San Juan Unified Board of Education Special Meeting - July 1, 2021

001room thank you all for joining us this afternoon at the district office and the public is welcome to attend alternatively the meeting may also be viewed on the district's youtube channel where it is being live streamed the meeting is being audio and video recorded and the recording may capture sounds and images of those attending this meeting the recording will be posted on the district website at this moment i please invite you to stand with us and join us in the pledge of allegiance good evening and welcome i'm paula vieskas board president to my right is dr michael mckibben board vice president to his right is miss zema kriesen our board clerk to her right is miss pam costa and mr saul hernandez board members to my left is superintendent kern and to his left is

002board administrative assistant stephanie cunningham before we begin i'd like to review the two methods that are available to offer public comment for tonight's meeting for those of you who are attending the board meeting in person and would like to offer a public comment on items that are not that are on the agenda rather we ask that you please complete a speaker card that is available over there near the door by mr allen mr allen thank you for raising your hand and you will be called on at the appropriate time during the agenda the second option is to submit a public comment online using the comment form located on the district website at www.san juan.edu board meeting if you wish to submit a public comment on more than one agenda item please submit a separate form

003for each item on which you are commenting comments received by 6 pm today have already been shared with all board members however for the series of special meetings regarding the cvra process we will also read aloud comments submitted prior to 6 pm after public comment for those of us who are here in person comments received after 6 pm tonight including those submitted during the meeting may be read during the meeting depending on time restrictions comments may only be submitted on an agenda item up until the item that the agenda item up until the time rather that the agenda item has been discussed please note that all public comments are subject to a two-minute limit or approximately 1 500 characters public comments regarding items that are not on the agenda should be offered during the next

004regular board meeting scheduled for august 10th we are now at item b approval of the minutes are there any corrections to the minutes okay seeing none is there a motion to approve the minutes for june 22nd it's been moved by ms kriesen and seconded by dr mckibben all those in favor please indicate by saying aye aye that was unanimous with that we are at our business item c1 california voting rights act public hearing number two potential composition of by trustee areas pursuant to election code section 10010 subdivision a1 and other applicable provisions of the law prior to the drawing of maps and resolution number 3059 miss simlik thank you and good evening president velasquez board members superintendent kern and ms cunningham tonight the board will hear from mr justin rich of cooperative strategies who will

005provide a present presentation on the process and potential criteria for drawing the trustee area boundary maps and the board will hold the second pre-map public hearing regarding this process prior to the drawing of maps before mr rich i would like to introduce to the board dominic spinelli attorney and counsel for the district in the california voter rights act litigation mr spinelli will provide information regarding the cdra timeline that will be discussed during the pres presentation mr spinelli good evening uh president velazquez and board members superintendent curtin audience my name is dominic spinelli i represent you in the litigation filed by several plaintiffs that has been referred to as the california voting rights act litigation uh as a brief update and prelude to mr rich uh the litigation is still alive and well and moving along

006um this process that the board started last spring was stopped by the governor's order due to the pandemic that order has been rescinded by the governor effective yesterday which is why the board is restarting that process today to complete the cvra process to allow the public to participate in the decision and intention of this board to proceed to trustee area elections the timeline that mr rich will present is a timeline of essentially 41 days the timeline can uh under the law is 90 days which is entitled to be the safe harbor provision that allows the board to proceed with the process and complete it in a 90-day time frame and right now because of the litigation there is a potential that that time frame that remains is 80 days or 41 days we have tried

007to obtain agreement from the other side at 80 days and have not been able to obtain agreement and therefore we have to proceed and you are proceeding with the 41 day time frame um and that is the time frame that mr rich will be presenting and the board as my understand will be following um and that is really about all i have to say on the topic at this point thank you thank you mr spit alley and i'd like to introduce the board justin rich from cooperative strategies good evening thank you for having me here tonight i'm justin rich with cooperative strategies as was mentioned um i'm going to walk you all through a brief presentation to just share a little bit about uh the process our involvement in that um i will touch on

008the timeline uh as well but uh really to outline a little bit more about how the map drawing process goes and of course why we're here tonight is to gather public input and so uh taking that information and incorporating it into the map scenarios that we'll be presenting to you uh at a at a future date um to cue the presentation oh thank you there we are so just to to start with i want to describe the really three different election methods that are out there just for for review there is the the district's current method of election which is at large elections this refers to the arrangement where every voter in the district votes for every board member in the district regardless of geography um the from trustee area elections is another election method

009uh which requires trustees to be to reside in a particular area yet again every voter in the district votes for uh for for those trustees and then the final one which the district has elected to transition to is by trusteery election so not only do board members need to reside within that particular area only those voters that also reside within that area are able to vote for for those candidates and just as a side note this is the only election method that has safe harbor under the cvra oh print hello just a quick uh extra background on the cvra um the cvra took effect in january 1st 2003 and what it was intended to do among a number of a number of other things is to require that any election method um that it does

010not dilute the the influence of minority voters so one of the things that's most pertinent to what we're doing here is is to address that um and at-large elections have been a election method that um that are pointed to that can do that and so uh the the purpose of the cvra was not necessarily to encourage elections by trustee area but but acknowledge that that is one um that is one method that will will help to to preserve that um just as a reminder that the the uh voting areas that are uh put into place will be applicable for the november 2022 election um and we talked a little bit about the timeline but i'll dive more into that so as as required by law we are holding uh two public hearings to solicit input

011and and feedback from the community and from you all about the types of things that should be taken into account these are we refer to them as pre-map hearings following tonight's hearing and when we get some more feedback we take the criteria resolution that you all will have before you later we're going to begin our process of drawing maps making sure those maps are in alignment not only with federal and state law but then also uh with the criteria that you have selected um and we will bring those back to you again the condensed timeline was was discussed we'll be bringing those back to you on july 13th for again another round of input and feedback uh with the goal of of um of adopting those trusty areas and the map on july 27th a

012wrinkle due to covid much like many other things in in life right now normally this would have been done in conjunction with the new census data but given the timeline that you're under uh the way this process will work is to uh to adopt boundaries based on the 2010 census data and then once the 2020 census data is released we will come back and make adjustments as necessary to finalize those boundaries for the 2022 election so this will be discussed a little bit more in depth in the resolution that you will be considering tonight and we also have some further slides just to provide some more information um but the considerations or or the criteria that are used in uh drawing trustee areas to start with each area and this is in accordance with with

013federal law uh each area shall uh contain roughly the same number uh or the same population um that's interpreted to to mean um plus or minus uh five percent between the largest and the smallest so that the combined difference between those areas are is no greater than ten percent um these will also be drawn uh to comply with the federal voting rights act in particular section two um they will be as compact and contiguous as possible um obviously that can be challenging when you have geographic and topographical features but um that's that's also an important consideration they'll respect communities of interest uh those groups that have shared social or economic characteristics they will follow like i mentioned man-made and natural geographic features to the extent possible it will respect incumbency and then other local considerations

014as well as i mentioned the resolution that you have before you tonight and you will be considering will provide your direction to us on the criteria that we will use while we're drawing up the maps of note complying with the requirements uh the equal population requirements of the federal and also the federal voting rights act um it outlines a number of other criteria that can be considered some of which i just shared with you um and also just the fact that for each one of the scenarios that we present there will be certain criteria may be weighted one over the other and i think that's our job in this is to be able to show you when you uh emphasize one criteria versus another what does a map look like that complies with that or

015or meets those considerations so i'm going to run through these criteria with you and just summarize them again these are outlined in detail in the resolution um number one is the the equal population uh we keep uh going back to that but that's really one of the most fundamental um criteria here also making sure that in in number two um that the areas are not gerrymandered in a way that uh dilutes the the influence of uh protected classes uh number three um to to make sure that again section two of the federal voting rights act to um avoid the dilution of of of of minority influence number four uh that the boundaries will be as compact as is practicable um and that the boundaries number five are also contiguous uh to the extent practicable uh

016the the boundaries of the trustee areas shall also take into account communities of interest these are some of the things that when we're looking at maps and we're looking at you know streets and roads and other things like that the local knowledge and input about communities of interest can really be you know is very valuable to us on the on the demographic side as we're drawing them number seven taking into account the high school attendance boundaries um and and looking to uh draw boundaries that uh consider or or respect those uh number eight the visible features again topography geography and things like that that may delineate various communities or neighborhoods um a in in number nine keeping in mind that the growth that the district has seen over the last 10 years to account for

017changes that may be needed may be needed in the future considering ways to to allow for that growth either by keeping some areas a little bit smaller so that when the 2020 data comes out that there's likely to be more equal population distribution those are things we'll take into consideration um and then the number 10 related to incumbency trying to avoid uh situations where there's multiple trustees in a single area and then finally number 11 other criteria that you all think are are important and that we should be taking into account as we prepare our maps and our scenarios so quickly i would like to just share with you the uh the 2010 census data and how um how that plays out for for your district um again this is now um you know over

01810 years old so uh we expect that there will be changes um and were um should have had that data towards the the beginning of the year and uh has consistently been delayed so we we look to get that information in late august or september i think is the the most up-to-date timing um what you'll see here is the not only the total population uh of the district's voters but we've also listed those that are age 18 and over and and presumably um you know able to vote it breaks this down by uh the very ethnic various ethnic categories um and those are those are in the table for your reference there's also a map on the left hand side that shows the city boundaries within the district and some of the major roads that

019are laid out there as well one thing that is available at this time is the 2020 population estimate from the census uh what we're waiting for is um we're waiting for um finer detail at the census block level so that we can do our analysis and we were able to get this information from a from a third-party provider that shows what they believe the the change in population is over the uh the last 10 years so comparing 2010 to an estimate of what 2020 would be we've taken that into our into our mapping system and compared the the population changes and the map reflects those areas those census blocks that have grown or declined during that period of time the darker blue almost black color represents those areas that have grown the most and those

020areas that are kind of a dark red or maroon color are those areas that have declined you'll see that it's really spread out over the district and there's um growth and decline all all over there all told that the estimated population change is about 10 500 which is about 3 of the district's total population we also have the citizen voting age population uh that's provided by the american community survey we've plotted that here and this breaks down um what we've done is we've layered on the largest uh ethnic group other than than white is the hispanic latino group and it shows the concentration of uh residents within the district that are part of the citizen voting age population those that would be eligible to to vote in in elections um again you'll see that in

021the beige uh or excuse me in the dark brown colors uh are the areas that are that have higher concentrations of hispanic latino voting age residents and those that are white or uh tend to be a little bit more of the brown of the light brown color where there's less concentration so this brings us to the question of how should the lines be drawn so i'd like to talk to you uh or talk you through some of the different considerations and some of the ways that we can take your input and feedback and then translate that into the maps and the scenarios that we create um an example of of the type of of feedback uh would be talking about certain neighborhoods or or certain communities that um you know based on uh those connections

022between those communities uh should be kept together uh and it makes sense for them to be in the same trustee area um beyond that um what's helpful for us is is more specific more specific information uh again when we're just looking at a map or we're looking at the the topographic features of a district we may not get the same sense of the various communities those communities of interest within the district so for us it's helpful to get specific directions about you know the the various dividing lines streets or uh you know freeways roadways and things like that with the primary rationale being that it helps keep communities together because we're we're trying to avoid splitting various communities and that it provides good representation to those within the community another example um might be that

