I'm going to call up our schools would you like to say something first no way you did an amazing job thank you sounds good I'll call up the schools we will hand out some certificates and then when you're called up please stand over there we're going to do a photo opportunity with the board sound good okay so first we have benchley Weinberger Elementary School [Applause] and Edison you're on Deck so come on up Edison perfect and then just go over to that side we have Field Elementary School [Applause] Fletcher Elementary School [Applause] Florence Elementary School [Applause] Hancock Elementary School [Applause] Horton Elementary School [Applause] La Jolla Elementary School [Applause] La Jolla Senior High [Applause] Lafayette Elementary School [Applause] Miramar Ranch Elementary foreign Academy [Applause] normal Heights Elementary [Applause]
018Ocean Beach Elementary foreign Elementary [Applause] Trace School [Applause] Wilson Middle foreign middle school and they were not able to be here with us today just kidding thank you and we'd like to take pictures with you all you want to say something Dr Casillas do you want to receive on behalf of Taft excellent thank you [Music] uh yes all of the board members are going to have to we're going to have to do a picture with everybody well I'd like to congratulate all the winners I especially would like to give a heartfelt congratulations to all of the schools from sub District B B we congratulate all [Applause] congratulations and we always throw out that challenge we want every school to be the best thank you can I just say that um where's our Edison principle Edison
019I do yeah so um one of our non-profit after school providers told me that uh she walked into her club meeting with snacks you know for the students at in the club at Edison and they were chips and the students said we can't have those we're a healthy school and so yeah and so what the result of that is this organization which has clubs throughout the city got the healthy snacks list from Edison and now is changing the snacks that they're providing throughout the city so way to go way to go as long as you leave potato chips on the list are there any other board members who'd like to comment or say anything thank you yeah I would just like to further congratulate all of you what you're doing is really set an example
020for all the schools in the district and um you know as we know um you know students typically don't eat the best and um and parents too and and and uh so and staff so we can all learn from this and what you're doing is is um just sitting the bar a little higher and allowing our students to to think a little bit more deeply about this issue so I really thank you thank you for your efforts thank you trustee Bassa Dr McCrary yeah so also uh part of a healthy school is having a healthy meal and it's knowing where those healthy meals come from and that goes back to ours including our school Gardens where our students learn how to grow and care for and harvest and prepare fresh vegetables that in some schools
021we have a a garden to Cafe program where they not only grow their food but they learn how to prepare it and eat the food that's grown in their school garden so thank you and I challenge folks to try it at home and and and I'm not saying anything right now about the outcome at my house but um I still challenge you there's another year you can grow something thank you I just kind of like to say thank you and congratulations I know for a lot of students especially in marginalized communities school is one of the few places where healthy food options are the best option with costs included so really thank you for all the great work you do and congratulations and here's to many more schools yes and with that I just also
022want to applaud a lot of the student leaders especially the middle school students that we saw from Merlin's middle school and see how all of the 18 schools that have been recognized are schools that have been prioritizing not only student mental health but staff mental health teacher mental health and overall creating more healthy and happy communities so thank you very much yes superintendent sorry I didn't I wasn't going to but I I will well while we represent uh 18 here where we recognize 18 all of our district schools are implementing uh District Wellness thank you Kate um for the work that you do and I'll be talking about Wellness for adults as well so thank you all to the great leaders and your students families and parents thank you very much for representing all of
023us thank you and we really do appreciate that I said to you yesterday if we're going to be a healthy Society we have to be a healthy State a healthy and I think she was talking about what I was eating no I'm teasing yeah okay very good thank you all for coming out and doing this annually with us and with that let's move on to item D1 the report on closed session general counsel green thank you we have one item to report out from closed session the board voted unanimously to approve joining and Mikus brief in the case entitled James Lacy versus City and County of San Francisco that is court of appeal case number a165899 thank you for that uh superintendent Jackson are there any any administrative assignments yes thank you president Dr Whitehurst
024Payne I have two uh this evening that I will be announcing very excited for the associate principal at Central Elementary School Vanessa Zuniga Garcia congratulations yes I see you Liz your heart's in both places right there you go and also the associate principal for I high Virtual Academy Cynthia Marlin congratulations and uh I know they're going to both be great in their respective schools thank you thank you and with that we move on to our Associated student body reports and we've got a couple of people here now we have with us Kiana Rodarte from Mira Mesa High School and we also have Janiece estrava see from Kearney high school so we'll start over here three things one I want you to tell us about your school then I also want you to tell us about
025yourself and what's going on both academically and socially um hello board members and superintendent Jackson my name is Kiana Rodarte and I'm Mira mesa's High School ASB president I'm honored to be standing here today speaking to y'all about my school's accomplishments in the year so far our goal does ASB leaders is to build community and other if the spirit lost through the pandemic so through our events we want students to feel proud of the school that they go to as summer comes to came to a close we hold our annual tailgate to Hype up our student body and welcome our newest smarters soon after ASP hosted our annual blood drive partnering up with San Diego blood drive as it is our first blood drive we hosted this school year in the beginning of the month
026of October we hosted our Enchanted Forest themed homecoming our spirit days were a big hit with anything but a backpack they having the most student participation in years later that week we hosted our homecoming football game and during the halftime show our well-known Sapphire sound performed in addition to floats created by class Council we are excited to bring back our homecoming dance where we were able to where we welcomed where students were welcomed by a beautiful light archway before enjoying an incredible DJ disco Movie Snacks games and a photo booth we had an amazing turnout welcoming over a thousand students to and their guests to the campus we recognize the building Community within our school of support is as important as building Community outside of it so for this reason Mira Mesa High School um
027organize the fundraiser to benefit the Susan G Komen Foundation to raise These funds we are currently selling pink socks in our student store for students to participate in our pink out football game this Friday in November we will join the no place for hate anti-bias program we want to start a school-wide tradition that makes students feel seen and appreciated in our community once again I'm grateful for the word for this opportunity uh to share with you all my many accomplishments with ASB and the future plans of Mira Mesa High School I would also like to recognize Mira Mesa High School ASB advisor Alexis Melrose for setting a great example as leadership in campus lastly I would like to thank our admin team especially Mr savings and Miss Reyes that without their support and constant encouragement
028none of this would have been possible so thank you [Applause] thank you Dr Whitehurst paint I just wanted to add a little side note that when I was talking to principal savings who's here in the audience one of the kids during nothing no it was a you couldn't no to the backpack thing nothing but a backpack so they were bringing different things and not backpacks and one of the kids I think wanted to bring her younger sister to school to take care and Jeff's like no you can't do that but that's good that's a good one yes we'd like to hear from you good evening superintendent Jackson members of The Board District employees and guests my name is Denise Estrada and I am the current current Associated student body president at Kearney High School Kearney
029High School is unique in many ways because of the small school structure each small school pathway focuses on different disciplines such as engineering biomedical science multimedia and design and college connections these Pathways help students to succeed in the real world by giving them hands-on experience with real world clients challenging academic coursework and college-level technical skills at the School of Engineering Innovation and design students use design thinking to create architectural solutions that serve to benefit the community of Linda Vista in the school I go to biomedical Science and Technology students are able to intern at Rady's Children's Hospital during their senior year at the school of digital media and design students work with the community community clients through project-based learning using industry standard programs and Technology to create to create digital media and 3D printed product
030at the school of college connections is built around a college preparatory class known as Avid by sophomore year all students at Kearney High School are able to take college classes at Mesa Community College while many students struggle during the pandemic with distance learning it actually created an opportunity for me to become a different type of student although I was born in the United States I moved to Mexico as a baby so Spanish was my first language learning English as a second language and attending three different elementary schools and three different middle schools it made it it made it hard it made it so when I arrived at Kearney as a ninth grader I was unmotivated and disengaged when the pandemic hit I was struck by how much my teachers truly cared about supporting my learning
031and I found a new sense of motivation I no longer needed people to tell me what to do and when to do it as they helped me to develop a sense of my purpose and my own abilities when I might while I might not be your typical ASB president my experience in ASB for the last two years has been inspired to con by continuing to encourage engagement through our active campus culture through our School athletics our 30 or 30 unique campus clubs and our social events such as our Enchanted Garden homecoming dance Kearney really has something special to offer to everyone no matter what kind of student you are the teachers and staff at Kearney want to meet you exactly where you are and support you along your journey I know how being engaged with
032your school culture can change so many aspects in your life for the better and that's a gift that I want to pay for to all Kearney students thank you thank you for sharing thank you this is the last um multi-school we have because San Diego high is the longest the attorneys but it seems to be working and you enjoy it having it that way very good thank you very good excellent thank you thank you both for sharing today and with that um superintendent you have a report thank you president Dr Whitehurst pain yes and I I have some slides to show uh if if we can we can run that video that would be great uh so we're going to begin uh recently oh or where are we going to start wherever you start I'm
033gonna start ah there we go uh so I want to begin we have the opportunity to welcome our first partner of California she visited Hoover High School and Hoover is one of our community schools and she was really paying attention to Community Schools and nutrition specifically around our health center our community garden as Dr Mike mentioned earlier as well as our culinary arts and we were able to participate in a panel discussion and one of the points of emphasis was a real appreciation for the one-time funds that have come to us and then really talking about the partnership and how we can advocate for ongoing funding to support our students in terms of health and wellness and Dr Mike I know we talked about Community Gardens uh but beginning uh on on our campuses with
034school Gardens and uh really happy that trustee barretta was able to participate uh along with uh assembly person Alvarez and um city council president I'm sorry I Ward sorry yes thank you uh Ward and uh city council president uh Sean ELO Rivera and we also um had Jason babineau part of this work I'm the former principal at Hoover High School and what a great Ambassador for for the work and so I really appreciate that that time and uh here are some photos of that visit um and and also I want to thank the staff we talked about Wellness earlier and as we talk about student wellness it's important for us to think about uh the wellness for our staff as well and so our fall Wellness Fair took place for our staff and the staff
035who stopped by they were able to participate in health screenings receive flu shots and covered vaccine they experienced cooking demonstrations and also Financial Wellness workshops and mindfulness activities and and you see here some great great slides over 650 Educators administrators central office staff and school support staff attended this wonderful event uh more than 60 Community Partners employee bargaining units local vendors and sponsors provided many different health and wellness programs and incentives to San Diego unified we had over 150 businesses donate prizes there's some bears there huggable bears you can hug the Bears and and this made it very exciting we had opportunity drawings staff received gift cards to their favorite restaurants we had spa packages and even Resort hotel stay and I think there was over eighteen thousand dollars of donated gifts and a huge
