001Good evening and welcome everyone. Let me go ahead and get started here. Uh the first item of business is if anyone in the room here needs translation, those services are available. Uh and if you go to the back, we will have headphones for you where you can join in. If you need translation online, uh please go to the circle icon at the bottom of your screen and press that and you will be uh have translation services available to you. Now we will have that translated. Please. Thank you. Uh the board met in close session immediately prior to to open session. We discussed conference with real property negotiators, personnel items, and conference with labor negotiators. Uh I would ask at this time if we have consensus on the order of business. >> Good. Thank you. And
002now you should have a drum roll for this. Our student representatives to the board. We're so glad you're here. and we're going to start with Zoe this evening. Welcome, Zoe. >> Hi, thank you so much. Uh my name is Zoe Fuji and I'm the ASB president of Slow High School and um yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and present on everything that's happened over the past couple of weeks. Uh favorite part of the night for sure. Favorite part of the month, in fact, dare I say. Um yeah, just excited to be here. >> All right. Right. First off, um we had our ELAC recently held a meeting celebrating our achievements for our English learner students. Um our students were recognized for earning high academic honors and for completing the pathway to reclassification as English
003proficient. Um the families also received important information about the AP exams, the seal of biiteracy, and other resources to help support the students. Uh we just wanted to give a really quick thank you to everyone who attended and supported those English language learner students. uh they work so hard and we're just so proud of them. And then we also had this year our uh Harvard Model Congress and Model United Nations clubs are having an incredible season so far. Um they're representing our school at multiple national conferences including uh Harvard Model Congress, San Francisco, UC Berkeley, and UCSB. Um we've actually had the most awards won as of yet this season. Um students uh it was best delegate, outstanding delegate um at these conferences. Those are basically the two highest honors that you can get. So,
004those are really exciting. Uh there were multiple of those awards won. Uh and the clubs will continue competing this spring and uh we're also planning to host a local model United Nations conference just for any schools that otherwise want to get involved. And then also we want to give a quick congratulations to Maline Bessums who earned a scholastic art and writing awards gold key for her poem titled Threadbear. Uh this is a prestigious honor and we just want to recognize her for her her exceptional writing. Uh we just want to say a really great job to her. I know her personally. She works so so hard and it was such an amazing poem. Moving on to our athletics. It's been a big few weeks so I'm going to try and keep it short and sweet.
005Um but our girls soccer has remained undefeated in the first uh and first place in league. And then our boys soccer and basketball earned some key wins and strong finishes. Um, also our wrestling team, uh, competed at major tournaments. There's a picture of them right next to just the word athletics. Um, they had multiple podium finishes. And also our traditional competitive cheer team represented slow high school at the CIF State Championship, hitting a zero deduction routine. That is just a perfect routine. And we are just so proud of all of our sports and how far they've come this season. Um, we also have, I know it's coming up so soon, but we also have our spring sports triyouts coming up. Our winter trimester is, I think, three weeks out. We're just so close. But we
006have our spring sports coming up. So, we're really excited to see how our winter sports wrap up and where we're going to go from here. And then moving on to the arts. Um, we have over 60 students working on our this on this year's spring musical, uh, Yur Town. This is a show about a hilarious satirical story. It's basically set in a world where there's a major drought happening and people have to pay to use the restroom. Um the our theater department has been working so hard on this. They hired a choreographer from LA who's worked with many many huge productions. Um it is genuinely hilarious. Everyone's been working so hard on it. Um and all their performances run February 13th through the 21st. And so we just want to say don't miss it. Go
007ahead and buy your tickets. Um, and then we also had our music students making us very proud. We had Len Netson selected for the California All State Honor Band and earned a top spot in Wind Symphony. That is a very very difficult thing to uh produce and our music students work so hard. We also had a lot of our own students get selected for the county honor Jazz Band and the county senior honor band. uh they made up the majority of those spots and we're just want to say congratulations to all of our very talented musicians. And then moving into our ASB updates, we have a lot happening right now because our winter formal is upcoming uh this Saturday. As of right now, I have no pictures unfortunately, but um currently we're going through our
008spirit week, which is our rivals week. So today was uh sand versus snow and I was very obviously uh snow. Just kidding. I am wearing Hawaiian print. Um but uh right now we're going through that. And then we also had our kindness week which we had many activities lined up in our quad. And then last Friday we had a winter sports rally to celebrate our athletes and just go through many fun games and recognize achievements. Um so we have a lot going on right now but it has so far all gone really smoothly. And then just for our other updates, we had our slow high school FFA students compete in parliamentary proced procedure debate. Uh they had outstanding results. They both advanced uh novice teams and they placed very very highly. We also had several
009students win outstanding debater awards and it just marked the strong start to the season and we're just really excited to see what FFA is able to accomplish. Our FFA department is really really talented. We always see them working very hard so we're just very proud of them. And then we also had one of our clubs on campus, the Eco Fashion Club, host a clothing swap uh during lunch sometime this week. So students are encouraged to stop by. This is just a great way to uh reinforce sustainability and helping um our environment. And then just looking at uh the rest of our upcoming events, we have a music assembly this Friday. We have our winter formal this Saturday. And then we have no school next Monday, thank goodness. Uh I know everyone's excited for a break,
010but uh then following that we're going to have our musical running and then we have again another no school day and then we have a choir concert. We have our finals and then we have a day after our finals just to recover and then we have the start of our third and final trimester. But that is all from Slow High School. Uh thank you so much. >> Seems like things have really calmed down down there. So thank you and Lucy from Moral Bay. Welcome and thanks for joining us tonight. >> Hi everyone. I'm stepping in tonight to talk about Morway High School. I'm the spirit commissioner over at MBHSASB. So, I'm excited to be here. All right, let's kick it off with drama. We have an amazing drama program. I really love it. We just
011did Newsies, The Miscast. Performances were fantastic. It was so impressive for our students to spend just a few days rehearsing and be cast into a character completely unlike them. I highly recommend seeing our miscast next year. It's very personal, very fun. Speaking of drama, Mamame Mia auditions were last week. Everybody's been really stoked about this performance, so come watch it in the spring. Congrat Oh yes, perfect. Congratulations to Jacobe, Alex, and Eli on the bass and trumpets last Saturday. These three students participated in the slow county honor jazz band performance at the Quester College CPAC. They were selected to participate with other students from around the area and they were a great representation of MBHS. They are wonderful m musicians. It's very fun to play with them. Last Monday, legendary basis Leland Skyler visited our