023each elementary school boundary should be either within the same trustee area or it should be split some of the feedback that we hear is that when you go from voting at large to voting by trustee area there's a concern that there will be uh favoritism played and that certain schools may get more support from various board members so if if you decide to put those into multiple areas perhaps that you know we'll we'll deal with that but i think those are uh very school district specific and and your individual circumstances would um would help guide us um again i think that just going back to the rationale our hope is is that when we apply those criterias at the end of the day it helps keep communities together and it provides better better representation uh

024just to quickly touch on the next step so after tonight and conducting the second public hearing on on the um on the pre-maps um we the the draft um criteria resolution is before you once you adopt that resolution and and any associated changes we'll take that and begin our map making process um again we we ran through all of those those multiple criteria to come back to you with various scenarios that you can start to review and parse and and see what you do like or that you don't like about uh those those scenarios that we've created uh so that's really the next step and then after that point where the the current schedule shows holding two public hearings on those uh draft scenarios um with the goal of adopting the map at the july

02527th board meeting questions for you all thank you for the presentation we're going to do one round of questions here with my colleagues then we will hear all public comment and then if necessary we'll return back to the diocese thank you for the presentation i'll turn it to my colleagues for any questions mr hernandez thank you um i don't have a question i have a comment is that okay okay well i'll go first then first of all welcome everybody appreciate you being here um i would like to make a comment and then i will share some information that i have work been working on for a while it is my hope as we begin this process to either move to seven or stay at five that we do so by focusing on all the important

026factors within our school district i am not proposing that we move to seven or stay at five at this moment we have often heard from some that a district of ours our size should have seven board members as six of the largest school districts in california have seven board members this is based on the ten largest school districts in the state according to the california department of ed based on student population i began to compare our district with these six districts to see if i could find a size correlation that exists between seven versus five and not based on student population so please look at my very non-scientific chart it is correct that six of the largest school districts in california have seven board members we are number 10 according to the department of ed

027again this figure is based on student population using 2019-2020 numbers and this is how i process this information maybe districts that have seven members could be because of the sure land size or mass of that district example la unified has 720 square miles within their district boundaries 103 square miles per board member we have 77 total as a district so 15 square miles per board member so let's look at one in our county in the top ten which is elk grove unified which also has seven board members they are five times bigger than us each board members in elk grove represents 47 square miles compared to our 15 per board member only fresno unified has a smaller landmass than us in the top 10 schools in the state i then focused on the seven board

028members i'm sorry i then focused on having said more seven warmers if it helps you be more efficient as a district with the help of our former cfo mr stevens we got some financial history of all the 10 districts on the list there are many factors determine how well a district is run but usually the manner in which a district handles their finances or budget is a good indicator without a healthy budget you lose programs and teachers we have another school district in our county not in the top 10 but very similar to us they're having major financial and district problems they also have seven board members so using this list two of the six largest school districts with seven board members have had a positive certification of the last three years compare that to

029the four districts that have five board members in the top ten districts three of the four have had a positive certification over the last three years i share this information for you trying to make a point that as we discussed to move to seven or stay at five that we stay focused on the important factors within our district to state that we should be at seven or five because of other districts for whatever reason is not in the best interest of our district in my opinion again i am not proposing then when we move to seven or stay at five i look forward from hearing all the parties involved to help us make a decision thank you thank you mr hernandez ms costa mr hernandez that's amazing great research i'm very impressed and it's information

030that actually csba couldn't get for us so isn't it interesting that one of our own board members got it so thank you um also welcome to everybody i'm really grateful that we're back in person for board meetings and that the governor's order has been rescinded it means that we're moving back to life as it was pre-coveted which is has been our intention since we started the process and our intention for our students to be back in person in the fall i really have appreciated all of the communication and feedback from many community members who've called me and emailed me i agree with the criteria in resolution 305.9 i have one addition and that edition would be that each trustee district should have a minimum of one high school or more i would really like to

031encourage the public who is listening to this broadcast on youtube and the public that's in the audience to come on either wednesday the 14th it's july 14th from 6 30 to 8 at either dire kelly casaroble or miraloma or on thursday july 15th at greer mesa verde or the district office your feedback is important we want to hear from as many of you as possible either send in your comments if you're watching on youtube or in person and come to the community forums thank you thank you ms costa ms creason thank you for the presentation i have a couple questions i want to be sure that you get what you need from us in community tonight so what exactly do you need to walk away with i think looking at the criteria resolution and affirming

032that those are all things that are important to the board uh in addition you know looking at high school attendance boundaries uh or or high schools um those types of things are are certainly helpful for us um and then perhaps after the public hearing and there's other um folks from the community that have good ideas as you discuss those and think yeah you know what that's that's something we should really account for we hadn't thought of that that's the kind of input that's really helpful for our firm in drawing maps that really reflect what you want thank you that's really helpful i know the one thing i do want to hear a public comment before i go too far into this but the one thing that really stood out that really unsettles me is the

033protection of incumbency i don't it's my vote i would vote on that right now that we shouldn't do that that shouldn't be a criteria at all um but i would love to get through the process and i might have more things to share after that but that's when that really um strikes stands out um and then question about senses i i do find it really unfortunate that since this didn't come out when it was supposed to come out um that really unsettles me knowing and understanding the change the great change that has happened in our community over the last 10 years that said if it's going to come out this year does that mean that we're going to be going through this process again before the 2022 election yeah unfortunately you will be i do

034think that it will be a much more fluid process we will again we'll have criteria input and feedback to be able to go through that quicker we have a starting point in terms of of the map that you'll be you know adopting a few weeks from now um and you know i think there's then we're just making adjustments and hopefully they're small adjustments um and i think that's that's what we would be looking to do okay and then does that change require the same process we're going through now with the five hearing that doesn't happen no okay understood um i think that's enough for me for now thank you sure if i could just make a point of process real quick before i call any dr mckibben and that's just i want my colleagues to

035know and i know staff's taking notes as well but also in the event it's helpful for the public so in the board packet you'll see the resolution and the criteria and so we'll be doing a little bit of active development here yeah um and i'm taking notes like we had a very specific kind of note already about each district should have one high school or more and a specific call out on the lack of a preference for one of the identified criteria etc so just like that's the activity for the evening yes ms creason sure and we're going to come back as well but yeah i'm sorry dr mckibben i'm sorry i did it um acknowledge i think pam's sorry ms costa's idea for making sure everyone has a high school also is very very

036reasonable and then i just want to talk about ask a quest process question it's my understanding that once maps are actually ready and those go out to community that those can be tweaked along the way so it's not like okay we're going to make a decision these are the static you know maps they're not static they can be changed before it comes to us to vote at this last the fifth meeting is that correct that's right okay thank you can i build off because it goes in line with ms kreesen's questions i was watching a board meeting actually elk grove the other day and they were talking about the growth in their district and it's probably more significant than we've seen but they were going to try and draw some of the maps and you

037said that you have some of that data already is that a consideration that knowing that there's those changes you could try and do that and would you identify maybe one map that took that into consideration and one that didn't how does that work i i don't know yeah that's those are great questions and i think we would do that i think we again when we come back to you there's going to be multiple scenarios those scenarios may favor one of these criteria over another but to your point i think that we can come back with one that leaves a little bit more room we have to be within that 10 threshold but perhaps in those areas where we know there's growth that has happened we keep those a little bit smaller in terms of total

038population knowing that when we get 2020 census data we will likely see more residents in those areas therefore when we redo the maps there will be less uh adjustments that need to be made um of course while we may know total population um you know at this time and we can sort of look forward we still have to go back and look at the uh you know the ethnic composition and how that's affected so um but certainly that's something we'll keep in mind dr mckibben i both want to thank you for your patience and have you go next thank you thank you uh i'd like to go back to uh slide six and ask you a couple questions for example on uh the criteria uh two on that page it talks about the uh principles

039established uh related to gerrymandering in the shaw decision do you uh can you give me a summary of of what kinds of things should we be looking out for related to that criteria in terms of gerrymandering are we talking about the classic slivers or or or or what uh what did shaw say basically yeah i'm stepping a little bit out of my expertise because i'm not your attorney but in those cases and and i think what we're trying to avoid is those situations where uh in in accordance with with section two of the federal vote federal voting rights act um that we're not cracking certain populations or communities of interest in order to dilute their ability to vote or we're not um packing them all so those are sort of the two standard um you

040know terms that that refer to this putting them all into one district so as to um allow uh or again to to limit their ability to influence the outcome of an election okay thank you yeah in terms on that same page you talk about the examples of interest in groups like that um does this only relate to protected classes related to ethnicity race and and language let me give you an example of that and i don't think it's exactly the right definition but we have about 13 percent of our students in this district that uh have uh ieps into individualized educational plans those would seem to me logically to be a community of interest and and we ought to be looking to make sure uh that we don't disadvantage those folks it appears in this

041they are not a consideration uh uh or am i incorrect in that i can give you the definition from from the state constitution uh again stepping a little bit outside of my expertise not being your attorney but what it refers to is a contiguous population with shared social and economic and economic interests so i'm not sure that that would would meet that definition um but again that's my layman's um view of it okay because those are uh as a percentage of things that are larger than all all of those things that are on our maps but one and and it would uh seem as a board those ought to be something that we ought to think about and so forth but if they're not part of this process then they're not part of this process

042yeah not sure if i would defer to you on that or i think your answer is correct yeah my my last one has to do with picking up on on ms costa's thing one of the things that i think that is the high school thing is absolutely correct i think that perhaps even middle schools would would fit into that but even going further than that we have uh various feeder systems within the district and i think those ought to be at least considered if not uh part of the uh part of the criteria and are you referring to the attendance boundaries of the elementary yeah certainly and and we have that data so that we are able to plot that and show you what that looks like in these scenarios um and how those would

043be impacted so um certainly we can in you know incorporate that into our analysis and into our maps and and finally one i'm sorry i cheated no more uh in terms of as we look at maps and so forth and know that if we go to seven we're going to have approximately 46 and if we stay at five we're going to be approximately 64 000 and so forth is there any way to have maps that uh uh of particularly of 18 plus voters that show approximately how many uh people are in a particular grid section or something like that or is that too difficult to do just so i'm clear so to show you a map that has the census blocks and the population that is within those census blocks yes certainly we could provide

044one of those uh and and do that at you know at this time that would be based on the 2010 census or the third party data provider that you know that i shared with you earlier so but yes we i mean we can provide that because i was looking at some of the earlier maps and it seemed like there was a look like there was a chunk added to a map and i was wondering why that was was was it indeed because that had a family that had 20 kids or something oh i see yeah so you mean in in terms of the map that showed the population change got it yeah certainly yeah we can we can show you that or we can show you the growth but generally the also the the overall

045notion of where people are right yeah okay thank you thank you dr mckibben and thank you as well for for the presentation so i just want to kind of clarify a few things there's been a couple of maps different maps floating around often with comments suggesting that you know we've we've voted them down or haven't considered them or have no intention to adopt a particular map that has been drafted can you just clarify for me at this point in the process that there have been no maps for this process that we started in march of 2020. we have not done any maps at this time we're waiting for a criteria resolution from you all that will really set the table for us to do our analysis um so no there have been no maps created