036thank you to the well Wellness Council and many of our departments who participate and volunteered um yeah I did not win um the musical Pumpkin Walk and uh they volunteered their time and created a great experience in the in the afternoon and a special thanks to Jessica Marrero for her leadership thank you that much so now you see some pictures and that's not my twin I was actually out on the basketball court I had the opportunity to referee some of our Middle School athletic games in fact I did three basketball games full basketball games yes I'm proud of myself um I was only sore that afternoon I recovered uh was able to uh here's the coach from Crawford high school and he was coaching Mann Middle School I had the opportunity to uh referee Golden
037Hill Challenger Middle School Wang and high Middle School PB middle school and Grant K-8 and I tell you the parents were wonderful the coaches only complained a little bit about my referee we're out there to teach our children and I want to thank our Middle School athletics program Lonnie is doing a great job Dante's doing a great job and collectively Scott giusti and and it's really building our students to participate in our high school track programs basketball programs soccer programs football programs and uh and then I leave uh with deep appreciation for uh our school sites and with with my colleague Dr bagula able to visit School sites on a regular basis and really appreciate the focus on academic success as well as welcoming School environments as uh as you spoke about you know we
038really want to create environments that are welcoming for our students and really focus on the whole child and really get a chance to see our leaders in action and see our teachers really caring for our students and I just I want to say thank you to our Educators and our students I know that your efforts throughout the pandemic has helped carry us through and really sustain the incredible focus on academics as well as as you mentioned Denise the notion about seeing the potential in every single child and that is so important and it was so important over these last two years thank you for showing up for our students and your colleagues each and every day and to each of you I say Ubuntu thank you Dr Whitehurst Payne and thank you I always commend
039the staff for the event on the lawn I I think I must like Food Services food it's pretty good I like it I always want to go and check it out to see what they're feeding the students and they complain but I like it so that shows the age difference there so yes thank you for that report and with that each board member will now have the opportunity to speak and share if they wish and I'm going to start with um thank you these last few weeks definitely been very busy um I had right after our board meeting I had my first site visit at Lincoln High School beautiful campus wonderful Community um thank you to all the staff at Lincoln High School and the staff here to help organize that super fun I learned
040a lot um if you remember a student named Nima came in and spoke a little bit about the district's role in providing support for students that may be struggling online and it's been a lot of fun and I'm definitely really looking forward to pursuing that more and really diving deep into the issue we also had our first student Advisory board meeting um definitely a lot of fun it's so nice seeing all these student voices come together and agree and really have deep discussions that we're looking for from students and participation on Friday I had an opportunity to go to Crawford for San Diego Pro teens and they spoke to me just some of the leaders within that school focused on activism and making sure their school is the best that it can be and I
041also had a great time with Richard at our San Diego High School alumni event where they opened a time capsule from 1976 and there are items sorry there are items in there from 1913 too it was definitely really interesting so thank you thank you thank you and we'll go over here tonight thank you so the first item that I have on my board information report is I was very fortunate to tour Kearney High School last Friday it was incredible experience especially witnessing their incredible ASB leadership led by Miss Murray and Janiece their ASB president and something that really stood out to me was after their event that they had at lunch is they had a glows and grows section of their meeting where they shared both highlights and gratitude for their event as well as
042room for improvement as they would call grows which I thought was very clever especially since they're the Kearney comets and then another highlight of last week was I also met with the Crawford High School Roundtable with trustee catoriano there was um it was my first time seeing the beautiful Crawford Community Center which was just a fantastic experience as well as hearing from prsot teens Leadership Academy where they introduce themselves and had a very meaningful student-to-student conversation thank you thank you and we'll start with the vice president I'm kind of afraid of what's it was in that 1976 Time Capsule because I wasn't that well like graduated about what eight years after that from high school so um thank you Dr Whitehurst pain I recently attended the Council of great City Schools conference which was held
043last week there was also a board a new board member orientation program that I had gone through it started last this past March it was a nine month program with a cohort of new board members from across the U.S and finished when we were in Orlando together last week and that particular program and the actual conference were included superintendents and board members from all across the U.S of the large Urban school districts and it's amazing how much you know we had in common and could learn from one another we attended a talk on superintendent evaluations learned some information from that with our superintendent our chief of staff and some other District staff as well I also was able to serve on a panel on student outcome focused governance as well as another panel on accelerating
044board capacity so just some really amazing conversations and also very excited to to say that we are going to be holding are going to be having that program that conference here in San Diego next year so as part of that we get to highlight some of our different student groups in terms of our musical groups you know performing arts and also um you know we'll have you know keynote speakers that are known Nationwide in fact Cindy Martin our previous superintendent current deputy secretary of education to the White House was one of our Keynotes for this event so already looking forward to next year and trying to determine uh what we want to do to show off San Diego to Public Health Educators that are going to be coming here from across the country but it
045was a fantastic conference learned a lot and just realizing how much we have in common how much we can learn from each other when we come together thank you thank you trustee River so I just I as as Matthew mentioned um we had a great time at the San Diego High unveiling of the Time Capsule I think the most mystifying thing that came out of that capsule for the students was uh they placed a phone book from and you could tell the students had no idea what that was but it was it was great and um what was really you know important about uh that event is Lee dolgarov was able to share with the Alumni Association uh the plans for the next phases of construction at San Diego High and we know San Diego
046High uh has been the last to go of our schools because of everything that we needed to do as a school community in partnership with the city to get the lease renewed but so we celebrated all of that work and uh and and especially we're excited about seeing what's coming to San Diego High in in future years so it was a great event I also painfully uh on behalf of the uh Enrique and Dan Howe and Jason babineau and many others the entire San Diego unified Dodger fan caucus we with Humble Pie congratulate the San Diego Padres on your on your improbable victory [Applause] thank you close the board meeting last time with Bill Padres thank you Dr Mercury so continue with a humble pie thing that I'm actually continuing with the healthy schools and
047wellness thing I will lift up our District's food and nutrition services department that provides healthy and nutritious meals for our students and staff and call attention to the dedication and love that is put into providing School meals that include fresh nutritious healthy and locally grown produce can we play the video that shows our energized Food Service employees in action foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] without you all right so we continue to stand tall and healthy and continue to make that happen thank you Dr Mike trustee uh thank you president Whitehurst Payne a couple of things first of all go Padres second uh please mail in your balance if you're like me and all my friends we got our ballots in the mail we filled them out for the races that we were familiar with
048or could find on the internet and then there's all these uh judges and things and so we set our ballots aside and they stayed sitting on this on the side table for two three weeks now is the time to mail in your ballots please I just got a text message that my ballot has been received and counted so that text message is a wonderful uh metric for the County voter registrars uh second uh last Friday had a great time went to Kearney high school for Kearney High School's homecoming I want to thank all of the adults that make this happen for our children I had a great time visiting with the principal the cheer coach a lot of the parents that are boosters that volunteer to help support the events for our children the coaches
049the teachers the staff it's really really amazing how the community comes together to support students and to allow them to have an enriched experience uh and and I've always been a very strong supporter of Athletics at our schools middle high schools because it really helps students to understand that they can't play sports in high school unless they also focus and make grades and for some students they wouldn't have any incentive to work on their academics unless it was if it wasn't for the sport so thank you I think it's a good a good union uh the the last thing I just wanted to talk about real briefly is how we need referees now we saw Dr uh Lamont Jackson refereeing a middle school game and I don't know uh if he was trying to recruit
050referees but one of the referees at the Kearney High School homecoming game was a good friend of mine and we really need people in the community that could please consider volunteering and becoming a referee for our children it really can make a big difference and I believe you do get some kind of a stipend uh but it's it's really for the kids um the the one thing that I did want to say at Green Elementary School we have a running track now at Gage Elementary School we have a running track now and at other elementary schools we're building running tracks to help increase the health and wellness of our students so I really want to appreciate those schools I noticed that they were absent from tonight's honors but I really believe that the the schools
051at Green and Gage would be deserving also thank you Dr Whitehurst Payne just for the record um my my refereeing was voluntary I did not receive the stipend that other referees received just for the record volunteer or did President wider's Payne vollen told you to referee I volunteered okay good I wouldn't give him that assignment I told him he had to be fair we had all the schools involved yeah thank you all and with my report I just want to mention that I did talk about Roosevelt my first assignment in San Diego and it's a group of junior high school kids who just took one second the group of junior high school students and it was college junior high school they're still together and they're still meeting so they always ensure that I'm there when
052they're having their reunions and some other things that folks touched on that I won't believe her this video clip that's coming up is something I wanted to show that how we are recycling our buses because um some people would say well you know we could use them but they are beyond our use and it costs us more money to keep them so I want to thank the U.S let's see this would be the Air Force yes who contributed to this Islands [Music] thank you [Music] so thank you for that we do good and Mike I understand you went up to the event to see them lifted off absolutely the uh the gifting of the three school buses from San Diego to Haiti were the first three of a total of ten so it's a an
053opportunity for us to provide humanitarian service in a real meaningful meaningful way so I was able to be there with our retired Marines as well as retired Air Force we modeled our our shifting of these school buses after what Oakland did earlier and we had a um we were able to get them off the ground and also get them to Haiti and they were able to arrive in time for the students in Haiti to start their school year writing their first school bus ever uh in in Haiti so it was a collaborative effort on part of many organizations including our school and and sister cities International in order to ship this the buses to the Department of Defense we had to guarantee that we had a trusted partner on the receiving end so these school