012school to speak about music and his career as a session musician. Skylar has over 2,000 recording credits appearing on albums ranging from those of James Tyer to Carol King and many others. This was very fun. All right, so poetry out loud. Every student at Moray High School competes in poetry out loud, which I remember my freshman year competing and I have improved a lot. Let's just say many students moved on to the schoolwide competition. Basically, one or two students from each class gets to move on to the school competition and that took place this week on Tuesday. Our winners were in third place Emerson Jaquay, second place Dian Lewis, and winning this school's competition Astra Barnett Davis. Astra will move on to the county competition this Saturday to represent MBHS. Best of luck to you
013guys. All right, mock trial. Mock trial kicked off the slow county competition this weekend. On Saturday, it was MBHS Prosecution versus Slow High School and a Royal Grande vers MBHS Defense. The schedule going forward is as follows. February 3rd, MBHS versus Tascadero. February 5th, Templeton vers Moray High School. February 10th, semifinals. And February 12th, finals. All right, for sports, our 70 our 70th annual Sam Boyd CIT wrestling tournament was the week before last, and we hosted over 100 high school teams and almost 1,000 high school wrestlers. This This is crazy for a small school, you guys. Having this many athletes on a campus was pretty crazy. Let's just say that our winter sports have two more weeks of league play and teams are hosting their senior nights. Last week was wrestling and this week on
014Thursday will be senior night for girls soccer and then on Friday night for boys basketball. LA next week we celebrate our seniors for girls basketball and boys soccer and we're excited for the playoffs for all these teams. In girls basketball, our coach Alex Engel recently earned his 100th career win. And in the same game, our player Violet Pay scored her 1,000th point for her career, which was so awesome. It was It was really cool. Tonight, our boys basketball game. We are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1976 basketball CIF championship with most of the team members attending. All right, coming up, we have our ELAC meeting on Thursday evening from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. Also on Thursday, initial interviews for our new principal will be held. as one more for this Thursday. Six of our
015teachers will be participating in our second round of learning walks as a part of our safe and nurturing schools plan. They will be visiting three classrooms looking for high impact teaching strategies that support all students, especially those furthest from opportunity. Thank you guys so much for giving me the opportunity to share tonight. Um I hope you guys all have an amazing evening. Great job, Lucy. Thank you. So, thank you both for coming. You It's a great way to start off the evening. We really appreciate uh your your updates on your respective schools. I you know, I couldn't tell whether you're very busy or not from all that. What do you think? So, you're of course welcome to stay, but we understand that you have a lot going on. if you choose to leave that with
016our gratitude. Thank you so much. >> All right. Now, another fun part of the evening is item 5.02. We're ready for teach elementary program highlights. Welcome teach. Good evening, school board cabinet. Thank you for um having us this evening. I guess I don't need to speak that closely into the microphone, do I? 6' three, you get used to bending over. Um well, again, thank you for having us at Teach. We're excited about this opportunity to come and just uh share with you some of the great things that are happening at our school uh day in and day out. Um, and this evening I have um our fourth grade team of students and teachers and families with us. We have Mrs. Robson and Miss Whitaker, our fourth grade teachers, and then two pair of uh fourth
017grade students who you'll meet in just one minute. So, you probably know that at Teach, we really pride ourselves in offering students um hands-on, meaningful, relevant learning opportunities. And uh tonight we want to share with you one of the projects that uh our students do in fourth grade and it's called Mini Mall Showcase. Been doing it for a few years, but it's it's it's a valuable learning experience for students. And it's one where students have the opportunity to basically come up with an item and market it and sell it to potential customers. And as part of that process, um, students really have to research the item that they want to sell. They have to decide upon that item, write about it, um, market it right to others in a competitive environment with other student vendors
018and, um, and that process is really valuable. And, and throughout that process, uh, led by our teachers, not only do they learn content standards, but they develop some skills along the way. And that's something that we're proud of as students in this particular project got a chance to um really develop that entrepreneurial mindset that we think is so important and look at um how they can solve problems throughout that that process. And so if we can pull up the presentation and I think I'm supposed Do I have a clicker? Thank you. Look at that. Jacob's on it. Never disappoints. All right. And so as part of that, um, it's important, I think, to note that the projects are fun. Yes. The projects are also embedded with our state standards, right? So students are learning content
019standards while doing some of these hands-on projects. And this project's no different. Um in this particular project we have writing standards, math standards are uh addressed and taught into as well as social studies uh standards are supported um during this project. Um and again at the bottom you see some that are listed speaking and listening obviously important uh financial literacy which we know is relatively new to our landscape. civic responsibility, community involvement, it's not up there, but technology standards as well. And so without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to the stars of our little presentation, and that is our fourth grade students. Take it away, James Keaton. >> Hello, I'm Katon. And I'm James. >> This year, one of our main projects in class was minimal. >> It was one of the
020hardest, too. For this project, we were expected to create a product, market it, make copies of it, track our sales and costs, and sell them at the showcase. >> Ken and I decided to make bookmarks. We made blank bookmarks, rainbow bookmarks, custom text bookmarks, and teach tiger bookmarks to bring out the school spirit. We also decided to make a Google Sheets page to keep track of our expenses and profit. On the sheet, we kept track of our products in the general product info. >> We also kept track of what we made per item, if we sold them all by using a formula. We kept track of our expenses and the number of items we sold and whether or not we met the break even quantity. Finally, we kept track of our customer orders and we
021gave customers the choice to create their own custom text with an online order form. We demonstrated an entrepreneurial mindset by problem solving. For example, since our bookmarks are 3D printed, part of the rainbow filming case chipped off, so it didn't roll on the stand for our 3D printer. We solved this and fixed the spool by replacing the chip part with duct tape, so it rolled on the stand again. Thank you. And and when you look at this spreadsheet, you might think that wh sorry about that. When you saw that spreadsheet, you might think that that was really teacher directed. It wasn't. That was something that again our students love to explore. And this was something that was created by by Katon and James. All right, Addie and Autumn, come on up. >> Hello, my name
022is Autumn. And my name is Adelaide. And this year we made button bags as our Mini Mo project. >> Mini Mo was definitely one of the highlights of the year. >> It was a really hard project, but it was still the most fun. >> We had to think like real business people and do things that real business people do in real life. >> The way we decided on our item was that we considered what we knew how to do, what we good at, and what we en enjoyed doing, which was selling. We then uh had to think about how to convince people to buy our button bags. So we came up with with a slogan which was just with one needle we can bring the Christmas jingle. Come on by to the double A selling
023surprise. >> We had to problem solve by thinking about how to make the bags themselves. For example, we had to do some math to measure and cut different sizes of bags. We had to figure out how much time it took to make one bag. We had we measured and cut the fabric, sewed the bags, and added a button. We made 8 to 10 bags each day and didn't have a lot of time to do so. >> We had to restart on our poster and put our motto, prices, logo, and slogan on it, but we eventually finished it. >> I spent a lot of time looking for the right logo. Since both of our names started with an A and since it was Christmas time, I made a Christmas tree that was shaped like an A.