046at this time thank you for clarifying yep um there's also a bit of a narrative that the board refuses to transition to seven seats and this doesn't accompany a question this is more just me making a comment um at this point we have not ruled out anything at all where we are at in a process where the front end of a process um and we are at this time establishing our criteria for developing trustee boundaries we have noted and clarified at various points that the intention is to consider a set of maps that includes five trustee areas and a set that includes maps with seven trustee areas can you confirm that that is also your understanding of the discussions that have taken place to date that is my understanding yes thank you this is not

047off the table and any narrative that we have refused to consider a certain map or certain seat numbers is likely intended to sow divisiveness and conflict i'll also comment on and this i wanna i'm kind of in a um alignment with what mr hernandez said here which is just this seven seats are automatically better i appreciate the research that you brought to the group for consideration thank you very much i also it's slightly less official than your research but i did re reach out to um a couple of scholars and emerging scholars in the field just around you know governance and student outcomes and what what do we already know about governance teams and how they impact student outcomes and emerging evidence demonstrates that school boards may have an influence on student achievements which is

048not that surprising and unsurprisingly high quality governance tended to have greater student achievement and while there is not currently specific research on the side of size of boards impacting student outcomes we can infer from the research on board quality and responsibilities that larger boards are likely to face more difficulties creating policy coherence and strong governance outcomes so again fair we're at the beginning of a process uh my interest is hearing community input that is part of this process and i thank everyone who's who's been a part of it thus far i do have a couple of items that i want to add kind of for consideration um i've said this in prior public settings but i'll say it again while it's legally permissible as you've noted in the criteria in the trustee areas where incumbents

049currently live is not a priority for me for consideration and i don't think it's necessary as a formal consideration for map adoption i care more about seats that represent our communities um i want to echo support for the criter criteria edition from ms costa around the one high school um or more per seat and also just want to clarify you know there's there's a list of things we can offer to you for consideration while we're considering the maps and then there's kind of our formal criteria list and so i think this was along the lines of what dr mckibben was suggesting as well but um throughout the consideration of the maps i would also like to see information related to both the high schools and the middle schools and the elementary schools that generally matriculate

050to to those schools because they think it'll be helpful information to consider i'm not sure if that needs to be specifically called out in our criteria we can have a little bit more discussion about that in a bit but i just wanted to um kind of echo that that sentiment and then i just wanted to add a little bit of material that may be helpful when considering some of the maps and um you know in 2018 i think most folks probably are familiar but the sac be noted that the arden arcade is the place with the most income inequality in the entire state and this is according to the u.s census bureau tracks which measures income inequality using the genie index and granted it is slightly outdated there was a 2018 sacbe article that was

051using 2016 data um that being said given recent events and everything that has transpired since 2016. i can't imagine it's improved or at least not improved in any dramatic way and i just want to note that in 2010 particularly since we'll be at least preliminarily using 2010 census data there was an incorporation effort that i was briefly a part of at that time and it very closely looked at the demographics of kind of the arden arcade boundaries and at that time there was two maps that were part of that process one included boundaries that went all the way south to the river so all the way down and then one included a map where the southern boundary um stopped at fair oaks so it would have carved out most folks who are part of the

052community know it would have carved out a lot of the lots and parcels of fair oaks that don't necessarily match the demographics of everything north of that area so i just offer that in case that background it's helpful when considering because that demographic is very very very different and i know we're talking in pretty broad generalities but it should be taken into consideration that those communities are not the same um and to the extent that we are considering like neighborhoods and communities that might be information to consider be happy to kind of send the old links the lafco analysis that went with that etc um and then can you just articulate one more time we've done it a couple of times but the process after the census just to make it absolutely clear that like

053there will be a smaller version but a 2.0 version of this process yeah and so again our um best estimate at this time is that we will have the block level census data that we need in order to do this in late august or early september i think at this time what we've discussed with your attorneys and and has has been discussed internally is at least one public hearing at that time but i think more likely needs to be known about how drastic are those changes and does you know does it require more of that and i think as this prod this you know first step in the process concludes and uh you transition with a map that you've approved once that wraps up we'll have a better sense of okay you know this at

054that time i think we can look forward and say that maybe we do need more public hearings or actually you know we we address most of the major issues i you know it's hard to know sitting from here but um and the intention is to wrap that up in december of 2021 january of 2022 you have to have those new attendance those excuse me voting areas in place by the end of february so that we can have that um those in place for the november 2022 election does that make sense i went through a lot of dates but um yeah that's that's the timeline at this point it does make sense and i just appreciate the clarification it's just again um it's it's a process government isn't always the fastest moving train well um that

055the reason for that just to add on one thing is the reason why needs to be done so far in advance is in order to give the county registrar time to be able to implement the election um so that's a major reason why it's not just your district that's affected there's county agencies as well i actually do have one more question so on slide six and seven there were some enumerated trustee or trustee considerations um or rather criteria to take into consideration can you just give a little bit of background on where that comes from does that come from statute does that come from prior um prior cases and prior efforts just broadly can you yeah no certainly and so it it comes from not only federal law but state law uh and then some

056of the others i think are also um you know best practices that districts throughout the state have have been doing um but but specifically um you know when it comes to the equal population that's a federal requirement you know gerrymandering that's a federal court decision that was made um and and requires us to uh to be in compliance with um you know the again criteria number three related to um to the section two of the federal voting rights act not diluting minority uh influence um so um and then as far as compact and contiguous i think those are things that are contained within the state voting rights uh act but uh also really um apply to you know that's also covered by gerrymandering right and compact and contiguous doesn't lead to those strange uh boundary

057lines that you know that we were talking about earlier so some of these cross over as well and you know there are um there are ad advocacy groups and organizations that have put you know have spent a lot of time researching this and how um you know protected classes have um had their their voting in influence um uh you know diluted and and impacted and these are some of the best practices that come from um from them so and i think some of these aren't just applicable to school districts it's it's applicable to all local agencies here in california and nationally great i just appreciate the background on kind of where we got to sort of our starting place for consideration that's super helpful when you're done i am done we're about to move to

058the public comment section so i was just going to ask you one quick question around following up on her question about gerrymandering we we often see that if if a board would say we're not going to protect the incumbency that makes it much easier to really draw boundaries related to you know all of the other classifications or identifications would that be the case because even even some maps i've seen from years ago of which none of these board members were on at the time you see very edges of of individuals and times like that so in your experience how does that work i think that's that's probably the case although i do think there's other situations where you may not have very compact and contiguous uh areas because you're trying to create opportunity districts or

059majority minority districts and that is a requirement of the federal voting rights act and so that i think is important to note that during this process and what was talked about in the presentation sometimes these criteria are in conflict and so it's important for us to be able to show you what the possibilities are um and then you can prioritize certain criteria over others so um i do think that's right though i i do think when you're not thinking about incumbency um you know that probably frees you up to focus more on the other criteria and that's how i look at it just one thing that i would want to clarify um when i heard you talk about uh not only high schools and where they're located and also boundaries for our benefit it's helpful

060to know if you mean having uh the physical location of the high schools within there or if you're looking to have multiple boundaries so just keeping that in mind when the criteria resolution uh is adopted if that makes sense that does make sense i'm actually just going to put a pause on a question here because i think that should be up for discussion i had one interpretation of it but it might not be a shared one so if i can just make a note really quickly and hopefully i can both read and remember my note um we do have a couple requests to circle back uh mr hernandez you know i love everything i'm hearing so far i do uh love the the middle school feeder program but i think we have a conflict and

061sometimes big for example will rogers is across the street from del campo but it feeds into san juan in a whole another city of citrus heights so i think that we would have to take a look at that that i think the intent is good but we may have to understand that that may not be the case in all aspects i think we even have some non-boundary schools in our district so that's unique um and so i think that that's a great example that you just bring up and i just have put a finer point on that i think that then you have those situations where what takes precedence communities of interest or school boundaries and you know arguably that's that's a community of interest within the school district um but perhaps not in in

062terms of the definition of uh you know the state constitution so it looks like we're going to do one more round i wanted to see it miss casa do you have anything to add at this time okay miss creeson and just to kind of piggyback off to after what mr hernandez said another layer that kind of convolutes things is we are an open enrollment district so a lot of the kids that are in the district are in you know the boundary don't necessarily go to school in the boundary so that's something i mean i know that's not going to be solved by this process but that's something that this board really needs to think about the challenges that come as from an ultimate open enrollment district doing one last check for any for this round

063okay just a reminder we will we will circle back um with that um i declare the topic of the california voting rights act potential composition of bi trustee areas pursuant to elections code section one zero zero one zero subdivision a1 and other applicable provisions of the law prior to the drawing of maps a public hearing and it is now open for public comment i'm going to go ahead and strike the gavel to make it official we do have public comments at this time and i'd like to remind the public that comments are limited to two minutes and the clock on the wall will count down the time um as noted at the outset of the meeting we will begin with individuals who are here with us today to offer public comment and then at the

064end we will read those that have been submitted as well i'm going to read out um names based on the order by which folks were signed up i'll just say in advance it's based off of our interpretation of a handwritten card so i apologize in advance if i mispronounce your name but i'm going to do my best i will announce the individual who should come up and then who is next or on deck so we're going to start with tina gonzalez casanova and then on deck is victoria castanzo that might be castaneda tina please begin your two minutes when you are ready good evening everybody my name is tina gonzalez casanova and i am a community member i've lived in my house down the street for 35 years i've taught in san juan for 40

065we purchased our home on purpose to live within the district that i work with i worked in for all the hard work i wanted to go towards my children um to benefit that i want to start out by saying that the students in san juan deserve a board that balances the needs of all the students in the north east the south and even in the west end each board member as you guys have done in the past needs to know all of the aspects that's going on within the community in our district five people um seems to be a reasonable amount and has proven in the 40 years that i've taught in san juan to make decisions that are good for kids the existing five-person model demonstrates for students how people make decisions together holding

066all the individuals important and precious i would like to i personally believe that we need to keep the five-person model so that the decisions can continue to be made that are for the most needy and the most urgent decisions by having way too many people in that too many cooks in the kitchen i believe that will muddy up the waters it's been working and i'd like us to stay for a five person model thank you and we're gonna take a short pause while we get our timer up i did have it on my phone but you probably couldn't read it but you were well within the two minutes thank you for your remarks [Music] so something's counting down [Music] well i'm happy to also do it on my phone my concern is that people might

067not be able to see the time so i'm trying to find a better way to display it on my phone but i appreciate that can you see this i'm so sorry you know what what i'll do is i will raise my hand when there's thirty i'm good let's go thank you let's go i like that let's clarification thank you my name is victoria castaneda good evening um i'm a small business owner in arden arcade former educator i have been a homeowner and taxpayer in the district for 30 years my two children are graduates of the district i was one of the leaders to get a multi-purpose room built at dale dale school elementary school long long time ago i have served as a vice president of the ptsa at rio maricano and president of ptsa