054buses would arrive and be used for the intended purpose and it was that connection between our schools and sister cities that enabled that to happen so thank you San Diego unified thank you sister cities thank you for the Air Force and Marine retired that enabled this to be successful program and thank you for sharing it thank you I think that we should things that we're not going to use I know Liberia was asking for science books but then connecting with a group to get them out there so things that we're not using others can use and just thankful for your help thank you and with that thank you all for your reports I would like this emotion on item E1 whoa okay that was by Barrera and Miser and do we have any I don't
055think we have any public testimony of that nothing's coming on that comments from the board members if if yes no but you're saying goodbye okay let's get Nippon monsignor's uh vote aye thank you hi thank you and the rest of us will vote electronically that passes unanimously with the students concurring thank you for that and let us now move on to the F items board consent agenda I'll move item F1 to F3 thank you thank you uh vice president yes and let's see no speakers on that board members no questions or any questions no then Seno thank you hi thank you um hi hi thank you and board members otherwise electronically vote thank you that passes 5-0 with the students concurring and item G1 Philly G1 um Scott City see here CAC cheer and Sarah
056Ott this is a joint report from our executive director of special education in the chair of the committee please provide your report to us thank you president okay just making sure hi everyone um we are and Christina Casillas here as well um and we're here to uh do we have a clicker oh thank you to share report we will go ahead and get started so uh first we wanted to share from the last time we were here over the summer different things that we did to Showcase some of the work that we were able to accomplish over the summer I know you heard already about summer experience which includes extended school year for our students that receive special education services as well as level up so we went to just the areas that we did
057besides that so first we did early childhood special education assessments our goal here is to be able to assess all the students prior to Turning three so they get a family plan oftentimes and we want to make sure that we are able to determine if they need special ed services when they turn three we were able to do only about 57 last year and although we did more this year 159 we were not able to do as many as we wanted due to not having enough staff so as you can see we have 90 San Diego unified staff who volunteered to work over the summer as as well some vendor staff but we wanted to have a lot more to be able to accomplish us so we did better than the summer before but still
058have a ways to go of those assessments we did 128 full assessments and 31 where the uh was only needed for speech and language so what that leaves us is this year so we are getting a lot of requests for assessments and we think this is due to some of the covid pandemic students when they're younger one two-year-olds being isolated often can cause language delays or developmental delays and so we are seeing an increase in assessments so since kind of last year and over the summer we have 730 assessment requests that are outstanding we were able to complete like I said the the ones over this summer in addition in August and September an additional 128. so that still leaves us 602 that are outstanding and we're constantly getting new requests so even to this
059date that number probably has grown and of those 123 are over timeline so we did uh decrease the amount that our over timeline but we do have some still outstanding so in order to improve in this area to make sure that we're servicing our students on time is that we have increased the number of assessment teams from six to nine we have assessment teams that are doing assessments on the weekends on Saturdays and we're looking to hire three additional teachers to be able to do more Assessments in our assessment teams because right now the teachers are part-time so in addition to that we also did gait testing over the summer we were unable to do the universal testing the testing for third and fourth graders during the school year and so we had an opportunity
060for parents to sign up via appointment or to have it done through the summer experience so if students were attending summer experience we came to their summer experience and provided assessment or we offered appointments if they were not attending summer experience so any student that was enrolled in our district or was going to be enrolled and enrolled through summer experience we we gave them that opportunity so we had about 1 426 students out of all our third and fourth graders that's about 10 percent that decided to take us up on that opportunity and you can see the breakdown of third and fourth graders and then we we pulled out how many of those students have IEPs or 504s so that 106 which is seven percent of all third and fourth graders with IEPs and you
061can see the results of that and they are a little higher because these again are parents and families choosing to to take us on these appointments so 43 were identified as gate and were able to be starting in those gate cluster seminar classes in the fall and of that 37 were duly identified any student that we did not test over the summer will be tested this year so they will still have the opportunity to be tested and we will continue gate testing this school year the other thing we did this summer which is brand new is the due to what we know as covid some students experience learning loss in addition we know we have a labor market shortage so there may have been services that were not provided so when we have Ed Specialists
062or para Educators that are not in schools that may have resulted in learning loss based on missed service and we were able to provide not only during the school year learning loss recovery plans where they could get after school or before school tutoring we also provided a summer Institute where students could come over the summer that was not part of Summer experience but something separate where they could get tutoring based on their individual goals so overall we had 106 students that were eligible to be part of this summer Institute um just so you understand we had 306 that we were able to accomplish last year so this is in addition to the 306 106 got ones over the summer and since the beginning of the school year we have additional 74 students so about 500
063students have participated in learning loss and this continues all of this year and all of next year so we will continue to reach out we've done trainings at over 91 schools and we're doing about five to ten a week so we expect by the end of December all schools will be trained on how to have this part of their IEP process so that all students have the opportunity to participate in learning loss so any of these families that we weren't able to contact our parents were opted out can still receive that support in this school year and next summer so we will we will try to reach everyone and with that I will turn it over to Scott hi everybody for the benefit of those who don't know me my name is Scott soti I'm
064the chair of the community advisory committee for special education uh I am it is a parent-led group so I am a parent of a child with uh special needs specifically visually impairment uh and we have about 24 members too currently hoping hoping always hoping for more uh we uh meet on uh at least a monthly basis uh to with the uh at our general meetings I work with the um sorry I work with the district office and personnel and advise the board members about what's going on in special education um starting with the assessments um we certainly applaud the work the district has done to address this issue uh however there I just wanted to remind the board that the promise was to have the overdue assessments complete by the fall and while the numbers
065have reduced uh there still continues to be assessments overdue the result of this delay is this is the result of this is a delay in services to those kids who would qualify at a very critical time in their development I remind everyone that we were talking about three-year-olds right so any delay in service is actually a significant portion of their life uh we absolutely agree with the steps the district has taken but as with most issues now there's a staffing shortage across special ed and the rest of the district uh part of our data that we collected is reported by uh reported by the the district is that we uh we track vacancy data on a monthly basis by a category of teachers so to take a selfish self-exual selfish example for myself is my
066daughter's in the visual impairment Department uh there are uh a total or there should be a total of 12 teachers for the visually impaired in the district there are currently five vacancies five uh there's never been less than two or three vacancies so it's always been hard this is a hard position to fill and this is just an example obviously all of these uh positions can be very difficult to fill they require extra training and education on top of what is already required to be a teacher add to that if the department is already reduced and staffed it just burdens the people that remain in increasing their own caseload uh the board had approved last year a ten thousand dollar bonus for teachers in special education which was an important and positive step more needs
067to be done though to recruit and even more importantly retain teachers especially a special education um to the summer Academic Program don't have a slide sorry I'll give this back then um uh we'd like to thank uh we'd like to thank Ed Baisley in particular and his team for working very hard to integrate the extended school year program with the general education uh a summer program um the extended school year is required by law and has been running independently for years it took a real ever effort to integrate that program with the General Ed program and uh found much more success this year um the after school enrichment program more work needs to be done to make that accessible to students with disabilities I've spoken with Dr Jackson about this already with outside Adventures providing
068programs it's not clear what experience or staff will be available to assist students with disabilities if there's no clear guidance or communication then parents and families will be very hesitant to sign up because they don't feel welcome in the first place turn it back over hello good evening in this section I will highlight some of the academic progress as well as areas that we continue to work on and continue to get right and as a district we're committed to supporting our students and ensuring that they receive a meaningful diploma to live a choice-filled life once they live leave our system specifically for our students who receive special education services our goal is to increase their cohort graduation rate from 68.7 percent to 87 percent by the year 2025 and I will provide more context regarding
069these these rates in the next couple slides in this slide you could see the cohort graduation rate has increased over time since 2019. from 56 percent to its current preliminary rate of 68.7 percent this data of students receiving special education services is highlighted in the green box when we think about some of our actions and we reflect upon what we've done over the years first and foremost credit goes to the IEP teams to the staff teachers service providers our families our partners and most importantly our students and their hard work additionally in 2019 we developed a call to action district-wide where we were really intentional and focused on increased ownership access to the core and high quality instruction for all of our students additionally assembly Bill 104 provided our students the opportunity to earn a
070diploma by earning the state minimum requirements our students receiving special education services were the first to return to in-person learning we also offer targeted summer support as Sarah described as the learning loss action plans actions not only contributed to our increased cohort graduation rate over the past couple of years but it also is evident in the smarter balance assessment by the academic performance of our students as Dr Bill Gula mentioned that the smarter balance assessment results are just a snapshot during unprecedented times on the on the left side I think the left side is the math performance data and on the right side is the English performance data and the students receiving special education services are highlighted in the green box as you can see in the math performance it has been relatively unchanged with
071a slight increase I'm going to give us credit from 15.3 percent to 15.5 percent what you see in the reading and the literacy there has been steady increase over time um from 2019 to to 2022. so it really shows the hard work by IEP teams our staff our families and most importantly our students so here is the outcome data that I wanted to to go back to in the in the opening part of this section regarding our goals I want to provide you the context of our current data as well as our goal to reach as I mentioned earlier 68.7 of our students receiving special education services received the high school diploma within the four years we have 11.6 percent of our students earning a certificate of completion which represents about a hundred students a
072little over 100 students whose courses study is aligned to meeting their IEP goals we have a small subset of students who pursued an alternative pathway through enrolling in an adult education or enrolling directly in Community College and our students to reach is where we need to get right it's the students that represent that gold session section where we need to do better that we have a responsibility and obligation to ensure that they receive a meaningful diploma these students 10.7 percent are still enrolled they're either in a fifth year program or enrolled in Trace or they have not yet completed school so um we we also refer to them as students who have dropped out and that represents 8.5 of our students receiving Services compared to the general education of 3.8 percent so yes we have