024>> We learned a lot in our project. Not only school type stuff, but a lot of practical real life stuff, too. >> Thank you very much. And this is one of our designs right here. >> And then we made long ones too. And we also have sports ones which was so we had to think about if like we thought about girls ones and boys ones in case. >> Yeah. We did like soccer and basketball. >> You want to share your bookmark in your real? So, this is like two of the books that we had. Rainbow and custom text. And that's our fire. When we added all the money up from both fourth grade classes, we got $4,600 in total. >> In the end, we donated all the money to the Big Brothers and Big Sisters
025Company. Thank you for letting us share a little bit about how we learn at teach. >> Thank you so much. >> Yeah. >> All right. Is there are there any questions or comments from the board? >> I have u Mr. Buckman. So you guys, I am so impressed. Two things, but I if you're still selling something, I probably want to buy something afterwards. But also, how do this is something I have a question. How do you determine how much to sell it for? I mean, I just don't know how you guys figure that out. >> Addie and Autumn, you kind of address that in a little bit in your presentation. You want to elaborate a little bit? >> You just you didn't have a lot of time. You had to know what your price point
026was. >> Yeah. So, we on the small ones, we thought that it would be exceptional to do at least $2. And for the larger ones, we thought um since it's larger and there are more stuff that could put it in there, we would do like $3. So, like for the small bags, it could only fit like some money like as a wallet or like some chapstick. But like for the big bags, you can put like a lot of stuff in there >> like pencils or glasses, markers. >> Yeah. So, we thought like the big one should be more money, like $1. Um, more. >> And Katon talked a little bit about the break even point. So, they knew how much their expenses were and then how much how many bags they had to sell in
027order to to to to uh cover their cost. So, I'll I'll just say from personal experience, I have found the mini mall really fun. I've done a fair amount of Christmas shopping there in the past. I didn't go this year, but uh we I would suggest that you know you make sure the board knows when it is because it is a really great event to attend and to see everybody and see what you're what you've created and and um how you're raising money, what it all goes into and what a um a generous gift to the Boys and Girls Club. So, >> thank you. Thanks so much for coming. It's great to hear all about teach. Thank you. All right. The next item on our agenda is correspondence. And at the time uh the agenda
028at the time the agenda was posted, we had received uh one item of correspondence from Ron Crawford with regard to Loso CSD. And now we'll move on to public comment. And this is the time when people members of the public can address the board on items not on the typically this time is for items not on the agenda. Um, however, if you wish to speak to an agenda item and don't have time, don't want to wait for that to appear, you can address the board now. Uh, we do have a three minute uh hard stop and there will be a um timer on the screen that you can see the countdown. Uh we if you wish to address the board, we would request that you complete a yellow sheet and they are on the table
029over there and then turn that into um Miss Dawson or Miss Maxwell and and the we'll receive it and call you up in the in the order in which they were received. So I will turn it over to Mr. Clawson. >> Yeah. First we'd like to welcome Rita Rodriguez up to speak. Hi, thank you. My name is Rita Rodriguez. I'm a second grade teacher at Hawthorne Elementary and I'm also the first through third representative for um on the executive board for our SLCTA union. Um thank you for your time and service to the St. Louis Abyspo Education Community. It's definitely a time of great challenges and difficult decisions. Each decision carries great impact. Currently, there are approximately 4,027 elementary school students enrolled in SLCUSD. Of those students, roughly 481 are receiving tier 2 supports either
030from EL specialists, student support specialists, S3s, or academic intervention teachers, AIT. in the form of English language development, reading, math or social emotional services. When looked at closely, it's possible to determine that there's actually a lot of overlap between um the e services and also the S3. In my classroom alone, I have two students that are going to e services every day as well as AIT services every day. And as a classroom teacher, I've been able to witness firsthand the academic growth of our neediest students who've been participating in these services. If the district proceeds with the proposed budget cuts, there's a likelihood that students will lose both systems of support. Yes, the classroom teacher will continue to teach and support the their learning. However, with the larger class sizes sizes, the intensive curriculum, and
031the greater social emotional needs, not just by these students, but by their peers, less time is going to be available to spend on those students. And my concern is that they're going to fall through the cracks. They run the risk of exiting our elementary schools and then entering middle school with a defeist mindset. I say this because by fifth grade, students have become aware of how much they know and they begin comparing themselves to other students. They know what they don't know and they can tell. Right now, students with academic and emotional challenges, they're going to enter middle school and when they get there, they're going to find that counselors won't be available because that's another area where there's going to be budget cuts. Right now, if they go, the support is there. After these
032budget cuts, if they proceed as they're stated, some of that support's not going to be available. Then I need to ask the question, what are the graduation rates going to look like at that point by the time those middle schoolers reach high school? Pardon me. >> It needs to be remembered that needs do not go away because of budget. >> Thank you very much. >> Next, uh we'll hear from Douglas Trow. Good evening, uh, board members, student superintendent, assistant superintendent, and staff. Uh, my name is Sheri Parkinson, and I serve as a volunteer board member with the Slow County YMCA. I'm joined tonight by fellow board member Hillary Olsen, Douglas Trow, executive director, and Ally Litik, our youth development program director serving your district. We appreciate the opportunity to make public comment. First, we are
033approximately halfway through the year as your extended learning opportunity program provider and we want to express our deep gratitude for the partnership we share with the district in serving students through our gap care and before and after school programs. The trust in us to serve Monet Grove, Baywood, and Los Ranchos is an obligation we do not take lightly. We are incredibly blessed with the opportunity to serve over 225 kids and families daily. These programs are more than just a safe place for children to be. They are spaces where enrichment, confidence, and community truly grow. Every day we see students discovering new interests, forming friendships, building leadership skills, and gaining the academic and social emotional support they need to thrive. None of that would be possible without the trust, collaboration, and open communication we have with
034district leadership, site principles, teachers, and ELOP support staff. >> Good evening. Uh, as the executive director, I'd be remiss if I didn't take the minute to recognize the hardworking site teams. That's both the district and our YMCA program staff. That's from Ryan to Lisa to Stephanie, uh your wonderful school principles, our wise height supervisors, uh and their compassionate teams who all show up for students with creativity, flexibility, and genuine care. As a community- based organization ourselves, we are proud to stand alongside you and supporting the whole child. And we remain committed to aligning our work with your goals and student success. Thank you again for your leadership, your trust, and for the opportunity to serve the students and families of the district. We deeply value our shared mission and the positive impact we create together.
035Thank you for your time. Uh next we'll have Caroline Cat. >> Hi. Happy National School Counseling Week. My name is Caroline Katada and I'm a teacher at Losos Middle School as well as secretary of St. Louis Coastal Teachers Association. Sorry, there's a cord right here. Okay. Um, I come to speak to you tonight to represent my students and my colleagues. I think it's important for you to know the uncertainty currently felt across our school sites and staff is debilitating. Our intervention specialists, our EL specialists, library technicians, TOSAs, and our counselors have been in crisis mode for two months now. They don't know if their positions are secure or where they will be next year. These people put on a brave face and a smile every day, and they show up for our students, but morale
036is extremely low right now. As Rita mentioned, the long-term impacts of the presumed cuts will be catastrophic for our students. Our most fragile learners will lose out on critical support at the elementary level, putting them at an even greater disadvantage when they reach middle school and high school. Our middle schools and high schools already do not have the needed academic interventions and lower academic performance correlates with more significant behavior problems. When students struggle in school, they find ways to distract themselves and others. Often our counselors are there to help them navigate this challenge so that students can find coping skills and strategies to help them attend in class. Cutting two out of five middle school counselors will exacerbate this problem. I hear there are efforts to minimize this cut and I really hope that that
037is the case. Our students need you to do everything you can to keep their counselors. The recommended case load for a school counselor is 250 to1. I'm sure this has been said before, but I still find it shocking every time I look at it. The average case load in the US is far over the recommendation at 371, sorry, 376 to one. The current cuts at our middle schools, cutting two middle school counselors would put our sites at 500 approximately to one counselor. As Rita said, our students need you to look at saving the jobs of the staff that work directly with them. Our S3s, our EL specialists, our library techs, and counselors provide them with critical services. I'm not sure how to truly get you to understand how much greater the need is for counselors