068at el camino i have volunteered countless hours in the classroom i strongly recommend that you implement seven electoral districts in san juan the underserved and marginalized communities of west arden arcade and citrus heights need their own representatives on the school board thank you ms castaneda we will now go to ben avey followed by marty velasco mr avey good evening president uh board member superintendent it's good to see you all in person apologize i couldn't make it last week but my colleague katie reed was here representing the san juan parents association i come to you tonight to share our support for by district elections i think we've shared that before we are an organization that believes in representation and the ability for parents to fight for their students and put kids first by district elections helps

069us do that representation is a key aspect of that representation can only come from the individual relationship that you have with that board member from your local community absent that you are not going to get the representation that you deserve we have been fighting for our kids for 12 to 18 months and i can tell you we have not had as much engagement with the board as we would like and i think that comes down to representation and the board's ability to interact and communicate with individual families and individual communities the more representatives you have the easier it is for them to engage and that's what elections are about it is not a performance review it is about representation and a person's ability to communicate and work with their elected official now i appreciate mr

070hernandez's research i too did my own research and i have a color-coded chart i took a little bit of a broader look i looked at the top 25 largest districts by enrollment sacramento county has four of those four san juan is the only one that only has five trustees the other have seven when i took a broader look at the large districts in northern california there were ten again san juan is the only one with five trustees oakland san francisco stockton clovis across the district across northern california seven districts why it makes sense to represent the people you're elected to serve we urge your support for bi-district elections we appreciate how expeditiously you're moving with them we do appreciate that the quicker the better and we appreciate you moving to five or seven trustee districts

071thank you thank you mr av next we have marty velasco followed by juanigas good evening um hi my name is marty velasco thank you for having me here tonight um i'd like to speak to you about the move to the by trustee area elections and whether the district should be a five or seven member board i'm a school counselor in the district my children both attended san juan unified schools i live within the district so this decision will affect me in on many levels that's why i encourage you to maintain a five-member board we have many large districts in california who are run successfully with five member boards and san juan happens to be one of them if it's not broken don't fix it over the last few months i have been increasingly concerned with

072some of the rhetoric um regarding moving to a seven-member board it seems to be largely led by politicians who ran for school board in the past and lost and now they're trying to gerrymander our school district for their political ambition there are several examples of seven member boards throughout the state and our own county facing financial hardships because their boards cannot work together and fight amongst themselves to represent their own sites we don't have to look very far sac city has seven member boards and they are in financial crisis we are not twin rivers has a seven member board and they have no money to upgrade their schools just look around their schools our our own schools we don't have that problem we currently have the most diverse school board in san juan unified school

073district in the last few years the district has been led with an equity lens that was needed and that has been felt throughout our ranks i feel it at my school site i urge you to leave uh with insurance velasco and not allow few people with political self-interest thank you miss velasquez that is not good for our students next thank you we have juan iniges followed by cathy morris [Music] good evening um i had prepared a few remarks but i think it's more important to respond a couple things have been said i think it's more helpful for the dialogue mr hernandez thank you for your data um you've been a good friend and a uh respected uh board member who was always accessible so i appreciate your input however i want to differ with it

074by your logic if we went by population then congress would not have its members elected by population by that same logic the same the city of new york because it's a small compacted area would not be able to break down into districts it just doesn't make sense we're an urban society we're a dense society and and to me uh geographic difference doesn't shouldn't be the indicator i'm really glad that uh comet has been on made a couple occasions about outcomes i would recommend indeed that uh when the maps are drawn that we take a close look at student outcomes so why are we insistent uh for seven board members let's take a look at west hart and arcade and the city of citrus heights somebody mentioned if it ain't broken don't fix it i'm here

075to tell you it's broken 15 percent of middle schools and high school students in citrus heights meet or exceed standards in in math 15 that's citrus heights in 2017 uh we saw the trend in the sacramento bee two of our schools in citrus heights san juan and sylvan uh were declared some of the worst schools in this sacramento region that's data that's outcomes what about encina what about the the western arcade district in 2018-19 two percent of insane students met or exceeded state standards in science so yes let's look at the outcomes and if you look at them fairly you will realize five districts do not work uh if everyone's in charge no one's in charge we need to go to seven districts two for west arden arcade and citrus thank you mr amigas next

076up we have kathy morris followed by ray real thank you i am kathy morris i happen to be the president of citrus heights districts neighborhoods seven eight and nine which happened to match exactly district two for citrus heights we support very strongly seven districts we believe very much excuse me centrist heights is a different community we all have different communities we need individual representation that can listen to us i recognize clearly that the board is concerned with the entire school district just like my neighborhood association is concerned with the entire city of citrus heights so we don't look just in one place but we do believe we need additional representation and we believe the way we can get it is by the expansion of the board from seven from five to seven members so we

077can get appropriate coverage in citrus heights thank you we have ray rail followed by amy cassonne thank you trustees i'm ray really i live in orangevale i've watched this process four times in the last couple of years i sit on the citrus heights water district board of directors i'm not representing the water district tonight but i think it's relevant to my comments i watch citrus heights go from at large to by district it's a very difficult process and i don't envy you the effort that you're going to go through to put this together properly i was fortunate because the citrus heights water district was by division so i lived in an area all three of us lived in different areas and we were elected at large but we went through the process for cvra to

078make it all by district now so we're individual i also watched very closely the san juan water district development of their by district voting and i think they did a very poor job because they did not pay attention to communities of interest and they have a district now if you look at the maps it looks gerrymandered to me it looks like they set it up in a way to protect the interests of the granite bay people who are primarily the elect for their board members are from granite bay i like the idea on the face of it of a seven seven board here because i think it'll give you more of an opportunity to reach into your neighborhoods far more effectively i would like to see you consider that but not just because i think

079it's seven is a good number here but because you're looking forward to the next 50 years of management of this district and the most effective way to do that is to get more engagement in every community and communities of interest and that's going to be a difficult thing to do but i would urge you to think long and hard and plan for the future not just for the five of you but what are the future boards going to want to see thank you next we have amy cassouny followed by magali kincade hi good evening board members uh thank you for the opportunity to speak with you tonight i'm amy casune former chair of your parent advisory committee i also back in the day got a voted most valuable parent at early get for my work

080on the beautification at that school and i also spent over 10 years on the art docent program along with lots of volunteer work in the classroom i'm here tonight to voice voice my strong support for a seven board member map the board's parent advisory committee has and continues to be presented with student educational outcome data that is very disturbing for example based on the most recently published school accountability report cards averaging all elementary schools in citrus heights the percentage of elementary students in citrus heights meeting or exceeding state standard for english language arts was only 38 percent math 30 percent and science 24. this is based on state standardized test northwest arden arcade the elementary school data is even more concerning english language arts 20 of students elementary students met state standards and only 16

081and 9 of elementary students respectively in math and science this is a hurdle that our district must address for the sake of students for the futures of our children it's about lives improving educational outcomes is not easy but it starts with greater connectedness to schools at the site level a vote for a seven board member map is a vote for greater connectedness to schools for improved student outcomes it's a vote to support students thank you for your consideration thank you miss kasuni next up we have magali kincaid followed by tim kassouni good afternoon my name is magali kincaid and i'm a parent of three children enrolled at san juan unified have lived in arden arcade up and down fulton and watt avenue over the last 20 plus years and as you consider a decision that

082will affect many of the students and families throughout this area and other areas across the district you must prioritize their need to have a voice on the school board west arden arcade needs their own representative citrus heights needs their own representative we need seven trustee areas it's time to put aside your personal interests and maybe some of those in the audience and bring greater accountability empowerment into the hands of community and deeper relationships and you will only do that if you actually engage with the community that's asking you for seven trustees and the others as well but equally thank you next up we have tim kasuni followed by maria grialva good evening members of the board uh tim cassoni i'm a business owner here in sacramento i have two children one who is a rising

083senior in college another who is a rising junior i'm sad to say my daughter is transferred out of the san juan school district my son is in the ivy league i was hoping my daughter would follow him at mira llama we decided not to we feel there's a top excuse me we feel there's a top-down lack of leadership starts at the state level and extends all the way down to this board i think if you look at the sign behind you the first word is educate there's not education i think all of you should wake up every morning and ask yourselves are we educating our students the statistics you've heard tonight should be appalling and force each one of you to look in the mirror i strongly endorse uh an expansion of seven members um

084i'm fearful that there will be a further mass exodus of parents who otherwise would be committed to the san juan community it will have a ripple effect on property values and that will only lead to a spiraling negative spiraling that has begun decades ago and i'm hoping that each one of you will reverse that trend and expand this to seven seven members thank you for your time next up we have maria grijalva followed by earl lago marcino thank you for this opportunity to speak before i read from here i wanted to tell mr uh mcnichol that this is about this about representation it's about really about color it's not about ieps it's about really about colors and i wanted to tell uh you that data is skewed so if you want data that tells you

085that five is works best then you can find data that says five works best it's really the data that you wanna find and so i want to say that there's been a rush to stop the seven seats since the end of the shutdown no jurisdictions has held this district in hearings without zoom or some way to address the board and public remotely on june 7th president viscalia announced that witnesses had to attend in person we are all really eager to end odd ways of participating there really will be no spacing restrictions and she was kidding tonight there are no sections no single seats no space for a speaker with a compromised immune system so they received requests to accommodate this disability and they've been ignored that is my request that i requested a uh ada

086request accommodation which was ignored for many of us the pandemic is not over some parents have not taken jobs in the evenings to make up for income lost in the shutdown other households have lost a beloved abuela to covid so parents can't abandon young children to come here in person for for all unable to attend all evenings that's the balance of two minutes thank you for joining us thank you next up we have earl lago marcino followed by aaron miner navy board members and others thank you for the opportunity to speak here i really enjoy your the inspiring words up here educate probably the most important one education is the bastion of our democracy and our democracy thrives when we have more representation that's why i support a seven district seven-member board i think that

087when a elected official lives in a neighborhood where everybody around them knows that they're representing them specifically that they're naturally going to they can't help but think more about the schools that are in their area because their friends and neighbors are going to those schools yes i know that every member of the sport is deeply committed to serving every student in this district but perhaps sometimes it's easier to overlook when you don't have a specific representation in an area so that's why i think that moore's representation always better efficiency is not a sole determinant or maybe shouldn't be a major determinant of whether or not we have democracy there are much more efficient systems than democracy but obviously we don't want this and also causation is not correlation just because some districts have five and

088have problems i mean seven and have problems and some five you know that's no proof whatsoever there's more involved in the reasons why they may be having problems with efficiency i believe this district would be an excellent district in working together with a seminar report and they would all respect each other and work to towards a common goal of serving all the students equally thank you thank you next up we have aaron miner followed by carolina flores good evening good evening trustees fellow members of the public i have lived in citrus heights for five years and i have met three colleagues who have attended san juan high none of them spoke well the education there one of them was not even a recent graduate was not even taught basic computer literacy san juan high has

089spent its budget on state-of-the-art equipment and medieval education their successors will be best served by a seven member district for the simple reason that every individual's interests are best served when their district is served by more people because there will be more members per citizen and any policy that serves a minority of one by definition will serve a minority of four percent or 13 and it is serving the interests of minorities who might be underserved that the spirit in which it is in that spirit that this law has been written and with which this board must comply now i would like to offer two cautions to the board the first one is in drawing too many comparisons between this district and others simply put we cannot tell whether or not five members or seven members