073a ways to go um and there's a number of students counting on us to get it right and to provide them with the necessary support and supporting their IEP goals ensuring that they receive a meaningful diploma so as a team initially when we were here in April we shared with you that we continue to have ongoing collaboration for alternative Pathways and we want to explore options such as joint diploma and meeting the state minimum requirements so we have a team right now a work group of District staff coming together to gather data to solicit feedback from students former students staff members and families and come together and take a look at different options and be able to provide you with an update when we come back in April so with that I'd like to turn
074it over to Mr sodi uh yes uh so yeah the graduation rate increases are certainly positive uh however a portion of that increase was due to the expansion of the state minimum diploma under ab104 and that uh db104 has Sunset it now so that is no longer available so it is up to the uh the board here to approve of an expansion of alternative Pathways such as the state minimum diploma to continue those increases that we are seeing uh we've been advocating for a long time about having alternative Pathways besides just the a through G as well as the certificate of completion so uh where glad to hear that the work is being done behind the scenes we're certainly would love to see it uh uh presented to us at some point and hopefully we'll
075have a uh updated when we come back in April for uh um I think that's it for now sorry yeah I was where am I okay we didn't practice together so that's the problem [Laughter] um so next I want to talk about this State's criteria around disproportionality and how the risk ratio that's identified here is indicating that we as a district are three times more likely to suspend our African-American students receiving Special Education Service than any other ethnic group and because that has occurred in our district for three years in a row we now are deemed by the state significantly disproportionality or insignificant disproportionality and we really take that seriously we've seen we were hopeful after the 1920 for the data that came out in 2021 only to see it increase right and so that
076ratio even went higher with the five and so when we really look at the data remember that it's it's a bit old so when you look at the when the reporting period is you know you look at the 2021 the reporting period was March of 2019 to April of 2020 really March of 2020 when we left for covid and so you know we'll be seeing new data as it comes out and so we this is an area and I would say an area of concern for all students but the reason we got into disproportionality was students who are African-American who were suspended 10 or more days as indicated in the data so what that means is we start working on a comprehensive coordinated early intervening Services plan alongside the state technical advisory team and so
077what that starts with is really that root cause analysis analysis and data discovery which is where we're at now so what we've been doing is collecting quantitative data we've been working through local education initiatives and inventory to see what is our current practices what are we doing we've done focus groups with all of these different partners we've done parent focus groups we've met with CAC has been invited to those we have offered General parent that anyone could come we've recently reached out to Tasha Williamson for inviting our African-American families to be part of this focus group and we're we're wanting them to be small so there's about 15 members per group but we can have as many groups as we want to really get understanding and understand the root cause behind this we also have
078pulled student files over 75 student files to really see what's going on with students look at their data specifically for students not only the students that were part of this data poll but all other students within within our school we also conducted empathy interviews and this was actually done with the technically advisory team so an outside organization coming in and doing into interviews to try to get a real perspective of what's going on they're right now writing the report and giving us that data so we haven't seen that data yet we're excited to get our hands on it and be able to really dissect it so we're really just kind of finishing up this stage it is something that will continue once we have this that then moves us into that plan development and this
079is being developed across our whole District so it is a partnership with the board the superintendent the instructional cabinet team not just special ed and isolation which is great because we want this to be a plan that's developed across schools for Austin students so we're in that data data Discovery root cause to then have a systematic plan development and activities to help not only our students that are targeted in the plan African-American students receiving but all students that may have disproportionality with discipline in addition we're also still continuing to work on our moderate to severe guaranteed viable curriculum this is really to better support our students we are one of the only districts working on this and it really is to help inclusion and support and Alignment across our schools for our students in the
080mod severe program so we have finished unit one for all of them as you can see and we have now had that started so every teacher has been invited and shared to start unit one they have been coming to training we have model classrooms that are being supported we're going out and seeing it in action and we're sitting side by side teachers to see how this is going and get feedback we are working on writing units two and three so they will be ready when the teachers are ready for them and hope to have all of that done in time we've really struggled with this project and the reason that we've struggled is because in order to write this curriculum we need teachers to do it we need teachers that are actually mod severe teachers
081in the classroom working with students and and we need partnership with our English language you know benchmark teams so we understand the curriculum to modify and we've really struggled to pull teachers out of the classroom to do this work so over the past two years we've really prioritized them to be in the classroom and that's this work has been done outside of classroom hours on the weekends in the summer when people are ready really last year were struggling and so we were not able to be where we want to be and this project where we we promised we would be in this project because we thought we would have people being able to do this full-time and we just can't and so with that we are now starting to see more availability of people we're
082starting to have visiting teachers so teachers can be released and we're starting to get more momentum with the project we're also have some outside agencies that have joined us so we are seeing some momentum but it still is not as fast as we would like we are taking those learnings as we do move to math so we we started to do math and we stopped because we are not sure we're continuing with the math we have or when we're adopting a new math and we don't want to modify to then get a new one so when we start to think about our math we want to make sure we're asking for modifications alongside and that we're able to roll out in a unified way and not somebody gets something and somebody else gets something three
083years later so although it's late it's really good and the teachers have shared how great they love it it's a great support they really like that it's ready to use it makes their job a lot easier it's less workload on them because it's prepared and ready to go their students are feeling a part of the community they're more engaged when they're in General Ed because it's the same exact curriculum that's being taught alongside and a lot of our students are able to be inside General Ed and inclusion classrooms more often it really also is modified two different levels so this is a student that's in our home Hospital program who is Homebound and is unable to go to school and can access the curriculum through his switches and different curricular materials that have been really
084beneficial so it's being able to adapt this and and for all levels and being able to have that experience understand I'll I'll continue with the mod severe curriculum the the stated goal and promise of the district was to have the math and uh English language arts mod severe curriculum completed by January 2022 last January so as you can see uh not done with the English language uh yet that is hopes that it will be complete we're sort of building I guess building the track as we go throughout the school year and then the math is I understand it's you know we don't want to change something or modify something only to have it you know a new math curriculum be adopted and then we have to start all over again um I understand the reasoning
085uh but you know we still have students in the district that uh uh that this does nothing to serve them and is that and they are currently in the district I'm not sure how we expect the graduation rate to improve by 2025 uh if the curriculum is not yet developed for them to actually partake in it uh going back to the discipline I want to tie the discipline piece to the rest of the topics we're discussing tonight there's a disproportionality and discipline is a symptom of failures in the rest rest of the system if kids are not timely assessed they don't get access to Services there's a lack of staff and a lack of training then the students cannot receive the benefit of the education they were they were to be provided there's not an
086appropriate curriculum activities the materials available it is that it is natural for a student to try and Escape demands access non-educational activities seek attention and so on uh Dr Otts stated that this was triggered due to the significant disproportionality for African-American students receiving special education but the issue should not be narrowed to only look at that particular group of students all students with disabilities are disciplined at higher rates than their peers we need every single student all Races no matter their support needs to have a pathway to a meaningful educational experience in which they can graduate from San Diego unified prepared for post-secondary Education and Training and competitive integrated employment that's that's all we have I just wanted to uh sorry to end on that note to a much High uh on a positive note
087we are meeting in December Dr Jackson will be joining us uh December 8th uh for uh informal sort of thing so we look forward to that thank you very much if you have any questions we have no speaker speakers oh now this is an informational item but I'd like to hear from board members and I'll hold my remarks until then thank you president Whitehurst pain just a couple of comments first of all this was the clearest presentation that I've ever experienced coming from the CAC and the staff to the board because you were talking about the same topics uh and I just really I know how much work went into making that happen and it certainly makes our job a lot easier when we're hearing from both of you on the same topics I also
088very much appreciate the honesty and the transparency about where we're doing well but also where we're not and um and I know that that's a Hallmark of Dr Jackson's leadership as it was with uh Cindy Martin before to be very honest and clear about the work in front of us so thank you for that it seems that you know there there are obviously a number of issues but at the core is Staffing and uh the challenge of being able to staff up in order to do our Assessments in order to complete the curriculum and in order to obviously um you know meet the needs of our students day-to-day I know that um we've done a lot of really important work particularly with SDA at the bargaining table to create um what I would imagine in
089uh for special education Educators uh is a pretty attractive place to work uh both in terms of our salaries benefits uh support and um you know assume to teacher ratios so given that we've done a lot of hard work to create I think positions that um you know we would imagine would be attractive to people to come and work in our district um what kind of outreach are we doing uh to uh make sure everybody knows about what's in and I know this is a HR question as well uh what San Diego unified offers uh and to and to fill those positions and I know I know that Staffing particular on special education is a challenge you know for all school districts I understand that but given that San Diego unified should be a place
090that people want to come and work um I guess my question is what more can we be doing uh to aggressively get out there and bring special Educators into our district and I know in case you can answer too um what I what I think we really need to think about is in areas that are very hard to staff in the example that Scott used around VI you know there's not institutions in San Diego so they're not even living here there's two in all of California and so you know how do we partner with our universities to offer more programs and then you know when I went to San Diego State there were five students in the mod severe program so we get all of them there's just not enough right and so how do
091we encourage high schoolers to go into the field of special education as a career and want to really work with with very diverse Learners who have so many gifts and the people who are in that when you talk about why are you in it really came from their high school or a camp or some type of experience so how do we do Outreach that way because we do a lot of Outreach with our universities we need to get the students in the universities when you need the universities in our city to have the programs that we need to follow up on that question then what kind of lobbying or whatever are you doing with the universities um you know at one point we had to create our own programs in order to have what we