038in our schools than it was even 10 years ago. Right? I've been teaching in this district for 12 years. So it's it's been shocking and what we are teaching is a new generation of students and what they are exposed to. They open their phone and they see what probably you saw last month. People being shot from five different angles. This is traumatizing even for adults. And so they are angry and they are scared and they need our counselors. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. Uh the next speaker is Jeannie Kitsman. >> I went to Mororrow Elementary. I belonged to friends of Mororrow Elementary and I went from K through 8 under Mr. Johni, which was wonderful. And um it was 1948 when I first started in kindergarten and 1958 when I graduated from 8th
039grade. And I think it would be a real travesty to tear the buildings down. because it's an iconic place for Moab. It's just and it could be used for so many different reasons, you know, for different groups. But I also remember hearing, this was after I was married, that the property that the school is on was donated by a family that said if it ever stopped being a school, they would take it back. And I don't know if it's too late for that. So anyway, I think it's a real shame to even think about tearing those beautiful buildings down. Um, that's it. Thank you. >> Thank you. Next, we'll have uh Katie Pante. >> Sorry. Good evening. I'm Katie Bervante and I teach music for Losos Middle School and Mororrow Bay High School and I'm
040here um to speak with you also about the budget cuts um in honor of national uh appreciation for school counselors week. Um I gave my students um at the middle school um time in class to write a note to their counselors if they so wished. And I just um want to read three for you. Thank you for always believing in me. Ever since I came to the school every day, I wanted to go home. This is a middle schooler, not a kindergartener. I love talking to you and thank you for always being there for me. I will miss you. Um Mr. V. Your humor makes me laugh and you're funny, kind, and an amazing counselor. Mrs. Hernie, talking to you made me feel like I was putting a heavy rock down after a long time
041of holding it. You guys make me feel seen. Sixth graders. Dear Mrs. Turnai, you are constantly helping me and keeping me from taking my own life. Thank you. I hope you are not the counselor getting cut next year. You are also helping so many people at once. I appreciate you very much. And she is the counselor that I understand is being let go. I have a I'm I have a couple questions. Um and I know it's a little rhetorical right now because you can't comment, but um are you board members looking at the raw financial data? Um and when you do, are you looking at the programs and staffing that are essential in the essential category and over here in the more a little bit above essential and enrichment? because I don't understand how you
042can with these cuts that are on the table have already been passed. This budget shortfall requires that you think outside the box. Um, I think that these cuts are in direct opposition to your board priorities and that these entire essential services, um, it's shortsighted as has been said before in this current climate with what's happening in Minnesota and ICE. They need this counselor. They need EL. They need intervention. Please go back and find if even if you can find a handful of jobs to save. It makes a huge difference. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> Is there anyone else who wishes to address the board at this time who's not previously spoken? >> Right. Thank you all for your your comments. Next we have our superintendence updates. And first Mr. Pinkerton with our
043business and budget update. >> Um, as the the YMCA talked about, we've had some recent meetings, uh, meeting with the Y, meeting with city of Sispo as well as city moral bay. Um, Stephanie Shepard working with our TK teachers, developing a new schedule for next year, those types of things. And, um, we really do have a great relationship as described today. And we are very fortunate to have those three groups that do a wonderful job with our kids. super fortunate. So on that behalf, um just heard today got a thing from school uh school services that um the bipartisan uh deal has been reckoned I guess with uh the federal government. So that's a good news in terms of 2026 and title one funding um title one, title two, title three, title four, those types
044of things. So that's a positive something that of course has been hanging over district's heads, you know, every year it seems like as we go through this process. But because of today's deal, at least for the the fiscal year 2026, right, through December, um it it sounds like those funds will be appropriated and will come to the school district. So, good that we don't have further cuts to have to deal with in the future. Um did attend a capital advisor. They give a budget update once we get more information from the governor's budget, kind of what's happening um with that. Um nothing really has changed in terms of our budget situation other than the potential of some one-time funds. So we'll see how that pans out. Um we'll learn more may revise um when the
045governor come comes out and kind of adjust the budget. Um the governor has come in kind of a little bit higher than what the legislative analyst office who wants actually to be more conservative with the budget. they're seeing outy years in terms of the state deficit um coming forward and so they're concerned about that. The LAO is um so we'll see again how that pans out. The biggest concern is really because the stock market has been so doing so well that's been a major contributor to the state budget and why why the state budget has done well over the past year. Um any type of bubble any type of um decline in that one revenue source um would be pretty detrimental to the to the entire state. Right. Right. So, that's something that again they're
046concerned about, worried about. Um, all that said, that the market's been good over the past year. That's been positive, right? So, um, the governor also is looking at potentially taking some money out of Prop 98. So, roughly five, six billion dollars, um, and trying to divert some of those funds on the non nonprop 98 side. Um, and that's something that of course CSEA, you know, our teachers union, all the unions, um, CASBO, state superintendent, school board, CSBA will all be fighting, um, to try to make sure that that money is put back into the Prop 98 side of the budget, um, as guaranteed. Um, and so we'll, again, there's a lot of politics, a lot happening right now. Um, and so we'll see how it kind of pans out over the course of the next
047few months as the legislative uh, session, you know, kicks in and and as as we move forward on the budget side. Mr. >> Yeah. I I one thing I I as I understand it, the governor's proposed budget maneuver, not only would it take5 billion dollars out of this year's Prop 98 funding, but that reduces the amount of Prop 98 funding every year forward. So, I think people should not forget that either. >> Yes. >> Good evening board. Um, you know, we are in the thick and heat of mock trial season and Mr. Scaldy uh sent a lovely message about his our our mock trial alumni from Moro Bay High actually had met up at UCI's college level competition and he sent photos to us um celebrating how tight those mock trial you know friends are
048as they spread out across the country to colleges and then met back up together. Also, the Mororrow Bay High mock trial team got to go to the Bay Area Bash up in San Francisco, Berkeley, actually, and had a fantastic showing there. Um, we had a fantastic arts and education mixer at the St. Louis Abyspo Museum of Art. Um, Miss Shepard and the elementary principles and Dr. Prader and I got to meet with the museum team to talk about how we could strengthen the connection between all of our elementary students, the PTAs, and our principles. And we had one PTA mom there. Um, but as they shared, if you if you get a youngster to be a museumgoing individual as a child, they will continue on into their entire life. So, I want to encourage everyone
049in our community to go visit the fantastic St. Louis Abyspo Museum of Art. They have two fantastic exhibits going right now. It's free every day. Um, so we're excited about that. I've been participating in collaboration with the slow YMCA. You already heard about the foundation has some ongoing work as we're looking to plan for next school year and and making some changes there as well. Um, working with Dr. Puchia and Mr. Pinkerton on negotiations with our SLCTA team. We held our second LCAP parent advisory committee which you're going to hear more about tonight. Um but we had a great showing on Zoom, conducted several site visits, met with concerned community parents um individually. Uh attended the common ground meeting with Dr. Prader. Also the student senate meeting was fantastic going over youth truth data. Um
050St. St. Louis Abyispo County Office of Ed collaboration on developing our direct assistance plan. So St. Louis Coastal has been identified as requiring direct assistance from the county related to our foster youth group. They were red on the dashboard. That means they are not progressing and not making growth in two areas, suspensions and in chronic absenteeism. And so you're going to be hearing more about that in the coming year. um also conducting mid-year evaluations with both my director team and principles throughout our district. And we had two meetings of the AI task force. Uh the kickoff meeting with the group at large where we did reading articles kind of introducing ourselves directing redirecting ourselves to the vision and mission of the school board as well as reviewing the tech plan that was developed last school
051year. Um and then the second meeting was a parent panel. We invited six different um parents that work in the AI tech industries to speak to the AI task um panel group and it was a really productive, incredibly interesting evening. And I can't thank the parents that sat on the panel enough for their time. And we're continuing that dialogue through um some Google information, Google Docs, so the the questions and answers can continue even though the parent panel has ended. So, lots of exciting happening in the ed world. >> Yeah, I just want to insert myself between uh Lisa and Ryan's presentation. I just want to update the board. Um, over the weekend I received uh a letter from uh Cara Woodruff, who's a uh basically Senator Leairard's point person here on the Central Coast.