090are inherently more efficient unless you control for every single other factor that might differ between them i have not seen any such indication in the studies cited here the second is this in all the years in which i have been engaged in public forums such as these it is my experience that these sorts of meetings are attended by the comfortable the disaffected do not even know this meeting is taking place you do not see my colleagues here two of them are trying to make a living and have probably not even heard of this meeting one has left the area and lives in sacramento now for most people if they have a voice at all it will only be heard at the ballot box they need seven members thank you thank you next up we have

091catalina flores followed by alejandro cabera we're going would you like a translator for your remarks or would you like to read your remarks in english i'm going to read some of it because some of it pertains to the ralph brown act we'll restart for the two minutes if that's okay thank you wait a minute don't start telling me yet the brown act let's clarify that the legislator legislature finds and declares the public commission boards school boards all all those receive input from the public the public has the authority to tell you the agency how they want things to be done how they want you to serve and how they want you to spend their tax dollars this is what the people do the people at this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies

092who serve them the people in delegating the authority do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know that people insist on remaining informed so that they may retain control over the instruments they have created you are the instruments they created they elected you in office and they probably will elect you out of office that is the right of the public the people have a right to access information they have a right to all documentation and everything has been carried on in public meetings the brown act says that local agencies shall be open to the public all persons shall be attending any meeting of the legislative body your meetings must be open there is no second thought there

093is no separating the other languages to another room there is no not providing zoom not providing public in-person meeting you cannot get away with that you've gotten away with it for too long and we no longer tolerate that thank you very much thank you next up we have alejandro cabrera followed by ben chafee apologies ben good evening trustees um i want to thank you all for having this public hearing today and having a conversation about the need to move towards a single member election district uh my name is alejandro cabrera and i'm here on behalf of council member guerra city of sacramento district 6. councilman thinks it's important that the district moves towards a single member smaller district representation that will allow board members to build a stronger connection with the school their schools and

094the families they serve smaller member districts will ensure adequate geographic representation and accountability to voters by having an accessible representative with that said we want to thank all of our board members who work hard long long hours in unpaid part-time positions building the trust and relations relationships with our families and schools in our council district san juan serves the neighborhoods of sierra oaks campus commons and in his ranch we want to ensure that our board members have manageable size districts so that they can realistically do the work that needs to get done to ensure the success of our students and our families thank you thank you next up we have ben chafee followed by mario galvan yeah good evening members of the board my name is benjamin chaffin and i wanted to thank you for

095the opportunity uh to speak here tonight and simply express my strong support for the seven ward member map this district needs it as well as our students you're in a unique position to affect this important change and support for a seven-member map is support for improved student outcomes and support for our students in general thank you next we have mario galvan followed by diane decayed i'm sorry i know there's a question mark here so i think we're trying to read from handwriting but we'll begin with mario thank you good evening thank you for the opportunity to speak here my name is marie radwan and uh with all due respect to the board uh i also want to address my comments to those watching us from outside on uh on the media um i ask that

096people please insist on an open process in this decision uh using real 2020 data we support the demand for seven trustees we ask people sent to send their input to board comments at san juan dot edu but to also send a copy to the seven trustees at neighborhoodelections.com and that's neighborhoodelections.com if the district won't post public comments we will so for real information please visit neighborhood neighborhoodelections.com we provide the demographic information that they don't this can help you decide the community of interest to which you belong then you can tell the trustees how they should design seven trustee areas that will give you permanent representation if you're registered to vote in san juan please sign our petition to that to the county board of education and consider the that the county board of education consider

097the proposal for seven trustee areas even if the incumbents submit a five trustee map you can sign here tonight at our table outside or you can email seven trustees at neighborhoodelections.com and we will make sure you get a petition to sign lastly excuse me trustee areas are supposed to group voters based on their community of interest it means neighborhoods defined by common shopping and recreation areas renters language education and other democratic excuse me demographic demographic factors including but not limited to race if the district ignores voters common interest the board can gerrymander seats five seats to try to keep safe as if they were thank you thank you next up we have deanne i'm gonna let you say your last name i don't think we have the right spelling here thank you for your attempt

098it's dion dequa thank you and i just for on deck we have murad so please begin when you're it always gets mispronounced with only five seats and a rigged map the voters don't stand a chance of actually selecting their own trustees it is impossible for citrus heights to get its own seat the trustee in orangevale and one of the three carmichael trustees will split the city and that is one-fourth of the district and cena neighborhoods west of watt and one-fifth of the district have very distinct needs and they too will never get a dedicated voice on the board since they are building blocks of trusted areas it seems logical to look at communities first and then draw the maps tonight they offer you no information except race that is set that is set out on

099those charts and this is the last hearing before they draw the maps they won't let you define your own neighborhoods they don't care what you think your neighborhood is whether your block is rich or poor whether voters dear or near you rent or own or whether most adults have jobs or high school degrees how many children go to school where whether your neighborhood faces an environmental or economic challenges whether there are many vacant homes or crowded housing whether they're parks or bus stops or rail stops libraries or shopping areas where people congregate and talk about politics tonight they don't provide and won't use any information about crime in your area or about the quality of your neighborhood schools they won't differentiate between established latino neighborhoods and struggling immigrant communities to them all that matters is

100how many voters are latino black asian or native american if you are here tonight you can see our maps showing all these factors or see them on your neighborhood elections dot com on thank you next up we have murad zarama followed by catherine tarantini president vasquez we have hit our 30 minutes per board policy we will need board action to extend thank you for the reminder we have um roughly 12 left for in-person comments so i'd like to make a motion to extend public comment for the balance of our um attendees here it's been moved i believe i want to confirm that you're seconding that motion miss crease or moving the motion i am moving the motion and there's a second from ms costa all those in favor please say aye aye that was unanimous

101mr ceramo please begin thank you madam president and members of the board um actually i'm studying before you tonight as a parent who lives in a district for almost two decades um during these years i witnessed the diversity and inclusion evolved within the district from inclusion uh within language accommodation to refute refugees students and parents to actually within the board 20 years wow what a change that i've seen but i came into this war so i'm glad to see that for decades millions of middle eastern americans like myself my family and i had no choice but to self-identify as white so when we talk about senses it's usually a sore subject for my community so i'm here in short i'm here tonight to support the by district election and a seven member board to allow

102for a better engagement and representation in each district thank you thank you next up we have catherine tarantini followed by damaris canton catherine do we have miss tarantini with us we're going to move to miss canton and we'll circle back to miss tarantini miss canton good evening board members i first i'd like to good evening board members how um i just want to address some of the comments that have been made tonight about the narrative that's been put out there that um some of the comments led to let people to bleed or would lead you to believe that the seven-member board issue has been led by disgruntled people who ran for office and didn't get that that's not at all how it happened it has been led by parents who have been in this district

103for 20 to 25 years who reached out to those people who ran for office who then joined and said we will help because as we have seen we cannot get people elected in this school district if the school district if the school the teachers union is not for them moving to seven gives a smaller areas gives us an opportunity to focus i have spoken with each and every one of you about the needs at encina high school in the west end 25 years and we still have so many of the same issues if we had a board member who lived in that neighborhood who met with their constituents on a regular basis who had access we wouldn't have this issue i can tell you i bet that mr kern he can he'll have real parents

104in his office how many have seen her parents have come have been able to go to his office and have a conversation with him through no fault of his who lets nobody's letting them in there we have to do better than this our students deserve it our community deserves it i live in this community i've educated three children in this community we are moving we need to move to seven so that we can give good representation living in fair oaks does not give you a good idea of how life is in citrus heights or on the west end so i thank you for the time but please don't listen to the narrative of those who want to keep it this way so they can continue to be incompetent thank you miss kansas is miss katherine

105tarantini here okay we will move on to lisa pelletier followed by faith or arguio that's my best guess apologies lisa please begin when you're ready thank you i'm ready my name is lisa pelletier i had three children in san juan unified until covet hit and in my opinion the board and the superintendent uh shut down refuse to listen to parents refuse to do what's best for the kids lied to us betrayed us left our kids hanging out to dry and i know i'm not alone i was so disappointed to hear today your comments about the mapping not one of you said i really want to connect with the parents who are frustrated i want to help the kids who are hurting and failing and cutting themselves and committing suicide and suffering from bullying by teachers

106and peers who insist on people with medical exemptions wearing masks anyway i was hoping you guys would say something like that but instead mr hernandez offers that maybe we should look at square miles when we determine representation square miles we are people we are people and your obligation is to represent us this is for the viewers please visit recall san juan unified boe.org we have recall petitions for all of them people like me who lead the parents need to be on that board right over there the mapping is important please go to this website neighborhoodelections.com you're going to communicate with us we're going to band together we're gonna fix the district so our kids can come back we're gonna end critical race we're gonna bring local control back to san juan unified so you feel

107safe sending your child to school and you know you have a voice thank you thank you um next we have faith faith possibly with the t i'm so sorry and then followed by uh her is uh scott rafferty thank you man please begin when you're ready uh yeah thank you faith that's a good relay okay but don't worry it gets mispronounced all the time so i do my best not to but so continuing continuing with the previous comments i just want to say that last year the board said it was wrong to comply in 2020 because using the 2010 census to determine the area size somehow left out refugees even though their areas may have lost population once they got their at large election the board reversed itself insisting on using 2010 data the 2020

108census is almost certainly the least accurate in recent history still the district must use 2020 data in the next election so it makes no sense to draw maps to nowhere this census has enormous uncertainty but for heroic efforts by our state government there would be a huge undercount of urban areas and of latinos it is difficult to imagine where undercount could matter more than within san juan orangevale had one of the highest self-response rates in the state west of watt amongst the lowest having claimed that this census would differ radically from 2010 san juan now says that there will be almost no change in its population their private data from geolytics says it has increased only ten thousand five hundred the census says seventeen thousand the odds that the census overestimated growth by seventy percent

109is about one in three hundred thousand both data sets show big shifts within san juan the demographer says in cena and citrus heights grew many blocks doubling in population areas where trustees live declined the census estimates change in 85 tracks not 3 3 hundred blocks but shows a similar disparity it is likely true thank you ma'am that's the balance of two minutes thank you next up we have scott rafferty followed by bill simmons so we had a script tonight we didn't finish it because there were just so many other really important things to say uh but uh we've sent you over 40 pages of data maps and and examples and and and none of it gets posted none of it ever not even our original petition and uh this just isn't isn't democracy uh you

110read you read written comments very selectively you discriminate based on viewpoint uh but uh uh your your data here from all these private sources that touchview hernandez has or your demographer has uh it's just not right it's not the official data you need to use the official data and that's what we've given you about school size and trustee size uh and uh you just need to be more open and listen to the community i do appreciate president velasquez that you recognize that there were different uh uh parts of our arcade uh especially east of of watt is is is different uh and but we've given you information about crime about all the barriers to participation in government and this reform is meant to empower those communities and yes it's good for everyone it's good for

111all neighborhoods the citrus heights they haven't had somebody on the board for 19 years and and they're a quarter of the district and their needs were very different than than than arden arcade they need to have voice on the sport they don't need to be split up between uh someone in orangeville and someone in carmichael and with five seats if you do criteria number eight where you're protecting yourselves everybody gets their own district uh there's no room for them it's it's it's over we've given you the seven member option because it is the norm you are one of the biggest in the country to not to have not to have only five members and one of the only ones that's large at large so please take it seriously if you save seven districts tonight we'll