092needed with the universities or even independent on Becca and utip intern programs and some others we had to go because I think the numbers was it 121 that we have vacancies right now um right but I think that's 121. yes but we have quite a few vacancies right now and I don't know you look at assessments those are labor-intensive I mean those meetings and all the things that you have to do to assess a child so you can't just have um one person doing a thousand or 500 or whatever you have to have the folks there to do the job and you know I was a recruiter nationally and I'm I've been all over the country all the districts are struggling we can't go to Philadelphia or Miss wherever to steal their folks we've got
093to do our own here we must do our own every District that's the only way we're going to do it because you said something important we have children who need these services and I'm a little not a little whole lot disturbed about the African-American piece and we talked about that when the state came into present this data these data earlier on but I'm sorry I've ignored my colleagues you guys want to talk first I'm just talking away but I I just just before Sabrina comes what does what does your committee look like what is what are the concerns of your Committee in terms of do you have a subset dealing with the fact that we've got a population that's obviously when you get data that surfaced three years in a row like that that says
094to me a red flag something is up here I need to isolate and do something get some research on what's going on in that sense I'm glad the state flagged it for us because you had a feeling that something was going on but for them to actually have hard data showing that that says there's a problem here and so I've shared that with trustee and and the team that's working on it I want to see results and I know we all do but we make excuses but at some point we have to deliver that's it I'm sorry trustee awesome thank you president and Dr Whitehurst pain I also wanted to Echo what trustee Barrera said about your hard work and working together on this on this presentation in particular because how you how you all
095work together it made a lot of sense and it seemed to move through the information smoothly so I appreciate that and as I'm learning more about special ed programs all the complexities and all the challenges and you know there all the you know you know the challenges that you're facing and you're doing an amazing job um I just had a question with the three-year-old assessments what's being done like to filter so are we along with the significant disproportionality question are we looking at is there a way to look at the students that are meeting that the most so that we're reaching them first I mean I know we're behind in doing the assessments but is there some kind of order so that maybe the students that are seen or however that's being assessed are most
096in need are being assessed maybe more quickly than some of the other ones that might be more moderate moderate so um we do look at the age of the student we want the ones closest to three assessed in priority because they're getting Family Services until they're three so we want to make sure you know as soon as their three we're able to service them as soon as possible so that's how we prioritize we also have an intake team that looks at the student needs and has a peer group that really sends students too comprehensive or to speech only so that we're able to move through the the process a little bit faster and that's new this year so we are seeing that as a success as onboarding of families being able to process and prioritize
097that a little bit differently it's not necessarily based on need but more based on age as we go through and and the process that needs to take because the comprehensive assessment may take longer than somebody who may just have more of a mild speech need but we want to make sure we're looking at both yeah I guess just with that much of a deficit of Assessments that you're in it would seem to make sense to try to get to those students as much as you can that are having the most difficulties or or would benefit the most um versus maybe those that you know are having some difficulties but are would still be able to get along I mean just because we're you know we have such a number to get through and the nice
098thing is if they do enroll in one of our programs so if they are three and they enroll in our three-year-old program we assess them there so they're still getting support and services we also offer learning loss for anyone that we miss the assessment timeline so through that learning loss action plan that's also offered for any three-year-old so if they missed a month of service and they were eligible for special ed but we weren't able to assess them in time we offer additional tutoring to make that up and I have an anecdotal example I know for a fact that you guys are doing that a recommendation went forth for a child who was two just turning three and you did you handle it and you got him in so I know that and Family's thankful
099everybody else around is thankful that you're helping out um just kind of working with him to bring him to that point where he can survive um but I still say that you know it's just troubling that we haven't addressed that group if I had seen someone else other than African-Americans for three years if there had been one year maybe a latinx group or some other group then that would say to me huh but it's just constantly focused on that one group that we just we have to do something about it yeah I think uh we are we are certainly aware of this and and as you know we'll be presenting to the board a comprehensive approach to meeting the needs of our African-American students this has been historical and we want to bring our outside
100Partners along with us because we cannot do this alone and I think that goes to what Scott mentioned you know we have to think about a comprehensive approach to assessment it can't just fall on one department and so how do we build that up whether we look at a cluster model a central office model to provide assessments because that is where we know it begins and when we're able to do that early we can provide the needs we can provide the needs then we can prevent some of the results that we're seeing and so this is a two-pronged to three wronged approach to meeting the needs of our African-American students and as we say when we when we can meet the needs of our most marginalized students we can meet the needs of all we
101can say that with confidence we are about all but until we do that we can't say that we're about all students and so I'm appreciative of our equity and belonging team I'm appreciative of the small group that's doing the work here and Scott is right it's good but it's not good enough and we have some work to do and I'm I'm saying to all of us right now we are deeply committed to this work and we will see the results thank you we all heard that didn't thank you for that thank you anybody else with any questions not thank you thank you yeah so thank you for pointing out the challenges and the concerns and and the one that is very con straint is the disapportionately uh uh data and and it looks like we're
102we've identified it and and we'll make effort to correct that I also want to point out the uh the highlights so it looks like we are closing the achievement Gap when we compare the 2019 to the 2022 as our our uh the gap between the the outcomes and uh reading and math uh have increased significantly you know going from a difference of 36 points to uh to a difference of 28 so we're moving in the right direction in closing the achievement Gap also on slide nine it indicates that our students as they went into covet and with the virtual learning they stayed flat or increased as opposed to our regular students who decreased and and I'm wondering um what was the difference what did we do in special ed that we didn't do in regular
103Ed that allowed our special students with special needs to increase their gains whereas our regular students dropped I I don't know that we could answer that right now I think uh you know there are a few things that we we identify um you know we had a very clear call to action you know our students did return our students with disabilities returned sooner I think with our learning loss uh and our support for our students um during the summer I think those are some things that we can lean on and say we did well by our students uh again I think it's going to uh Scott's Point again uh lifting up the fact that we we still need to make sure that our students have access to the curriculum that they need and and we
104need to to be more mindful of that and also the supports for our students in classrooms and uh being able to support them and so I think it's very clear the work that we were doing pre-pandemic was really a driving force to support the results that we're currently seeing but we have work to do and we're not going to shy away from that but we're going to be very clear on the work that we've done in terms of our literacy focus and our support for our neediest learners um thank you I just want to say a few things um first of all thank you for all the great work that you've done um these numbers really are great but something really irked me and kind of raised a little bit of a red flag when
105talking about these Early Childhood special education we see these numbers and we see that 600 assessments are yet to be completed while 200 are being completed and you spoke a little bit about how there's a labor shortage of five spots to me this huge this huge gap speaks more than just five spots missing so what beyond the labor what else is missing because I know that's something that we've definitely emphasized here up on the dice but what more beyond that so let me just clarify um Our obligation is to assess by this time this student turns three but parents can request assessment when a student's like 2.5 so all of those 603 were not we wouldn't assess we're not required to assess or we don't need to assess until they turn three so I'm just
106giving you like all the parents that are requesting only the 123 are actually over timeline and so that is the the Staffing so we did add this year three additional teams so we have six assessment teams whose only job is early learning assessments and we had three additional teams so we expected them to do 10 to 12 a month per assessment team so that is what's new plus the weekend assessments the additional staff of the three teachers is there are certain assessment teams that only have a halftime teacher and we want to make them full so that they can do more assessments and so we do think with the nine assessment teams and the and the weekend assessments that just started this year we will be able to catch up but it all depends on
107how many assessments requests we get so you know we may get way more than we're expecting and we'll continue to be in this pattern and so we'll have to look can we add more assessment teams can we have more students go to school at three so that they can be assessed at their school like you know different ideas that we can have if we end up getting more but we're compared to the other years we're doubling and the requests for assessment and I'm hopeful that that's not a trend that continues that that really is due to the covet pandemic I wanted to build off of your question for the assessments is it the parents that request them or are the students coming in and someone in early childhood is saying oh because well maybe some
108parents are more worried the worried well or so I mean just you know that's why I was asking if there's any way to filter you know the the how you're doing the assessments because um you know if they're reading okay I mean do you have to assess everyone is or is there any kind of kind of factors that you look at that you to in terms of Assessments or do you just have to assess anyone that you're requested to assess so it's a really good question um in our utk through 12 model we do response to intervention multi-tiered intervention we do all these things this the federal law for three-year-olds is that if they have a family plan oftentimes that comes from Regional Center so 50 of these or more have a family plan meaning
109that their doctor diagnosed them with a developmental delay and they come to us we are required by federal law to assess them they may not qualify for service about 10 percent don't but we are required to assess them the other 50 are coming from doctors or families that that are saying they've had indicated delays sometimes we meet them in our intake and we say you know we're going to write a notice letting them know that we we think that things are okay and we're going to move them but most often we assess because we we don't have enough data without assessment to say what you've known for three years of your life is not true so we do assess so it is harder to have intervention in our early program because of the way that
110the regulations work and so we do often assess almost every request thank you Scott for chairing a very challenging committee and thank you for the staff and the committee for coming together this is the first time we've ever had a joint presentation and I concur with my fellow trustees especially trustee Richard Barrera when he said that this is the clearest presentation that I've seen in my 12 years on the board but I really also uh echo my fellow board members when I say thank you for the transparency of highlighting where we are doing well and just talking about and being honest with our opportunities to improve so that we can figure out plans address those and improve in those areas thank you very much for that a couple of things first of all I really
111want to thank Acacia thed and her team in HR for all their work to try to hire more staff to take care of our children uh she had you know job fairs on The Lawns she did all this other stuff she pushed for the ten thousand dollar hiring bonus for special education teachers in San Diego unified um and I'm looking forward to the report on how how did what how many special education teachers were we able to hire as a result of that ten thousand dollar hiring bonus the other side of the coin is also attrition you know you know do most do most special education teachers leave in the first two to three years because they're not getting the support they're overworked I mean why do we have this in this need and that's