052And that letter from John Leair was really directed to um members of our city council in St. Louis as well as um perhaps even everybody. Um and in that letter, I just want to highlight a couple things. One is uh Senator Leairard made it very clear that he is actively interested in developing legislation to bring back unitary tax here to our county, specifically calling out our district as being um the agency that was um most notably impacted. And um and so I so he made it very clear that this um that SB846, Senate Bill 846, left out a provision for keeping local entities uh whole when the plant was extended from 25 2025 to 2030 and the governor signed that into law. And so he made it very clear in this letter that he is
053interested in writing the SB846 wrong, if you will, and making it right, uh, by legislating a funding mechanism um, for 2026 to 2030. Now, I want to differentiate that from the recent coalition letter that came from our county and multiple cities around us have signed except for St. Louis Abyspo. Um, but I think we're splitting hairs here and I just want to be real clear upfront and publicly about that because I did engage in a willingness to participate as superintendent in that coalition because I want to be make darn sure our district's at the table when these conversations are being held. And um so Senator Leairard's uh letter made it very clear that he is not talking about extension, the 20-year extension in this legislative action from 2026 to 2030. Okay. He made it clear
054that the the funding mechanism from 2026 to 2030 needs to be resolved and I couldn't agree more. Post that mechanism being approved and hopefully approved by the governor and signed by the governor this spring. We then he then can begin negotiations for rellicensing at an extended period of time, which then would keep those revenues going for as long as the plant remains open. Does that make sense to everybody? So, super positive news and I'm super nervous about how it's all going to work out, but I want you to know that I'm paying very close attention to these details and um they're very important to us for the very reasons you're hearing tonight from our our um our employee groups who are in the trenches working every day with kids. And so, this revenue um really
055should have been resolved. this this whole thing should have been resolved back in 2022 when SB846 was signed. Um and so this is important to us and um I will keep you posted as I learn more and um I will be very active on that front. Thank you. >> Thank you. Right. Um Mr. Pinkerton, measure C update, please. >> Yeah. So, we'll be meeting with the board for the next study session at Sunshine Elementary School, reviewing the kind of construction that's happened so far. We'll do an update on each project as well as a budget overview, kind of get the board caught up. It's been a while since we've done that with you. Um, and then lastly, if you've driven by PB, the walls are coming up. So, it's kind of an exciting to to
056see that kind of next next phase, right, of construction there. So, we're we're excited about it. Thank you. >> Right. We will move on to the discussion action portion of our evening and beginning with 8.01 the LCAP uh update. Miss Yamashida All right, good evening board and community. Um, I am here with uh Miss Shepard to give you an LCAP update. This uh presentation is going to have two parts. The first part is related to the feedback that we received from our educational partners, meaning our parents, our staff members, and our students. And the second part of the presentation is going to inform you and our community about some of the best practices research in the area of closing the achievement gap and intervening with students. And as we move forward in designing the intervention
057programming and planning that we know um everyone is concerned about related to the budget cuts, we're going to be using this research as kind of our guiding center as we make choices moving forward. I'd like to remind everyone what is the LCAP. The LCAP stands for Local Control and Accountability Plan. It's a required plan annually by the state of California, but it's written in a three-year cycle and then updates in year 2 and year three. Um, this is an opportunity for the school district to share the story of how, what, and why we have programs and services to meet our students needs. And specifically the LCAP is to address the socioeconomically disadvantaged students, students that are English learners or long-term English learners and foster homeless youth students as well as students with disabilities. So as
058we write the plan and respond to the goals, they are going to be focused on those student groups. I'd like to highlight though that although this plan is about $7 million we're talking about, these are not the only things we do in the school district to address our student needs. Our we we do lots of things outside the LCAP funding to provide for those students. You jump up when it's your slide. I don't remember. Um, so this is obviously a year-long process to remind the board and the community where we've been. Back in September, we started to collect our parent advisory committee recruitment. We started to prepare our survey. We sent out family communications and flyers. In October, I created what we call the LCAP road show. It's a video presentation in English and Spanish
059that's posted on our web page for community. It was also shared at the secondary and elementary staff meetings. Um back in October I had the opportunity to come and speak with you at our first LCAP presentation and at that time we were sharing our plan for outreach. October 9th, I got to attend the DAC meeting and actually present to our district English adver advisory council. So those are the parents of English learners across our district exactly um how we were going to go about the LCAP uh plan development and seek their feedback and input. Uh we held our first LCAP parent advisory committee a couple days later in October and you can see the slide deck and agendas there but essentially we were again reviewing what our general goals were and getting feedback on what
060the goals were and sharing the plan for feedback. A major change um this year which we kind of grew on from last year was embedding the LCAP questions in our youth truth survey because we know students and families get survey fatigue. We know that we have great participation in our youth truth surveying and so this year because of a greater timeline we were able to include um staff, students and families all were able to engage in the survey through the youth truth. Um if you were not a student, staff or family to get access but still wanted to provide feedback to our group and we did have about 16 people participate this way. We had a a Google form that we created and there was a QR code on our web page. And then as
061I mentioned uh just the other day we held our second LCAP pack meeting. And then tonight is our board presentation regarding the feedback we've heard. And next board meeting when you'll see us, we're going to be giving a detailed report not on the new plan we're building for next year, but instead a progress report on our work this year. So one of the critical pieces of LCAP design is that we are required to gather input from across our schools. And I mentioned already um our approach was to have these groups take it through the youth truth portal and then our community members who didn't have access in that avenue could take it on a Google form. And I'm super happy to share that we actually had huge participation. her turn with f more than 5,000
062responses. Good evening, board. So, I have the pleasure of going over some of this data and the visuals that we've created to help represent what our respondents and our educational partners shared with us. So, as Miss Yamasha shared, um we had about 5,500 respondents. Um, I'll provide some historical context in just a second to show how much of a gain it is in comparison to years past. Um, this is in part to that survey approach of embedding it, but there were other details within that such as ensuring that staff had the opportunity to fill out the survey during a PD time or a meeting time that increased our participation this year. We also expanded the um number of secondary students. So, we had kind of tried out over the last two years what it might
063look like if we had certain groups such as students in AVID, students in leadership, and this year we open it up to all of our secondary students. So, that's why you'll see the big jump and they're the largest proportion of that pie that's up there. So, this is our historical data and the date um span that's referenced on the top in yellow is the feedback that we are collecting in order to create the next year's LCAP. So that's why you'll see 2627 is up there. I do want to highlight that we more than doubled our total number of respondents. So if we go all the way back to 2122 when we were collecting that data, you'll see we had about 641 respondents, a little bit more the next year, a little bit more the next
064year, and over these last three years, we've really seen huge gains in the total number of um individuals. So we see that as a good thing because we're amplifying the voices of our students as well as our community. So this is a breakdown according to our subgroups that we really want to ensure that we're serving within the LCAP itself. And so what you'll see is that our students with disabilities, that's that SWD, we had from our family group, 249 respondents that said they had a child that um is learning and has an IEP in school. Underneath that, you'll see SED, our socioeconomically disadvantaged subgroup. There were 103 families of those students that responded, 26 for foster homeless youth, eel 137, and then are there are other families who do not have a student within one
065of those subgroups or categories. We had a little over 1,000. You'll see that we're still disproportionately um pulling from our non subgroups or non um student group families. And so we want to continue to work towards more involvement from our families, from our subgroups. So as I want to orient you on this slide, so I'll take a little bit longer on this particular slide and then we'll pick up the pace a bit. Um I'm going to start first with the legend that's in the upper right hand corner. And so you'll see the same numbers from the previous slides around the number of community members that responded. That's in parenthesis. That's 16. and community is going to be represented with that teal color. Staff, we had a little under 600. They're going to be represented in
066these bar graphs with the navy blue. Students are yellow and our families are going to be a lighter blue. Excuse me. If you look along the bottom of the bar graph, you're going to see essentially a shorthand of the different options that people were given as they completed the survey. And so from left to right we have enhancing our hands-on curriculum, strengthening teacher expertise within the core curriculum, PD for safe and supportive schools, use of assessment and data and inclusive hiring practices. So this particular slide focuses in on goal one which is rigorous, relevant and engaging instruction within our core. So now to the numbers and the bars themselves. If you are adding up the percentages for the community or any of the groups, you're probably thinking, Stephanie, that's way over 100. What's going on?