112settle the lawsuit thank you mr rafferty next up we have bill simmons followed by david hawkins members of the board superintendent curran my name is bill simmons i've lived in the district for 32 years and voted in every election for this board i i also know that this board has done great things at school sites around our district and they have served the students in arden arcade by rebuilding dire kelly by rebuilding greer by rebuilding del paso manor if we had a seven member board representing seven districts like many of our neighbors do there would not be consensus to serve the needs of the most neediest schools this board has done a great job we have 60 percent of the board are minorities that's not recognized by mr rafferty's group but mr rafferty doesn't live

113in the district mr rafferty has made money off of this as an attorney and he has got a group of disgruntled politicians that lost board seats to come to this board and to make statements you will notice that there were many members that came up here tonight and spoke to you they do not live in the district they live outside the district and have come with mr rafferty to make noise listen to the voters in the district listen to the people who you represent you represent the people who live in this district thank you before we move on everybody will get equal time to make their say and we appreciate folks being you can make hand gestures but please just do it quietly next up we have david hawkins followed by michelle wright hi everyone

114david hawkins uh i actually live in the district um i actually have two sons have gone through san juan um one at del campo which was not the greatest experience and our youngest who's now at san juan high school i'm a labor advocate that's what i do for a living and frankly i'm embarrassed by some of the comments of the union um i think what would be helpful i think what would be no we don't need snapping this i think this would be helpful there are narratives that that people are putting in place there are assumptions that people are putting in place there are misunderstandings that people have put in place because the stakeholders aren't talking with each other and i think that that's a disservice to the board to have people come up and

115oppose or sub or support something based on what the latest catchy phrases versus what is the impact on our students in the community and that's what i'd like to try to touch on um president the ask is i'd like to thank you first of all for for your clarifying questions i was looking through the resolution and i saw the piece on draft maps i didn't know if it was five or seven and i don't think you've decided maybe you have but i have not come to the conclusions this board's decided that it needs to be a five or a seven seat um conclusion um i was honored to be appointed to the inaugural lcap committee by a member of this group when she was president 2014 noah was in fourth grade and we had a

116very nice conversation about the diverse needs of the district and about the need to be inclusive of the members of this of this district who were not being included at the time and that was seven years ago and it seems to me that if we open dialogue and have some conversations we might be able to be more inclusive with with the larger board thank you thank you mr hawkins next we have michelle wright followed by michael nishimura nishimura hi i'm michelle wright i'm a fair oaks resident and i grew up going to schools in fair oaks and i have benefited from over representation so i am actually in support now of a seven-member bi-district board um because i don't think um people from my neighborhoods actually need continued over-representation i think it would benefit everyone

117and especially students who are at schools that don't perform as well as the schools i went to to have increased representation to have people that understand their backgrounds and what they and their experiences um because i think in designing education their education they need people that understand where they come from um so the more access we have the greater um inclusiveness and people that are more representative of each of the communities i think that would just allow for increased um a better reflection through your policies um in in how you and how you govern this uh this just uh sorry this district thank you thank you next up we have michael nishimura followed by hermann thank you board members my name is mike nishimura the vice president of the residence empowerment association of citrus heights

118i'm also on the board for our neighborhood association and i'm also planning commissioner for the city of citrus heights i'm very happy that you are moving over from at-large elections to um by um by trustee i would really like to see it go to seven trustees just to be more it would make it a lot more fair and equitable be a lot easier to draw the maps citrus heights represents almost 25 percent of the district the students yet we have not had any representation for almost 19 well 19 years almost 20 years so i think that it's high time and i just feel that seven seats would make it a lot more equitable and fair for everybody involved i was not quite aware of the problems that you know the arcade area had so i

119would really like you to consider the seven trustee area and to the comment that if it ain't broke don't fix it i'm sorry but it is my own stepdaughter lives in citrus heights she owns her home and this charter schools are coming we have one opening up in our neighborhood association and she's gone so far as to check into sending her daughter my granddaughter who starts school next year sending her into placer county because of the performance of the schools in citrus heights and i don't want to see that i'd like to see it fixed thank you thank you mike next we have followed by teresa amador good evening members of the board superintendent uh thank you for having us here today and it's a long night uh i'm a parent here in san juan

120unified i'm a voter here and i'm very disappointed to see that the results and net data is a report that black and brown kids are suspended the highest rates than any other ethnic group in the school district and cena high school still doesn't have an engineering and technology program like rio americano does so we hope that this efforts to increase the representation at the local level can create a kind of small learning community where we can hold somebody accountable to bring those resources to our neighborhoods and i'm in full support of this i'm also here on behalf of my organization that i'm part of it's called the united latinos we're a health and environmental justice organization that's funded by different groups here in town and we've been meeting with community action network to keep an

121eye on this effort because it's very important to us so i have their full support from the board and their membership that i'm here to speak on their behalf to say that we do support the seventh district uh system thank you [Applause] thank you next up we have teresa amador followed by jocelyn milan good evening thank you for having me my name is theresa amador i am a parent of three children one in elementary one in middle school and one in high school um i am not a disgruntled politician i am a homeowner and i reside within the district in the boundaries and um i am in support of a seven trustee map i have worked for 23 years with special education i've been an independent consultant in districts within across northern california i've also

122been in kansas colorado i've seen how different districts do it i grew up in a rural community where we had representation and my mother served on the board there and was able to see the impact that they had by representing i came from an affluent area where my school was in a small farm town and it was rural and we were able to to get the community to work together and i feel it's important to have individual representation student outcome is important and i think it's really important that the board look at and define what run successfully means as a parent and a homeowner i define that as student outcome test scores dropouts district rankings um number of suicides that's happened um housing business cost of living as as somebody who owns a home it's

123important for me to keep that and have that value and when i'm looking at other areas to relocate or move the first thing i look at as a parent is what are the schools performing at and how successful they are and i and i look at our response to covid and during a board meeting mr kent kern spoke and said that we are such we have so many moving parts it's really difficult to get anything moving and working together we're really working really hard well that's my point for looking at yes a car has many moving parts too but if we just look at it as this hole and the engine lights on and we don't do anything about what's happening and what needs to happen to improve equitability how resources is funded and allocated

124how many communities are underrepresented how many areas have title one schools and have heavily impacted that don't have that individual representation i think is very important thank you thank you next we have jocelyn milan good evening everyone we are here as graduates of citrus heights schools san juan high school graduates a graduate of uc davis and sacramento state we are both currently in master's programs we thank you for your leadership and support a five board member thank you thank you that is the end of our um public comment for individuals who signed up here in person um as was um announced at the beginning of the meeting for this series of special meetings we will also be reading written comment and i'll turn to mr allen to help facilitate that certainly president vyasas we have

125seven comments that have been submitted tonight including those received before 6 pm tonight our first comes from elizabeth roten who writes i am in support of redrawing the district map to include 7 neighborhoods instead of the current five san juan is a very large district and including more voices in school district decisions is incredibly important for ensuring that community voices are heard and considered having communities speak to their needs is vital for making sure they are being served by the district expansion from five to seven seems like a very reasonable way of getting more communities involved and giving them the opportunity to advocate for their needs our next comment is from nina manchina who writes i've thought a lot about the issues surrounding the board discussion tonight i can see how on paper it makes

126sense to expand board membership to enhance community representation but i can't help but wonder if this move will result in the exact opposite in looking at the research around effective school boards the one thing that jumps out is the importance of collaboration and building a strong team several studies caution that a board can become ineffective when members focus on the interests of a specific neighborhood over the interests of the district as a whole while each of the communities in san juan is unique i believe it is my job as a community member to bring those needs to the attention of the board it is the board's job to think about them in the context of the whole in order to ensure that we are doing our best work for all the students we serve in

127order to do this well the board needs to be collaborative and respect each other's points of view something i fear will become more difficult if the size of the board is increased as i stated earlier i can see why people believe that expanding the size of the board and creating trusty areas will improve representation but without intentionality this is not guaranteed so i ask that you consider what steps you will take no matter the decision to build a strong board that engages in effective dialogue and mutual respect for the good of the whole our next comment comes from michael seaman who writes as i commented for your postponed june 15th meeting i prefer seven districts not five so that disadvantaged and or historically neglected communities for example west arden arcade north highlands citrus heights west

128carmichael etc will be represented on the school board i appreciate that sjusd will be using 2020 census data even though the data are late the seven districts should be apportioned by a population density and seek to maintain the integrity of neighborhoods communities and unincorporated areas with consideration for racial ethnic and economic demography it would be wrong to slice districts such that trustees from affluent areas west of watt but south of northrup or east of watt from arden oaks southward to the river will get to speak for the diverse comparatively disadvantaged densely populated areas to their north at least one trustee area should cover the area north of northrop and west of watt as that area has no middle schools at a neglected high school too many charter schools several close to school sites abundant rental

129housing and a significant homeless population our next comment is from alan levitt who writes as a voter in the community for 42 years i want the board members to know that most of us in the community want five trustee areas we want more teachers counselors teachers aides and social workers we do not need more board members districts around us with seven board members are highly dysfunctional we want to have a highly functional five member board our next comment is from somebody whose name is entered as tommy nelson i support the board in moving to trustee areas i support you exploring both a five or seven member board whatever provides the best governance for our students but i don't support our attorneys like scott rafferty trying to get rich off the process for the past decade

130or longer rafferty has been going up and down the state sending out threatening letters to school boards and city councils warning them that if they fail to acquiesce to his demand he'll bring legal action against the school district or the city the kind of legal action that can potentially cost a school board a school district or city more than a million dollars in legal fees in his petition he notes that election code allows plaintiff attorneys to collect fees of up to thirty three thousand dollars for working on the petition and that doesn't include far steeper fees that may result if the case ends up in court many believe attorneys such as rafferty are in it for the payout rafferty says the legal actions are about establishing fair elections that will ultimately improve city services and

131create opportunities in every part of the city if that was truly what you believe mr rafferty then acknowledge the district has started the process to move to buy trustee area elections collect your thirty three thousand dollar thirty three thousand dollars and move on or stay and prove to everyone that you are looking for a much bigger payout public spend a couple of minutes researching this man and you will know what type of person he is greedy and taking money from our kids our next comment is from john carranzas who writes you do not listen we are still suffering from cobit our caregiver died we cannot leave our children alone all evening where else in california is anyone requiring people to show up in person just to be heard you care about you care only about

132yourselves that's why we need seven trustees final comment is anonymous who writes you should not require identification on your form we have good reason to be anonymous i do not want to be attacked personally like trustee creeson did to austin schlocker we need seven area trustees so everyone has someone accountable to them not to the special interests and that's the end of our public comment um we will then bring it back to uh the dice for comments and discussions we're gonna do another round down the dice um again just to repeat i am kind of taking notes at some point we will have to return to actual like the the text of the criteria and what we want to adopt but i'll continue to listen and we'll have some discussion first mr hernandez um i