112I think a part of the whole conversation that we've had before and I look forward to you know seeing some data on that one of the things that I think is really important is that a lot of the analysis that we do is based upon a false assessment the federally mandated standardized testing is flawed for many many reasons first of all before I talk about why these federally mandated Common Core standardized tests are wrong and we should not be using them at all is that first of all in the state of California parents have a right to opt their children out of this crazy testing system follow the money the testing system has been mandated by legislators in Sacramento and Washington D.C who are paid who are lobbied by these corporations that make billions of
113dollars in profit off of our kids they take money out of the classroom to pay for federally mandated standardized testing and this goes all the way back to No Child Left Behind which left children behind when the CST testing system when Educators started helping children meet those standards and schools even in high poverty areas we're realizing amazing educational growth the structure and the powers that be threw away the CST system and replaced it with the Common Core system because obviously a public education was doing right by our kids when we measured with the CST test so they threw that system out and now they changed the goal line it's well documented that these standardized tests are gotcha questions intended to trick kids into getting them wrong so the billion dollar testing industry can then set
114that can then sell us you know support books and intervention books and things like that additionally we know that these standardized tests are biased and who are they most biased against African-American students so African-American students across the country will traditionally always not perform because these tests are biased there's intrinsic bias in these questions and we most Educators already know this additionally these federally mandated Common Core standardized tests take away instructional time in math I lose two weeks of instruction just so my kids can take test after test after test weeks of instructional time gone every year that we have to test our kids and some schools test for two three four five six weeks every year so I really really hope that we can take a look at the 10 000 foot view get out
115of the weeds get out of the forest and take a step back and really take try to understand we are stuck in a maze and we can't figure out how do we help these kids and what's going on with those kids and the real reason is because the metric that we're using is flawed and that's really really important until we have that conversation I think we're going to continue to find ourselves in this position but most importantly as a math teacher I'm really disappointed that the Common Core standardized test does not measure growth at all it doesn't measure how much did the student learn that year only can they pass this standard it doesn't it doesn't measure if a student comes to a teacher at an eighth grade at a second grade math level and
116by the time they leave they might be at A fifth or a sixth grade math level that student could have grown four or five years of math learning in one year but they are considered and labeled a failure because they didn't test that the 8th grade math level at the end of the year so once again parents in the state of California have a legal right to opt their children out of this federally mandated standardized testing thank you discussion on this I too want to thank you all for your presentation and I know I've marked it up and sent it back to you and on and on and on but it helps and um you know about my frustrations over this not at you but over the fact that we have to get it right
117and I commend you also for the fact that during the pandemic our scores for special ed students did not go down they you kept it moving and uh I that's amazing that everybody else was going down but whatever we did to help those special ed students during that time we need to keep it up and do it accelerate that and then go and do some of the things we were doing before to help the other students so that everybody's Rising okay thank you good job thank you okay and with that I'd like a motion on items G2 through G I believe it's five so moved thank you a second on that I can't second it I'm sorry yeah yes this is only this is non-student board members here second okay Barrera okay uh any discussion
118I don't see any speakers so no discussion will vote please vote electronically okay that passes those items those uh action items passed unanimously I'll move item H1 the 500 million dollars in bond sales hey thank you a second on that thank you and this is an item the students May participate in so I anyone no speakers again on that and I don't think anyone else has any questions on that so let's move forward let's say no aye thank you hi thank you and everybody else's voting electronically that has us unanimously with the students comparing that moves us to item H2 which is the presentation of personnel update thank you Mrs occasion hi good evening so we had a little bit of a preview heard some exciting things um so today I am uh appreciative of
119the opportunity um to present to you Dr Jackson and members of our board um tonight I'm going to present the annual update on our personnel um the purpose of this report is to provide the board and our community with an update on the actions taken to ensure staff are in place for the start of the school year this year's updates include a discussion of our efforts to increase the diversity of our Educators as well as Recruitment and Retention efforts kind of talked about that in the last item as well as all of our efforts identified in goal for the lcap um I just want to kind of preface this with a high-level summary of what you're going to hear so over the last year there's been a lot of discussion about the impacts of the
120teacher's shortage and and what we're worried about is how it impacts students what I'm happy to report and what I'm really proud of is that as a district we have worked diligently to stay ahead of the teacher shortage and we've been able to do so in a successful manner which I'm going to highlight today those some of those ways that you've heard me talk about before are strategies that still continue to work for San Diego unified because as a community we have a commitment and that is to partner with our Innovative teacher education programs locally and um nationally and we also continue to be very competitive with early hiring hiring incentives and just being in community and connection with people who want to become Educators the districts has had a long history of creating pipelines
121and Pathways for educators this has been extremely important as we have known that credential programs each year enroll less and less folks and we continue to have our focus on a commitment to diversifying the education profession so despite the impact of covet on the education profession and the Nationwide concerns about teacher shortage today you'll see that we are still very competitive and we're doing well so um I talked a little bit about our commitments to diversity and so as a department my division we have our mission statement here that our focus is on ensuring the success of all students by supporting and empowering a diverse Workforce so I want to start by giving you a highlight of the diversity of our new hires so from July 1st to October 1st 2022 the percentages of groups
122of Educators classified staff and leaders are there and those that's just a snapshot in time that is a self-identification of individuals who have identified themselves in diverse categories we know and as we've heard from both of our student board members as well of our other student groups that we bought before the board we know that representation matters in our classrooms and in our schools and so we continue to have that commitment as part of our local control and accountability plan in the work that we do to attract and retain folks this slide demonstrates our continued commitment and if our numbers keep continuing like this we're going to continue above the state and the county averages the next slide gives you an overview and an illustration of what it takes to actually staff and prepare for
123the start of the school year um it would be wonderful and amazing If This Were a one-time thing but it's not because of the size of our district we're one of the largest employers in the county we have a year-round recruitment strategy for recruitment selection and hiring this slide provides you with an overview of the steps that we take to fill vacant positions in preparation for the start of the school year we know that in reality as much as we would love to say we are 100 staffed there's just a lot of when you have 14 000 employees there's always going to be someone who's in transition and so what you see here though is really great news we had in the in our last recruitment period November 1st 2021 to October of 2022 we
124received two uh 23 770 applicants in 687 recruitments within those 687 recruitments there were 454 classified recruitments 139 certificated Improvement recruitments and 94 management recruitments and some other slides you're going to say 139 certificate recruitment hired way more people than that which is true but we hire in pools so we create eligibility pools that allow us to interview and select and hire from the same recruitment over time and so that pool allows us to have flexibility and constantly recruiting so although there are only 139 recruitments that it does not equate to the number of Educators that we hired to same with management yes so a recruitment is essentially a job posting so we posted 680 separin postings and from that so on the classified side those were usually individual postings or sometimes we hired more
125than one so for example on the classified side we have a continuous posting for para Educators that is a posted all the time and we hire hundreds of people from that particular posting same thing for bus drivers we hire all of our bus drivers from the same posting and all that allows us to do is expeditiously screen and qualify candidates to get them in front of the hiring manager sooner we we have individualized recruitments for a highly specialized position the superintendent of Public Instruction was a very public recruitment that we had our principal positions are one-to-one recruitments so that's why you see the difference in numbers of applicants versus numbers of recruitments it's just the manner in which we advertise our positions and then how we can use best practices in Personnel recruitment to actually
126find candidates and get them in front of our hiring managers mm-hmm um something that's really important and critical to us that has been I think a blessing for us as a system is um because we have so many positions we are able to offer employment to folks in places where we may have had to lay off in the past and so because we have had enough vacancies and not as many reasons for um to conduct an actual Financial layoff we have been able to work with our bargaining units to reassign folks instead of having them leave our organization and that just keeps our employees in a great space it keeps knowledge within our communities and it really helps us as a system take care of our employees and their families um by comparison just so
127you have some numbers in the same time period last year November 1st 2020 through October 1st 2021 we had 19 508 applicants 535 recruitments 350 were for classified 92 worst first certificated and 93 were for management so more recruiting this year than last year more applicants from this year than last year um this time last year I shared with you the impact of the job market conditions on um on our employees as they return to the workforce um and so I wanted to give you a highlight and kind of a summary of what we've done um in the last year to overcome the job market conditions um so and I wanted to highlight three really things three things that we're really excited about and very proud of that happened this year that highlight our commitment
128and our strategies to not only recruit but to retain staff so the probably the most visible was our event on the lawn in June um we had more than 700 participants we had great support from our community by advertising that we were able to hire 37 clerical substitutes 48 pair Educators nine landscapers and 11 substitute teachers so that was a great success for us and and it's sometimes it's we even as um as our own team we get excited like why didn't we get 700 but that is a good number not everybody can start and not everyone begins to start at the same time so we also more than anything build trust within our community people who came were excited even if they didn't find something that day they learned more about our district even
129if they didn't find something that day and those who joined us had had a great experience as well so we we um and that was more than just the HR team that was a whole district-wide effort of individuals coming together to put that on so very proud of that work very excited and appreciative of all of the teams who came together to make that happen the next thing that I wanted to share is something that I've talked about before was is our para educator hiring events so Sarah and Mr sodi talked about the importance of having staff in front of students who are qualified and able to do that work in a high quality Manner and so we para Educators in any organization often have turnover in our organization we kind of create our own
130turnovers sometimes because we promote our para Educators our para Educators often to come to us very skilled and already interested in education and we leverage those skills and knowledge to put them in our teacher pipelines so um but also para educators are just valuable in our system and so we have systematized an effort to ensure that we're always actively hiring for our para Educators so in addition to The Summer Event where you saw we hired 48. we also had two events um so far this year we actually had three because we just finished one yesterday and those events will continue to hire throughout the year and the reason why we do those is because when you have 178 schools who are hiring it's it's we take some of the logistical efforts that it takes to