067So, this particular graph is actually showing selection rate. So, anyone that took the survey out of the five, they were able to select up to three areas that they believe continue to help our subgroups in particular and that we should continue this area of focus moving forward. And so as we look at that enhanced hands-on curriculum, what you'll see is that um the higher percentages, that higher bar graph indicates broader agreement amongst the different groups and educational partners that responded. So the standout here is really enhance hands-on curriculum far and away. You can see that we have 61% up to 81% of those respondents clicking on that saying yes this is something that matters and makes a difference for students in the subgroups. Um coming in sort of second place if we're to rank these
068would be strengthening teacher expertise within the core. And so those two kind of rise to the top as we look at the feedback from everyone. So I promise I'm going to go a little faster on the next one. We're going to continue to look at goal area one, rigorous, relevant, and engaging instruction. But now we're going to pull out Hi Erica, good to see you. Now, we're going to pull out our family student groups or subgroups. So again, take a look at that legend on the right. You'll see SWD, that's students with disabilities. So, families of a student who has have an IEP, families of students that are identified as English learners, foster homeless youth, and socioeconomically disadvantaged. So, it's fairly similar from what we saw on the previous graph. You can see that we're
069still seeing those same two priorities kind of rise to the top. So nice alignment within goal area one, whether we're looking at the broad spectrum of all respondents or honing in on those student subgroups. So now we're going on to goal area two, which is MTSS or multi-tered systems of support within academics. And once again, we're looking at all respondents. So big picture, you can see across the bottom, strengthen districtwide MTSS academics, strengthening our ELD academic supports and interventions as well as robust robust support for LCAP student subgroups and students that are dual identified, meaning that they may be English learners as well as have an IEP. Those are the three that you can see have the the biggest support for or got the most clicks in terms of continuing to focus on these areas.
070Things that were less um rising a little bit less voted for so to speak were continuing to expand and strengthen our district equity work and implementation and continued AVID expansion. Those two fell a little bit below in terms of looking at those bar graphs. And now still on goal two, these are our family student groups. This one does not quite match up exactly the same. And so you'll see that we pulled out a top three category here. Um you can see that that MTSS academics as well as ELD supports um are at the top and then we have a little bit more um within the subgroups voting for that district equity work to continue. All right, area three. As we're looking at this one right here, um you'll see the district-wide MTSS seal. That stands
071for social and emotional learning, continuing to align our TK through 12 systems around student behavior, ensuring safe and supportive schools, and the next one is refining our chronic absenteeism response systems, and then engaging and educating parents. Um, something that's a little bit fun to look at here is that our students, when we look at all feedback, really felt like refining chronic absenteeism response systems was something that we should be focusing in on. Um, and yet our families and our staff and our community did not have that one as their top three. So, it's an interesting u point of fact. When we go down to our family student groups, you can see um some disparities here as we compare what those look like and where people were prioritizing our work as a district. So Lisa's going
072to recap this for us. All right. So to review essentially for our you know core rigorous hands-on engaging instruction um continues to be a need and something that we hear from our community loud and clear. They want us to continue to focus and work on as well as strengthening teachers expertise in the core curriculums that they're teaching. Not just the curriculum but the core content area they may be teaching in um and or pedigogy related to that. In focus area two, um those top three issues about MTSS academic interventions and strengthening ELD, which you already heard about tonight a little bit, um and robust support for our LCAP students that may be dy identified and have multiple areas of need. And in focus area three related to culture of care and mental health and well-being.
073Um again focusing on MTSS seal which we consider to be kind of the tier one core instruction about having social emotional awareness and well-being of our students which is a little bit different than aligning aligning the K12 student behavior. So student behavior is what our reaction is to unexpected student behavior. So that's kind of the difference between social emotional learning is proactive teaching about emotional regulation, feelings, managing yourself and then responding to student behavior is uh separate from that. And finally ensuring safe and nurt nurturing campuses through training, monitoring and support of our district-wide programs. And that is a continuation of the equity work that we had started a couple years ago, ensuring everyone feels included and safe and belonging in our schools. So when we met with the um LCAP advisory committee on January
07427th, we asked them what they noticed and heard and they noticed there's a common thread of prioritizing hands-on learning, strengthening student supports, and building teacher capacity through professional learning. Um they did note concerns about feasibility of class sizes, program clarity, and the impact of impending reductions. They didn't have any suggestions or changes to our goals. They felt like those goals were addressing the needs are currently exhibiting. And they did have some suggestions for action steps. Um they want us to maintain our current direction but prioritize planning for intervention sustainability and funding alignment. Make sure uh to streamline and more accessible stakeholder feedback collection. So I'll let me speak about that a little bit. When the LCAP survey um in previous years was designed, the LCAP advisory committee wrote the questions that were put into the
075survey and it was noted this year um although we had fantastic participation, there was concerns that there was so much terms and jargon that people may not understand what exactly they were asking for. and that one of our schools, hats off to Seal Smith, they actually held an ELAC meeting to dive into and personally surveyed all of their ELAC members and asked them with some clarifications about what they were wanting to hear and get and and explained it all. And so I think moving forward as we continue to refine our process, making sure that our survey tool doesn't um contain words that are unclear to a person that may not be in education all the time would be important next steps. And then finally, um concerns related to targeted supports for our secondary MTSS programming.