133personally want to appreciate everyone who made a comment i i do appreciate those uh for that support seven those who perform uh support five and those that are looking out for uh specific interest uh and the need for their community and i think that's the great thing about being part of our democracy that we are able to be heard and again i do appreciate i want you to know very much and i appreciate those comments directed to me um because more than anything i think it makes us all think and um and again i i stick to my comment that i i'm looking forward to hearing everybody's point of view and which will help me come up with a decision and especially i want to point out one more time that i do not i

134am not promoting seven or five at this time i um i really do want to hear all the parties involved and um one of the thing i appreciate all the people that came out here publicly to make their comment hurt so thank you so very much and as far as uh interest is concerned i i support all the ideas that have been already been addressed and um that's it thank you thank you mr hernandez and while i acknowledge that that was the end of the public comment i did not formally end the public hearing so i'm so sorry that was it was there's nothing for you to apologize so that was totally on me so i uh formally declare the public hearing closed we will come back to the board ms costa i agree with

135mr hernandez uh i really appreciate all the people who came and who spoke and the people who are on youtube listening and providing written comment i have not made up my mind uh i really am interested in community input and i really would like to hear what people are thinking and that's why i listed the dates of the public meetings uh earlier because i think that it is really important that we hear from the widest number of people possible what their thinking is uh as i said earlier the emails that i'm receiving are all over the place as well as the phone calls so i think the more people we hear from the better it will be in terms of our decision making ms creason thank you i do want to address some of the

136public comments if that's okay all right um it seemed to me in some of the comments it sounded as if folks think decisions have been made and they haven't and that's why we're having these hearings and there's more hearings to come to help inform the decision thank goodness uh that's what i came here to do is to represent communities so i'm not sure if maybe i misunderstanding or others are misunderstanding but no decisions have been made um there is a couple of comments about from a couple of people about engaging with community that we should be engaging with community to talk about this issue and that there should be more stakeholder engagement as a whole and i agree 100 and i just want to be very transparent that i have can i try to call

137back or email back anyone that emails me where it gets tricky is where there's a lawsuit i'm not allowed to anymore i can't talk about what's in the lawsuit especially with who's suing us and i'm just to be very transparent i got a phone call i had one phone call with the community member the next day we got that letter and that stopped it i couldn't so i just want it to be known that i'm i wish that we could just sit down at milagro and talk it out because this is an important decision that has to happen i've always been transparent that this is something that need to happen so i just wanted to put that out there um regarding census since this has come out several times census was not a part of

138any of our decision making at all i have said many times that i wish that we could have wait waited and that was always my intent and i've made this very clear for 2022 election which is when i'm up for re-election has nothing to do with incumbency for me that we should be by district and the reason why is because census would be out this is way before coped and that we knew that things were going to be the way they were that was my personal want that never was a part of the decision making because there was a lawsuit and so it kind of changed the trajectory of how things were done so i just want to make that clear yes i wish we could have waited for census 100 i've met said it

139a million times coven messed up everything including the data we're going to get and i recognize that um and it's unfortunate and we should go with the best data that we have but i think the law is going to force on him our hand on the data we get to use and it's my understanding that will be 2020 census data and nobody else's data and then we'll do it again in 2022 because we have to our uh with the 2020 i'm sorry we're to use start with the 2010 data and we have to do it again with the 2020 data because we have to do we have a choice okay okay um i i was writing notes the whole time i literally have a tally of who wants what um there's a lot of good

140ideas that i was able to grab from this but i gotta say too um this is the people system i believe that a hundred percent um so it is hard because i am a parent i do have a kid i am an advocate that got elected in 2018 i've always been for the people i came from the hood um so it's hard when i hear people say that you're only out for your self-interest because that's just not true and i heard somebody talk about critical race theory if you want to recall me for caring about uh people of color recall me i'm all right with that i will never ever bow down to that ever um just know that we're people too you know i mean that's not why we're here to be like oh

141phil for us it's not that but i mean this should in my view this should be a dialogue so we could get where we want to be as a community um i'll leave it there um sorry i had a lot of notes i want to make sure that i one clarification that i do want to make too it's my understanding that even when we go by district that we are responsible for the district as a whole not just our area is that accurate yes that that is accurate and if it helps at all i'll just take an opportunity to add i went back and listened to our march 10th initial hearing meeting over a year ago at this point and it was a unanimous um sentiment amongst us all that regardless of what happened we

142would do what we could to set the norm to make sure that the governance team that succeeds us does so with intention and watching out for the entire district so yes i think that's an important point and again i touched on this before we went into public comment and it's really waiting heavy on me we're going to be ahead we're going to have to work as a community to address the fact that we're an open enrollment district we're an open enrollment district so although we're going to be voting voted in by the people or maybe one of you are going to be voted in by the people in your community not all of them are going to go to school in your community so that's just that again that's not something we're going to be

143able to resolve on dice tonight but it's something that i hope that we all can really think about because that's the real stuff that's going to affect kids that we're going to have to talk out and figure out what that means and how do we represent our kids i mean i'm going to probably be in that boat too you know if i happen to be reelected if not i get my evenings back um i can help out in other ways but it's very possible that my son will be going to a school that's not in a district that i represent um and so what do you know how do we how we navigate that i don't know and that's not just me as a board member but as the community that's voting too just something

144to think about i hope we all can work together to figure out how we do how how we address that miss creason can i speak that may actually end up being a benefit to helping us try and represent more than just an individual area because you will know that you're representing folks that voted for you who have students in other parts of the district you know one of the things i think we've heard and we've heard this for a while is that idea of having a connection to a board member in a region and and you know as you try and engage the community i think that's that's something that by pardon me by going to trusty areas allows yeah and i i hope none of that comes off as if i was trying to

145minimize the relationship that comes from having your own remember absolutely that's 100 true and i agree with that and i'm glad we're going that way it's just a layer that and i think we should about that's enough for me thank you dr mckibben uh a couple things first of all thank all of you those of you who showed up and and came here those of you who offered written comments and that sort of thing they're all very important and and that i think all of us were taking notes and we really appreciate you being part of this democratic process and and saying to us what you feel and what you believe i want to join this conversation uh that and talk a bit about who we represent in many cases of course we all represent

146the voters you have to recognize recognize that only about 20 of the people in this school district actually have children in schools now we do indeed represent them and they're very important but we also represent the other 80 percent and that's a thing in fact none of us could get elected without those people who do not have children in schools and it's very important because those kids come back to our our communities and become community members so investing in all of our kids and listening to all of the people is very important one of the dilemmas that that i think that we face as a school board is exactly the point that i think mr kern was making is that over the over the last uh six to seven years that i've been a school

147board member that i've tried to do both one is you know to join organizations like the orangeville community council and that's the thing because those people talk to the other people in the community but in fact if you look at the mileage on my car in fact that for many of us i think for virtually all of us we visited every school in the community because we want to hear about all of the different kinds of programs and that's the thing i'm worried that there will be less of that but i think that we will all work indeed to not have that in fact in fact uh uh before covid that i had spent about five times as much time on the west side of the district that on the east side of the district

148where i live i think that will continue with boards if we uh if we vote for responsible people but the notion is that that indeed for 16 years of of my career i spent 100 000 miles around the state talking to school districts and and i was the director of teacher development uh uh and bringing teachers of color into classrooms did that and i will tell you that there wasn't that many of the boards the best boards that i dealt with that did the best job of bringing people of color into our classrooms were on five member boards it did not matter much on that so the the notion of having larger boards necessarily makes better government just doesn't have a ring of truth to it thank you dr mckibben um i will just echo

149thanks for everybody who has engaged in this stage of the process and take one last opportunity to emphasize this is an a step in a multi-step process that will continue through the summer um and so we will um all of the the meetings are now are in the board packet and we will continue to um advertise that process and and work to get the word out um i do want to turn my colleague's attention to the criteria of the establishment of trustee areas which is an action item for the evening and i was listening closely so i have a proposed method forward and then want to open it for discussions um which is um my proposal is to add here as the 11th criteria i kind of just have the paper out here um the

150the item around each district having one high school that miss costa proposed um and then once we if i want to see if there's anything else we want to add and then we will have a quick discussion of what we don't want included and then hopefully be able to take a vote on what remains if that works for folks is there any i'm getting universal head nodding just for those for our audience at home um what i just have officially written down just so you know miss classes the boundaries of the trustee area shall include at least one high school or more um so that would be 11 that would be item number 11. is there anything else here that we would want to directly add to this and again distinguishing between this and the

151information that was shared that our demographers will take back i'm sure they've been listening very very intensely i didn't hear a specific additional item here but i want to see if i am wrong mr hernandez i just want to make emphasis i don't know if we have to put it in there it may be just a focus because serving a liaison as a facility member i think it's important that those lines be uh drawn in a way that if there's a safety issue that a child doesn't have to cross a big street sunrise hazel dewey greenback fair oaks boulevard you see what i mean if those big streets can help to us for safety reasons that we pay attention to that because i think it's important for our kids that are traveling that we do

152if possible pay attention to those big streets and i think he mentioned it in the criteria but i think it's uh for safety factors that we pay attention to it that's all do you think that it's adequately captured in seven where i think it is but okay i just want to confirm i think morpho slash safety underneath that for for transportation for those students that walk so do you want to add and safety considerations here is there are there any objections to that feel free to take a moment think about it i don't see any objections but we're going to continue the conversation so if you change your mind let me know okay miss costa miss creason a point came up and this is something i have spoke on a couple of times when we're

153going over data is the fact that um a lot of our a lot of immigrant communities are jumbled as white and we know that our immigrant communities have unique needs um so do i understand correctly that item six communities of interest make sure that we're considering that or do we need something else to make sure that we're considering communities that aren't the white that we think about when we say white no i think that captures it i will say that there's a limit to what the census will look at and the data that we will have so i think throughout the you know the process is intended to look at a map and say wait hold on a sec this is dividing a unique community in this area and we need to think about that

154and so because we're going to have multiple opportunities to look at maps to to evaluate them on the criteria that we mentioned and are very clearly prescribed in federal and state law but then there's also the from you as board members from the community that comes out and brings things to our attention that oh you know what you're right we should go back and see if there's a way to keep that community together so um just to clarify there was some comments earlier about the data that we use we're required to use census data as you pointed out but we can also look outside of that and we can incorporate other things that you know frankly there's not as formalized a process for gathering that data or quantifying it we can try to come up

155with other ways to make sure it reflects again those communities of interest um and that we're we're capturing that properly i appreciate that and i don't propose to know the how we get there but the what really is concerning to me right i want to make sure that we do that appropriately and i'm not so so this is what i think about when we're talking about some communities especially if we're talking about immigrant refugee newcomer communities we know that it's that those families don't often show up to stuff like this so they may not be around to point out a map saying hey you're blow you know separating my community on this map and so we're relying on those of us that aren't a part of that community to be able to call that out

156so i guess i'm just and again i'm not proposing to know how to address that but that is a concern that i would like to be addressed to make sure we don't do that can i jump in with a potential suggestion which i think communities of interest is inclusive of that and so we are therefore not limited just to the census data however i wonder one if it's legally permissible so i'll just get the lawyers in the room to program it um just to add maybe to item six um a sentence that says you know this may include the district information the use of district information allowable for use in accordance with privacy laws regarding enrollment and service provisions i think that makes sense but it depends how much well we can add the um