131call all of our eligible candidates and schedule the interviews we just create a space where everybody can come together we invite the candidates and then the leaders can come in and do their interview process so we just try to take the logistical hurdles that can sometimes happen when you're a busy manager running a school um out of their hands and get them right to the point of hiring the last thing on this slide that I'd like to highlight is something we're so excited about which is one of our areas of focus on retention and that is the lead para educator Independence facilitator pilot that's a really long word so our para educator Independence facilitator are our para Educators who provide direct support to students we have lead positions and those positions are designed to provide
132side-by-side support to our para educators and I have to tell you we have some amazing people in these jobs they're pictured up there on the slide we've been able to provide hundreds of individuals one-on-one support from these ladies in person or in Zoom they are going to make a huge difference in how we welcome people into our organization how we support them when they're there and not only are they supporting the pair at Jacob in the classroom but they're supporting the whole classroom environment by providing skills knowledge and expertise for people to feel that they are making the contributions that they came into the role for so more to come on that but I wanted to highlight it today um next is we talked we we've heard some questions and we've had a lot of
133excitement around our hiring incentives so to date I wanted to give you an update on how we're doing with our hiring incentives over the last two years we've had two different incentives and this has been a really great way to highlight the importance of work in these credential areas these credential areas take individuals who are truly committed to the work that they are in and they're highly competitive everybody wants highly skilled Ed specialist everybody needs registered credentialed School nurses and so as a system we've made an investment and committed to not only providing high levels of support to retain these folks but also an incentive to come into our organization versus others so up here what you see is a comparison to date we've had 360 certificated staff who've received one of two hiring in
134incentives offered in the 2021-2022 school years the First Column is data from July 1 2021 to June 30th 2022 a full year of the individuals and the credential areas that we were able to offer the first stipend to and the first stipend was four thousand dollars the second column you'll see that the number is lower and you and the second column represents just our progress today so the second column is the 2022 incentive that's actually a ten thousand dollar incentive that incentive only shows you part your data so right now where we're at with our incentives is 217 individuals qualified for the four thousand dollar stipend last year we have a full year of data this year so far 143 employees have been able to receive the payments of the ten thousand dollar incentive we
135have around 65 vacancies so by the end of the year the numbers will be about the same depending on kind of how things go this year over time when you just kind of do rough math we'll spend right around three million dollars of an investment for these individuals and I and I believe that it's well worth it I know the board does because you approved it already and we're very appreciative and believe that this has been a success for us to recruit and help staff retain though the nice feature of these incentives is that they're paid out over two years so they are an incentive to not only have people start but also stay with us and we'll continue to give the board updates on these incentives throughout the year this is a slide you've
136seen before over the year we try to provide kind of a summary of the changes that happen with our employees and just kind of the movement that happens in a large organization like ours so what you see here is just a snapshot in time so from July 1st to October 1st 2022 we've had 449 hires 223 promotions 311 separations and today or as of actually October 1st we were sitting at 653 vacancies 90 of those were teacher vacancies we also provide a breakdown of um kind of where we're at with our vacancies so we have vacancy means that a person isn't in the job right now and we're going to fill that position but there's stages of how a position is vacant and so that's what we try to highlight here is that we have
137240 positions actively in recruitment that means they're posted or they're being screened we have 413 of those 653 they're actually interviews in progress or they're they're getting ready to make a selection so the number isn't stagnant it moves and it and it is it changes and adjusts day-to-day um and then I want to go into what we're doing next to fill those so the next slide really goes over a snapshot of now that I've shown you the numbers what we've done and how we got here this is what we're doing next so what we're doing next is We are continuing the strategies that we know work so I talked a little bit before about the fact that we have ongoing Recruitment and that um that demonstrates itself in many different ways we have weekly interviews
138I talked about the hiring events that we had we had two events this week we had a educator hiring event on Monday and we had a para educator hiring event yesterday then we also have just our regular interviews that we conduct both at the HR department level and at site and departments for their vacancies I mentioned the monthly hiring events and then we have continuous postings and paid trainings for really our select position so I mentioned the para educator pilot but we also have as a district a very unique bus driver training program that not a lot of districts do but we actually provide paid training to people who want to become bus drivers so it's a it's a unique and really incredible benefit that we have because not all districts do that if you
139have to go drive a bus in other places you have to pay for the training yourself so we are very appreciative of that and then what you see here is similar to the last slide it's just a narrative numerical description of where positions are at in recruitment by different groups of employees where they're at in terms of the interview and selection process and it brings it back down to that 653. and in closing I want to thank the human resource division staff for their commitment to recruiting high quality Educators classified staff and leaders for our schools and our departments we're very proud to continue and our ability to attract staff despite job market conditions and keeping our focus on diverse and Equitable hiring in the Forefront and I also have our beautiful banner and appreciation
140um we encourage everyone who works for San Diego unified to talk about your amazing experience as an employee because we can be our own advertisement we should be our own advertisement and we should tell folks how wonderful it is to work here why they should come work here and really truly in its deepest sense working in a school district is a way to contribute and give back to your community and so we have made that a focus of our recruitment this year so everybody out there please refer a friend apply today and we have immediate openings in several job classifications so thank you that's my formal report thank you I hope everybody's jumping in here I want to really say thank you because we knew we were facing a real issue this year with all
141the hiring and and so forth and so it's commendable the event on the lawn was so exciting to see 700 people and they thought I was applying for a job and they wouldn't give me space in the line no thank you but it was just really exciting to do that and I was just saying to him oh I wish we could do that again um even more often but I think for me it's the the host special education piece because as you know you know this better than anybody else in this room other than Dr Jackson and those in HR it's just very difficult to get special education teachers and we think we may have solved a problem here um and the whole incentive two years in a position but we still are winding up
142at the same place where we have vacancies and I mean that that is one that we really have to really go back to the drawing board and figure out what can we do to bring in more folks and I got excited about your special group there that you were talking about and he says oh we start 200 pair educated vacancies we don't want to steal them from there but we've got to get more people and it's to the community please if you have some training and special special education or special needs and you're interested I'm begging you to come and help not only us but throughout the the Nations the nation at least get some more of folks who have a commitment to help children and they're the neediest of our kids yes thank you
143president Warrior Spain and Acacia first of all I just want to thank you for your whole uh report but really lift up the diversity of our new hires I mean that is these are the best numbers I think we've ever seen in terms of new hires and I know they reflect a long-term uh incredible effort on your part to you know we've always said our goal is to have our education Force mirror our student demographics and we're getting really close and when we talk about our leaders 99 it's really significant work and I know it's a short time frame um but uh you know I think if we were to go back and look at past Trends we'd see you know how just how strong these numbers are so thank you I think and it's
144a question that I'm not you know expecting any answers right now but we have I believe um the uh most skilled Visionary uh leader of our human resources department that we could possibly have in you acacia um we've got our superintendent who has incredible experience around HR former HR Director of this District and as president Whitehurst Payne you know just mentioned with everything that you're doing and with everything that you're bringing uh to this effort we still see what a challenge this is you know with special ed and with um with some other areas so I guess what maybe we can ask as a board is what are your moonshot ideas what are your you know big never been done before uh uh ideas that you might at some point soon bring to us as
145a board and say if we did these things that's where we think we could really you know move move the needle in ways that we've never done before and I know you've already done a lot of that but are there some big areas uh that we could take on and um and and try things that you know maybe we haven't seen other school districts do we haven't seen this school district do so I would just ask that you know given everything that we have in place and yet we're still facing big challenges um how do we jump ahead you know and what are the the really big ideas that you could that you can that you could bring to us that's what I think we would want to want to hear yeah I think the
146barriers are you got to look at what uh this CTC is saying teacher credentialing office I mean you've got some barriers there but we need to think even beyond that to because you have to ask yourself is it better to not have a teacher than to have someone who's at least trying and working towards that and a CTC California teacher credentialing office says you have to have a b c d e f g but if you have zero on is it better to have ABCD working on EF you know at least because it's not working this way there are some kids out there who need some help and no matter what we we're doing so far within the the traditional framework it's not working I mean the ten thousand dollar bonus is going to wind
147up the same as the four thousand which probably winds up the same as not having a bonus uh it's just there's something else out of it you've got to find a way that's the state hasn't thought of or somebody has not thought of we've got to find a way to give these children the support that they need and it's not you I'm not blaming you it's a whole system nationally we've got to think about ways we can address the needs of these children yes uh thank you President White hair is paying for your sentiment I think that I really have always loved your passion and your focus on the kids because that's why we're talking about hiring and our human resources department and I I uh totally uh am have seen a complete transformation in
14812 years I remember the conversations we had here 12 years ago about why don't we have any why don't we have the diversity in the Staffing uh and the conversation would always go back to well it depends on the size of the labor pool what's the demographics of the people graduating from the credentialing programs and so then we uh made very deliberate concerted efforts with your help and president whiter's pain and a lot of other folks on the staff to reach out to the hbcs across the United States of America and bring teachers here to get ahead of the uh the teacher shortage that we knew was coming because we could look at the demographics you know I remember when I first got on the board in five years almost half of the teachers were
149going to retire and we tried to figure out how do we keep how do we how do we incentivize new teachers to join San Diego unified a lot of programs a lot of effort and a lot of initiative and I think that you said it really well that any organization with fourteen thousand employees will always have vacancies it's just it's because it's a living breathing organization and I think one of the things that we've never really measured is when from the point we're in a vacancy exists to the timeline when that vacancy is filled that would be an interesting metric because you know if we can fill a vacancy in three four six nine months I'm not sure I'm just ballparking it that would help us better understand because every time you report oh we