076So, hats off and thank you to all of our principles and our parents and our teachers that provided feedback um through our survey practices as well as at the cap pack meeting at the end of January. It was great. Now, for the second part of the presentation, I know would you let me defer to the board. Would you like me to stop here to ask questions about that part? Keep continue. Okay. So, best practice research and review. So, of course, as we've been talking about the needs to make a change to our current intervention programming, but continue to address the achievement gap for our students furthest from opportunities. Um, in looking at a a lot of uh research, I wanted to share with you as we make some tough choices. One of the top things
077that we know moves the needle for students is targeted tutoring. Let me be clear, when we say targeted tutoring, we do not necessarily mean one- on-one tutoring like you envision an adult sitting next to a kid, but instead it can be in a small group, three or four kids. Smaller group, better. And when we say targeted, we mean targeted to a skill that they are missing, not targeted to a subject area. Um, it needs to be high dosage, meaning it needs to be frequent. It needs to be relationshipbased. So there are a ton of online virtual tutoring opportunities, but it's found that we know learning to be a relational activity and a social experience for many of our learners who struggle. And so it's important while we may choose to employ technology tools because that
078is efficient at some point, it's important to keep a human in the loop and close to the process. It needs to be aligned to grade level content and it has to occur during the school day. When we offer extra tutoring before and after school that is good for those students which can access it but if it is outside the school day by definition not all of the kids can access it. And so it's very important that as we develop our refined models for intervention that we can um make sure that they are planned during our school daytime. And so all of that comes to us from the Stanford scale institute. The next important piece I'd like to share with the board is related to we need to have teaching whole class which is where the
079teaching whole class and teaching small class. We need to teach to where students are and have really structured instructional practices. Um, if we just teach the content that we're expected, like whatever the one grade level standard is without acknowledging gaps and holes in knowledge students may have, some of the students will be like the draanium on the window sill and just like die while the rest of the class is moving on. So we need to ensure that during our structured instruction um there is time for whole group direct instruction activities but there is also time for the main classroom teacher to pro be providing small groupoup targeted instruction time. This is true in secondary schools and in elementary schools. I wouldn't want anyone to think that the things I'm talking about are related to a
080grade level. So that comes to us from a study like a metacognitive meta study from the World Bank group. Also, we know that our classroom teachers um are really the most important lever for closing the achievement gap and improving instruction. And I know Mrs. Rodriguez spoke about the incredible work our ELD teachers are doing in pullouts and AITS are doing in pullouts, which is accurate. But the the strongest lever we have is while the classroom teacher is with a large group of students instructing and helping that be as successful and efficient as possible. And to that end that means investing in and coaching our classroom teachers on a regular ongoing basis is a really important tool. Um, we also know there's been a ton of studies that random one-off professional developments um rarely have as
081big an impact as multiple touch points over the course of the year embedded during a teacher's workday. And so we want to um make sure that we move towards this idea and clarity around what is the teacher's role in teacher coaching? What is a coach's role in teachers coaching? Who is going to be the coach of the teacher? Um what are they being coached on? And all of that work needs to be co-c collaboratively developed between the site administrators and our teachers. But we know this is a multiplier or investment when paired with highquality curriculum and tight implementation of those curriculums. This is from the Annenburgg Institute at Brown University. And fourth, I'd like to speak to the importance of protecting instructional time and removing common barriers to learning. I am most confident that all
082of the beautiful blue shirts behind me will loudly support that instructions to classrooms or student outbursts or interruptions that are distracting to students can can really impede and lose a lot of instructional time. just when the class's momentum might be going in a certain direction. And to that end, um having that clear classroom behavior supports, interventions, reactions to student unexpected behavior is super important. And we also that aligns with the LCAP survey um from our educational partners that they want us to continue to work on this area of behavior management reaction. So by area, particular areas of focus as we're moving forward developing our planning. Um at the elementary level, we know that the right they've got to be reading by third grade. Everything needs to be about foundational literacy skills in K3 with MTSS
083and early intervention. The earlier we can intervene, the smaller the gap stays and we can make a bigger difference there. So with the implementation of our new reading science of reading benchmark curriculum program and our strong MTSS pullout system looking at student data based on regular screenings progress monitoring those students that are receiving pullouts currently is really been productive in the elementary landscape but we do need to keep our focus there according to the Institute of Education Sciences and again um there's more hear about coaching to the adopted curriculum and programs. And so we know continuing to support our elementary teachers in their implementation of benchmark is going to be critical. We are also looking forward to considering a new math adoption per the state of California with the new math framework that's come out.
084So that's going to be another focus moving forward. And then finally, we know that the hands-on instruction and authentic tactile engagement of our youngest learners is so important. And so to that end, coaching also needs to reflect an expectation about hands-on opportunities in our classrooms of our elementary students. in the middle school landscape of research. It was particularly interesting that we were um supported in a lot of the work that we're actually doing with our nextgen programming and that we know math is an area that some struggling students particularly often of these student groups that the LCAP is focused on happens when they can't pass certain math classes and that becomes a barrier to them in engaging in A throughG classes or certain science classes because they don't have the math necessary to do that.
085And the recommendation actually is it's important to accelerate all middle schoolers into algebra, but make sure that you provide them support. So we don't want to create um any kind of you know we want to remove as many barriers and levels as possible and instead offer every child an opportunity to take the most advanced course but then provide the intervention extra support for them to be successful in that course. And again that's according to Stanford's work. There's more about structured and skilled targeted instruction, which goes back to that targeted tutoring idea and model at our middle schools. We're very excited that Lagona currently has a tutorial program in their schedule on Fridays that we hope we possibly can leverage in a more structured way moving forward. Lossos Middle School does not currently have a tutorial
086program in the same way during the school day. And so that's a dialogue and a conversation that we're going to be moving towards and having about how to accommodate that targeted skill instruction at the middle school level. And finally, coaching for any like high need grade level. So if we look at student achievement data related to English language arts, math or science because we have those um statewide ranked and for math and e English language arts, we also have our own progress monitoring star universal screening data. If there's any grade level cohort of students that shows particular struggle, like maybe it's seventh grade English or maybe it's eighth grade science, we can try and refocus the coaching um to that that area because middle schoolers are of course much larger than an elementary landscape. So
087it's more targeted in the support we're giving teachers. And then in the high school level, we found um so research here says that you really need to focus your your tutoring to get kids passing traditional gateway classes. So so for example, 9th grade English language arts is a really important class for all the students to pass because English language arts is a class that's taken all four years of high school. So, as soon as you fail one of the terms, you're you have to do summer school to be able to earn that credit and earn that grade. Algebra 1 is another one of those classes that you have to be able to pass algebra 1 to be A throughG compliant. And you have to know algebra to be able to do chemistry and to be
088able to do physics and a lot of other things. And so those are the quote unquote type of gateway classes that we need to ensure that every student passes when they approach and take that class. And we have to pre-plan what interventions we're going to provide them before they fail the class to help make sure they don't fail the class. And then pre-plan what classes other than summer school we can give them to help them jump over that bar appropriately. And specifically, they mentioned in high school, summer learning is still a targeted strategy to help catch kids up when necessary. And again, we are having great success in our NextGen AVID programming. We specifically had our incoming 9th graders take honors geometry so that they could then get a year ahead in math. and we
089put them in a special cohort with a special tutor help with a special teacher and 100% of them well I should I believe it was like all but one passed with an A or a B and so that is about 25 26 students who were able to accelerate a whole year in math and so figuring out a way that we can really look at the transitions not just from 8th grade to 9th grade but we should also be looking at the transition period from our fifth grades on the coast into LOMS as sixth grade and from our sixth graders into Lagona in seventh grade. And then finally, um a strategy that we know to be super important for our students with disabilities, but it also really helps any student that's trying to access uh curriculum
090is called universal design for learning. And it means that students have kind of a low entry or multiple entry points to learn something. Meaning they can have different avenues. I watch a podcast. I read an article. I watch a video to learn content in a particular given area. And then on the other end of it, they're asked to produce some kind of content to show what they learned. And again they can have multiple avenues to show the the type of learning that they have achieved. So that is a super simplistic version of what universal design for learning is. Um but CAST is the organization that has done a great deal of research around the impacts of utilizing this lesson design strategy and um we haven't done much of that here yet. So in summary, as
091we move forward designing both the intervention programming we're going to do to close the achievement gap as well as our professional learning for all of the educators, including principles and administrators in our system for our elementary landscape. Essentially, it's really important that we get our tier one core instruction right and make sure our MTSS interventions are really tight. If we pull kids out of class too much, then they're missing the core instruction. If we pull them out and they're not there to maybe they're not attending regularly and then they miss their intervention time, that's also not really useful. Um, so that's what I mean by getting core tight core right and our MTSS programming right. And in the middle and high school classes as we move forward, we want to plan and pro we want
092to protect and plan for a student's gateway course success. make sure no one quote unquote falls behind and gets behind the eightball. And then implement um a more universal design for learning in our lesson design so that all students regardless of their skill level can access the core core content during during class time. So before we get to questions, you can have them in a second, but I wanted to remind everybody here the way the process works. So, um, tonight we I'm here to present kind of the building of the 2627 plan. Next month, Stephanie and I and Dan will be back and Katie Ecklund will be presenting the midyear report. So, that's going to be an update. February 2026 um is going to be an update on where we are implementing this year's plan.