157the catch-all insofar as practicable which i actually hate the language of but doing this for a living it's usually what we add at the end well we won't get into that right now sure but it would just be inclusive of district data that we could use again it wouldn't be include data that we we're not allowed to use for hipaa and other reasons but that privacy provisions worked in there as well and i'm not proposing we know how the how to get there but if we could just have a placeholder so we do figure that out as we're going through the process i i'm comfortable with that i don't know how well it's also a may so it's not like we have to use it but it's there and it calls it out because that

158helps i mean because i know i'm talking about a specific community that has jumped uh you know put into this one bucket but that's i mean this is with all communities and the problem with aggregation aggregated data right we know i'm asian there's a whole lot of communities we know that um some communities um some low-income communities just you know it's not the same engagement level so i want to make sure that share their voices heard and that said it's my understanding that we once we get to the map piece we will be accepting comments via zoom is that correct uh when we do those community meetings yeah well we actually have the maps out there so we're going to do we're going to have in person and there's going to be zoom one of

159the things that i was going to say around that is we have some data specific to our schools related to immigrant populations i i wonder if we could provide that to the demographer because when we talk about communities of interest and i can't remember what community member said it tonight about individuals who are whether they're playing youth sports together or they're shopping in certain areas that can be affected by those communities of interest and so we could try and provide some of that data as soon as possible so that you could see that yeah thank you so we can do that without adding it into the criteria is that sufficient or do you want language specifically calling out non-census data which i think is probably more of that i mean as long as we're committing

160to do it that's all i need okay if we're doing it and that number six yeah you know one of the challenges we're faced with in this compressed timeline is you have a map to produce first maps to produce in five days and two of those days of the weekend and we have a lot of staff that are out right now or have just retired as of yesterday um and so we that we'll do what we can to get you that but that could that could be a challenge um yeah we'll we'll do what we can you know one of the things that i wanted to share about the community meetings as well because we talked at the last time about what ways could we really try and get that information out to everybody we

161have and trent do you want to speak to this real quick in terms of the mailer that we're trying to send out to every member of our community maybe there we go so we do have several different avenues we are using to reach out one is a community-wide miller so we'll go to every household within the district it's actually been a long time since we've done a piece of snowmelt to everybody in the district whether they're a a family or not so that will be going out should be hitting mailboxes towards mid next week or end of next week english and spanish with links to materials in other languages provided online we do have calls going out vr systems our social media as well the website's really that hub where all the materials are available

162in multiple languages and then we do have multiple advertisements going up in the local newspapers as well as media releases going out next week no i know we kind of talked about it but can we do the like um yeah at lunch distributions provide flyers because i think that'll hit a little yeah we could try something like that hopefully that the mailer yeah we can we could add that too the mailers to every household in the district really encompasses um it gets everyone once yep you know you know because we're doing social media you know that'll hit some people twice for following up on that i really do and i know it puts staff in a tight timeline to get a mailer out to every household in this district but that really i think allows

163us to engage every community member who wants to be engaged so thank you for following up yeah we we really wanted to the the and and we can we can do that where we pass out the meals as well the challenge there is most of that is our school community and we really wanted to find a way that we could get to broader than just our school community um as i think dr mckibben you mentioned the majority of our our district do not have students in our school system um and so how do you reach those families because we do know that there are folks out there um i mean i think we had a couple emails in tonight that aren't necessarily folks with students but they they wanted to have their voice heard and

164so that's that's part of the process we did not want it to we we wanted to try and explore every way possible in this short time frame that we can get the information out i totally understand i absolutely agree that we have to hit everybody that has voice in our community um i'm the only parent you know with a kid currently in a district school and so my lens does tend to go towards you know what can we do at the school site but that in no way is intended to diminish community as a whole it's just uplifting school sites before i move to dr mckibben i just want to make clear that we're we're good with number six and it inc being inclusive of of other communities not captured by census data so the

165boundaries of the trustee areas may observe communities of interest that's good we haven't gotten there yet we're still we're still on that auditions we'll we'll come circle back to any um taking anything off dr mckibben uh i have uh well about three uh one is that the uh related to the german mandarin piece i do think that we should uh either have incumbency as a very low priority or as not one of our criteria i think that it tends to get in the way of uh uh uh putting our districts uh into things that look like uh sponges rather than uh the compactness that the other criteria so that's my first uh the second one has to do with i appreciate the adding the other interest groups like immigrants and and those former refugees and

166things like that the end of the group and finally i think that uh in the notion that keeping communities together uh on not only the high schools but the high schools and the recognizing that uh the high schools represent more than people in schools but represent the whole community and we are after all a community school district and so we ought to keep those people about that's why i really appreciate the snail mail going out on this one because it really does recognize how important this vote is and that everybody ought to be involved thank you dr mcivin and that actually brings me to the point that i wanted to clarify which was um you know by discussing it our team will be taking it into consideration it doesn't need to be captured here but

167there was a distinction brought up earlier which is the difference between including or considering the physical location of a high school and including or considering where those students live like that's a those are two different things and i'm just curious if folks have input o i interpret it to mean when i do when i think of kind of feeder patterns and matriculation of school sites etc i'm keeping in mind where the students live but i think practically it would have to be based on the like physical location of those high schools will you turn on your arm mike mike is that synonymous with boundaries because i you know i suppose it is yeah but again that's for our boundaries schools right miss creason so that gets tricky again so we're thinking about el camino it's

168100 percent oh you're my yep i wasn't it's a little um el camino is a great example of a school that doesn't have any boundaries it's 100 open enrollment so how i don't know that that can fit into that criteria so and again i'm sorry to be a broken record but we're an open enrollment school so that i think further complicates it because we can't really say the kids go to this school just because they live there um so to me that means that we have to do just physical school site mr hernandez you know mr crease and i think that el camino is a pure open no roma but i think by boundary there is a boundary set by the schools where they sit geographically isn't that correct well our non-boundary schools have this

169area around it this we call it a 40 area where those individuals have but it really those schools really are non-boundaried um so we we have some unique challenges when we look at boundaries and again i think going back i actually in watching one of the other districts again they their their board talked about let's let's try and split boundaries because then at least two board members have involvement in in in a school rather than it's just being owned by one so different districts do this very differently i think um as you know was presented to us tonight some of these things are going to have to take priority of others even your comment about like major thoroughfares our boundaries don't take all of those things into consideration all the time so there may be

170a boundary for a high school where you absolutely have to cross certain major thoroughfares so there's there's going to come some complications in this and and really then what is the prioritization i think that will be the great part about having multiple maps produced where we can really hear from the community about wait this doesn't make sense and and those are the you know the folks in those communities saying this is problematic for our community based on whatever the reasons being um so we'll have to take all those things and that's that's why they're drawing the maps not us yeah okay dr mckibben you know having been one of those persons that lived on one side of the street and the other side of the street went to another school too you can mess up

171communities uh by by saying okay you can't cross they're busy streets that you shouldn't cross so it so it's a slippery slope on that one and uh and i wish i had an answer but i don't i think the boundary and and i should know this better arden middle school is a good example you've got watt avenue right there the other side of it is not arden middle school or a portion of that is not so kids kids at times can literally see a school but that's not their home school if you know if we drew the boundaries now they would probably look very different than they would of as we were kind of growing this district so i think in conclusion on our addition um the boundaries um you know this discussion around being

172inclusive of at least one high school it would be inclusive of where that physical high school is located and again it is at least one high school or more so more to come on that i want to make sure i don't i'm not hearing any other significant additions at this time no we haven't we haven't gotten quite there yet okay so now um what i have captured here is miss costa's edition as well um which is the new number 11. and mr hernandez is addition and clarification of safety considerations incorporated to number seven so now we can move our discussion to ones we don't want included and there was primarily discussion around item eight the boundaries of the trustees areas may consider avoiding pairing two or more incumbents in a single trustee area to the

173extent legally allowable i'm gonna i want to open this up for discussion but i think at least two of us have already indicated a preference to have this removed a desire to have this removed is there any further discussion okay there's a consensus to have um an item eight stricken from the criteria list okay i want to make sure there's no nothing else here that we want to consider for removal take one last look no need to it's a reminder the first three criteria are legally mandated so those are not on the option list um seeing none um this is an action item so i'm gonna repeat let's see this is an action item to adopt resolution number 3059 clarifying the criteria the criteria the demographer will consider when preparing draft maps and this is

174inclusive of exhibit a our criteria to guide the establishment of trustee areas which is as in print with three amendments which is item number seven the inclusion of safety considerations removal of number eight and the addition of number 11 the boundaries of the trustee area shall include at least one high school or more i want to make sure that there's no questions for staff on capturing all that we're also on video so i think we're good um is there um a motion to adopt the resolution with the criteria as um amended so moved it's been moved by ms costa is there a second it's been seconded by dr mckibben all those in favor please indicate by saying aye aye that was unanimous we are now at item c2 tensitive agreement with the san juan professional

175educators coalition superintendent kern thank you president viazquez members of the board um i am pinch hitting for mr shoemake who started his new job in rescue union today um so we have a couple tentative agreements coming forward so i'm presenting the recommendation that the board approved the tentative agreement between the san juan professional educators coalition and the san juan unified school district this agreement was ratified on june 18 by 89 percent of the voting sjpec members i'd like to state for the minutes that the one time off schedule payment will not increase employees base compensation this is an action item and at this time i can answer any questions if needed thank you um comments on this item seeing none many board members have questions or comments seeing none at the last board meeting this

176was a discussion item and tonight it is an action item is there a motion to adopt the tentative agreement between the san juan professional educators coalition and the san juan unified school districts it's been moved by dr mckibben and seconded by mr hernandez all those in favor please indicate by saying aye that was unanimous we are at item c3 tentative agreement with the teamsters union local number 150. i'm presenting the recommendation that the board approved the tentative agreement between the teamsters union local number 150 in the san juan unified school district the teamsters overwhelmingly approved the tentative agreement and ratified the contract on june 29th i do not have the exact numbers for that one i'd like to state for the minutes that the one time off schedule payment will not increase employees base compensation

177this is an action item and this time i can answer any questions if needed thank you mr kern we do not have any written comments um any speaker cards or written comments on this item do any board members have questions or comments is there um just to note at the last board meeting this was a discussion item and tonight it is an action item is there a motion to adopt the tentative agreement between the teamsters union local number 150 and the san juan unified school district it's been moved by ms costa or miss creeson and seconded by ms costa no mr hernandez okay moved by miss crease and seconded by mr hernandez all those in favor please indicate by saying aye aye that was unanimous we are at item c4 tentative agreement with the san

178juan supervisors association superintendent kern i'm presenting the recommendation that the board approved the tentative agreement between the san juan supervisors association and san juan unified school district this agreement was ratified on june 11th by 83 percent of the voting supervisors members like to state for the minutes that this one-time off schedule payment will not increase employees based compensation this is an action item and at this time i can answer any questions if needed we do not have any speaker cards or written comments on this item do any board members have questions or comments seeing none um this was a discussion item at the last board meeting and tonight it is an action item is there a motion to adopt the tentative agreement between the san juan supervisors association i want to get it out and

179the san juan unified school district so moved it's been moved by ms costa's their second seconded by dr mckibben all those in favor please indicate by saying aye aye there being no further items on the agenda we are adjourned no not for a special meeting you