150have 100 vacancies and we're thinking gosh what are we doing to fill those well those 100 vacancies are probably going to be filled in the next six months and then 100 new vacancies will be created as people move or they whatever happens and so that's really an interesting thing to also be aware of and think about so on behalf of uh you know for you and everybody in the human resources department and your team I really appreciate all your work that you're doing especially to alleviate and take some of that pressure off of the managers and the principals so that they can focus on their job and they're not spending so much time hiring also so our vetting or interviewing and all that kind of thing one of the things that I was wondering is
151I just love the QR code to you just scan that and takes you right to the website where you can apply see all the different jobs that are uh we're hiring for and you can apply online just with this QR code to what extent are we able to get this QR code out into the San Diego Community like in local community newspapers in online ads and things like that so we um we love our QR codes because they are that easy we're like oh here here why um and so we we have been um increasing our social media presence our Communications team is amazing we have leveraged the multiple voices of our schools and leaders in the community so whatever ways that make sense in a school's Community we um you guys have actually probably
152seen these banners they're out um they're out out outside on the lawn we made yard signs we hung up banners so wherever we can get this in front of folks digitally paper um newsletters um I love the weekly update that comes um from our superintendent because there's always an advertisement it's almost it's the very last thing at the bottom of the page so there's always a continuous visual representation to say we're hiring come join our team come be a part of San Diego unified so we have learned over time one of the good things that covet taught us is that we have learned that visuals are important and creative nobody wants to just look at a bunch of text um and that they're easy to get out in front of folks so the way that
153we can digitize information bring it in front of people actually is very helpful thank you thank you before we go further how many employees do we have I said some 12 000 some of you said no it's 15 000. it's about it's about 14. so that includes our substitute pool so the number very very is varied depending on if you count our salaried employees and whether or not you include the substitute positions and or not so I always say it's around 14 000 because that's high level really what we have okay good I won't be inaccurate yes thank you yes thank you for the presentation and it's just amazing um looking at and talking to our superintendent about how large this organization is I mean we're one of the largest organizations that hires in a
154county of three million people so that in itself is incredible and the fact that we haven't had to conduct any layoffs I mean that's incredible um and something going out into the community that's very a very positive thing that we can share and I also appreciate the uh breakdown with the hiring incentive just so we can kind of see that and see um because also be able to share that with community members because I know that has come up um I just had a question about because we're in such a large community I mean again coming from this Council of great City Schools there's a lot of places where like the that their their school district is the only one in town like you know in Seattle or um other other parts of the country
155but we have 42 different school districts just in San Diego County so I'm just curious I mean we all know that Sandy unified is a fantastic place to work but that must sometimes be a challenge because there's so many school districts competing for staff um are there things that that what are a few maybe one or two things that we're doing to make a a standout from some of the other school districts so they know to come to us um I think the thing that's really important is um when we're talking to candidates they want to know what it's like to work here and so when we can all say how amazing it is to work here and we can share our stories of success we can share our stories of the joy that we
156can bring to the school or Department that we work with that's the difference our who we are as employees and how we work and commune within our school communities within the larger community that makes a difference why people want to come here um that's what people ask us what's it like that's why we um you know there's lots of different ways to recruit you can send a list out with names and you can call people but what brings people here is the experience so um Dr Whitehurst pain you talked about our event on the lawn we didn't hire everybody but we got to talk to every person that came that day about how amazing it is to work here um we had an event yesterday and we we also get to show off our community
157so our event yesterday was at ucsd's extensions Park and Market building and so we because of our partnership with UCSD we were able to go to a place in our community and show what it's like to be part of our community so working in San Diego is different than working in other districts it's different than working across the state because of our size and because of the massive geographic area that is our community and because of the variability within San Diego we're not one Community we're multiple experiences communities ethnicities identities and so coming here you can find a place that you love and that you can make a difference in so that's what I think the difference is that's um and then we pay really well our benefits are amazing and it's just a really
158great place to work so that's as you can tell I am a recruiter um but I also many of you know I'm from the Midwest I recruited in the Midwest and the most that everybody asked me was what is there to do there and if you can't compare you can't compare with what there is to do here and then work here so um we're we're just overall a great organization to work for and with I think I think first of all once again I just Echo all the board members and applauding you for um your work your recruitment efforts as well as the entirety of Human Resources so thank you very much and something that um really stood out to me especially having first-hand experiences on um on my campus and various campuses throughout state
159of unified is the teach lead initiative having students our very own students understand the value and meaningfulness of education and eventually pursuing education to become Educators or be involved when the education system and seeing firsthand that student to teacher pipeline is incredibly meaningful and inspiring so thank you so much for for the work you continue to do thank you yes yeah so I just want to you know quickly Echo all the other board members thanks I mean when I read these numbers of the diversity of new hirees that is really powerful to me um knowing that our future educators will look like our student body and we are making real progress with seeing the diversity that we need in schools is really inspiring so thank you Dr Mike yeah are we are we including our
160students at these recruiting fairs I actually could probably get a lot more done if I just had the kids come and do recruitment um so um you know we um everybody who loves to talk about our work is more than welcome thank you that's it thank you thank you thank you for your report also thank you thank you and that moves us now to item I which is a superintendent's consent agenda so moved second yeah we don't have any speak Acres so there's no discussion let's have the student NEPA moncino I get Toriano hi and everybody else is voting did I skip something right 13 and 14 morning I uh we'll exclude those two for you too I abstaining from items 13 and 14. I upstating from items 13 and 14. thank you the rest
161of us and I haven't voted thank you so that passes unanimously with the students concurring except on 13 and 14 and that takes us to the end and we have one person in person is that Catherine Deboer is she here and now we have Viviana Gonzalez not here and we have six virtual uh speakers are they on only three okay I'm gonna call the names um um whaling Yang Audrey Yuen Ming is on okay and let's just see who else is on um no G corales okay thank you and Claire okay okay so each you have three minutes we'll start with you said Ming okay please unmute yourself hi can you hear me uh yes we can thank you thank you so much um dearest thing board members and media attendees today is my daughter
162Audrey ewan's birthday she attends Vista Grande Elementary in Terra Santa in District B and area one our family has actively supported Vista Grande I have won around three thousand dollars in grant money for the school in my work as the uh as the Director of grant writing for the Parent-Teacher organization this money supports all Vista Grande students since 2022 Audrey has been singled out and targeted by the principal Nikki Mitchell with despair treatment I complain about this treatment in May 2022 to your District including Mitchell herself since then the retaliation discrimination has continued most recently Audrey's teacher in third grade Darcy Rhodes has targeted Audrey with harsh reprimands intense and welcome scrutiny and physical aggression while she did not treat any other students in the same manner I have spoken directly to Darcy Road on
163October 5th after that things only worsened October 12th during exchange at school Darcy Rose placed her hand on Audrey's head turned Audrey's head around with Force while reprimanding Audrey in front of other students we have followed the proper mechanism prescribed by your District a reported the child abuse to your school police department and local authorities I have also reported multiple complaints to your quality assurance office and to your Title IX coordinator since then I submitted a uniform discrimination complaint to Title IX coordinate coordinator Lynn a Ryan on October 18th requesting a formal investigation I followed up with Ryan on October 19th she replied that that acknowledgment will be sent to me in a few days it has been a week I have received nothing since then your employees including principal Mickey Mitchell have offered nothing
164to Audrey in the way of counseling therapy physical psychologists or any other supportive measures that would not involve punishing Audrey by removing her or excluding her from class meanwhile Darcy Rose remains in the classroom while my child remains traumatized there have been no words of conversation with Audrey by any employees let alone an apology we are a family who lives outside of Tracy we are first generation immigrants non-native English English speakers not of high social economic status and not of the same race ethnicity national origin as the demographics of the established community in Tara Santa for our leaders here today your District employees have subjected my child to trauma discrimination bullying behavior and help turn that Blind Eye to our proactive reporting of discrimination and misconduct why has no one been held accountable for this
165toxic and unlawful Behavior we would like a meeting with the should be board member Kevin advisor a superintendent Dr Lamont Jackson there are other factors of prejudice privilege and a pattern of toxicity and microaggressions we have observed investor Grande that have translated in your culture of Oppression or bypass families that's black indigenous blood color families the different values of diversity equity and inclusion are not of Health thank you thank you Lord for the superintendent for follow-up that takes us to G Corrales hi hello can you hear me yes this is G Corrales yes hi good evening um my statement is very brief I am here in support of student Audrey Ewan I was made aware by the family their concerns of misconduct regarding faculty at Vista Grande I hope that her and her family's concerns
166of misconduct at Vista Grande are properly investigated and addressed thank you and uh Clara yes hi can you hear me yes great thank you board president Whitehurst Payne board members and superintendent Jackson anti-lgbtqia plus bills and rhetoric are constantly in our national news and recently we're experiencing many local conflicts lgbtq issues are looming large over many families in the district during this trying election season thank you so much for continuing to show your support for all students in so many things you do including flying the progress pride flag at the education building every day I'm pleased to see that you recognize the importance of social and emotional Wellness at school for many lgbtqia plus students achieving social and emotional well-being is a huge hurdle due to a lack of support from family society and school
167having safe space options such as gender neutral restrooms and locker rooms in every school can help them tremendously please commit to getting safe spaces in every location as quickly as possible students in your schools need them right now just this week I watched a teen dissolve into tears when they didn't have access to non-binary spaces and it broke my heart that they blame themselves for being a burden when it is the adults who have let them down finally I urge you to mandate trainings for principals regarding lgbtq students and how to treat them equitably and show sensitivity to their unique and Urgent needs thank you so much thank you and that concludes the other three speakers did not come on thank you I'd like to thank all of you for your comments to the board
168and superintendent today we do value your input and please note that we feel that it will help us to make the district better this concludes the agenda's business of the board our next meeting will be on November 15th so with that that's it uh I just I would like the opportunity of President writer's paying to briefly just let the public know that due to Brown Act laws in the state of California I'm not able to comment on any uh person that spoke during non-agenda public comment but we are the president weider's pain did refer the comments of Meng Jang to the superintendent Dr Lamont Jackson for follow-up thank you