093We'll come back to you in again March um to share some feedback and general planning guidelines ideas and then a first draft of the plan will be shared with you all in May after meeting with the LCAP advisory uh committee as well as the DAC team again and then u it'll be brought as a second reading in June. We're required by law to bring the LCAP W plan along beside the adoption of the budget in in June. So those two things always go together. >> All right. Thank you for your good listening. Um how can I help you? What questions? >> First I'd like to go to the public see if anyone from the public wishes to address the board on this. Great. No one. We'll come back to the board. I see Mr. Anger
094and Mr. Banfield. >> So, I have three questions for you. When we talked about the data, um you mentioned that you you were able to get a lot of that you were able to get a lot more participation as the questions were embedded in the youth tooth survey. But one of the things that we talked about as budget cuts was not doing the youth tooth survey. So what are our plans to get that kind of feedback and to get the data that we need in order to plan for our next round of LCAP? >> Yeah. Um well, we are still obviously going to develop that plan as we move forward. I anticipate that it would then if we don't have youth truth next fall because we're shifting to a three-year cycle, we will have to
095revert to a different and separate survey tool. and we could see a drop off in participation. Um, I think the key to youth truth is having students champion the importance of participation and so finding a way for students to champion the participation in the LCAP survey would be critical to our success, but it is an area of concern we'll need to plan for. And then I was curious um one of the things you brought up too was hands the interest in hands-on learning and um one of the the results we got from the youth survey from our elementary school students was that that we weren't offering a rigorous enough curriculum. Do those two things have a nexus? What do you think? >> Oh, interesting. Well, I I yeah pro definitely could have a nexus that
096that schoolwork may be uh feeling boring and not hands-on and so then they also don't feel like it is challenging or rigorous. Um, as I mentioned in my opening statements tonight, I'm working closely with Christine Robertson, the foundation, Katie Peters, um, and I innovate planning for next school year and how we can operationalize bringing back the idea of kind of lead innovation teachers. They used to be called LED teachers. and how to um make room and space and clarity around teachers appropriate opportunities for innovation in those hands-on activities. So, it's kind of um a yes and in that we need to um be tight on our curriculum expectations, but that also means be clear when and where the innovation is still expected to be happening. Um we tried to meld the innovation tasks called culminating
097activities. So, at the end of each unit in Benchmark, there are already hands-on culminating activities. And this year, we've implemented a plan to make those be required activities in benchmark so that there's already a marrying in our language arts program about hands-on and still doing the language arts program. But I think we can do a better job moving forward around clarity at least in the elementary landscape about where in science and social studies those hands-on activities could would should still be be happening. >> Is is that kind of what we're doing at Delmare? >> Correct. Um Katie Peters is working regularly out at Delmare with the Delmare teachers to ensure that works um going on regularly. Also, Sasha um Jefferson, one of our aids was, you know, delivering some of the lessons to allow teacher
098collaboration time to continue to work on that. >> And then my final question, one of the things that that I think is interesting but kind of scary to me is you talked about the possibility of changing our our math curriculum. >> Well, and there's a possibility of changing our math curriculum >> in terms of the state standards, right? >> There would be a whole process. So the state did come out with a new framework for mathematics. They have not yet rewritten the standards, >> okay, >> for mathematics. >> This is just like a warning shot. >> This is a warning shot that new standards would be coming, but it is accurate. The state of California is having their instructional materials review going on this school year. We are not participating in that right now in
099this school year and look to um consider doing it in the probably next school year. Start to explore that as a do we want to is this the right choice for us? >> So obviously, you know, we'll have lots of input if that happens. >> How do we you know just sort of a not a rhetorical question exactly, but how do we make sure that we're not throwing the baby out with the bathwater that there are things that are working now? Um, you know, how do we not make sure that we don't flip into something like, you know, with the old new the old new math, right? Which and then flip back to, you know, how do we how do we keep a consistency in our math instruction? >> Well, I think >> as someone
100who's not a math head, I I'm have an interest in this, you know, >> we're going to rely on our teachers to help us make sure that we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. And any program can can every I would say every curriculum program has strengths and every curricular program has weaknesses and it's our choice to decide which program we want to plug the weaknesses and holes in whenever we adopt a program. Um and we'll work collaboratively with our teachers to help us make those choices. >> Thank you. >> Mr. Sorry, Mr. Bfield. >> Well, I just I just um The question I have kind of dubtales to what Chris was saying about hands-on learning and and how we plan on enhancing that. I'm wondering if when parents give that input, yes,
101we would like more hands-on. I'm wondering what they're thinking of as opposed to what we are thinking of. In other words, did I kind of get the impression that one solution for enhancing hands-on learning is is through that innovation lab. >> Okay. I'm wondering if parents are thinking of that or are they thinking of something else? I think we would need more information from our parent groups and we would need to do some followup with them specifically about what they mean by that based on talking to the parent community as I do as a parent in our school district. Um, and I think we had a great example tonight of teach is doing hands-on learning projects. Um, and I I feel like it's it's an and situation. It is the innovation related to career career
102preparedness and technology, but it can also be hands-on related to gardening and other place-based learning opportunities. So, I wouldn't want to make the box around hand what hands-on can be too tightly. I think it it can be anything that is aligned to standards and rigorous but allows kids to touch and communicate and be related to the world that they actually live in today. >> Had a couple questions on the research section that you presented. >> Yeah. Um, so my takeaway from that was you're saying there's four things that move the needle more than most other things. So was it tutoring, small groups, coaching, don't >> and knowing Yep, you got it. Bingo. Those are the things we need to make sure are happening. >> So K12, >> were you presenting that as kind of new
103findings that we should incorporate or things we've always known that are already incorporated or both? And I I guess I'm I'd love your thoughts on is this a lens through which we should look at future plans or a lens through which we should look at what we're already doing. Does my make sense? >> Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Um I I think that much of the cabinet team would agree that those four things are not new and I started teaching in the '9s. um we know them to be important and successful practices and I think we have those things already happening in really strong pockets across our school district whether it be a certain school or a certain subject area but um they may not be codified or explicit or done all the way across
104our system yet. And so my eye is to um ensure that we talk about these as important um strategies with our entire educator community and our family community as we develop the LCAP moving forward so they can understand the choices and the system design that we're going to make. >> So you're saying those are areas that we're going to prioritize as we look forward and form our programmatic approach. >> Yeah. Okay. And um do you feel like there's pretty good support for those concepts? Like as you as you talk to the broader community um like is there a pretty good consensus that those are good priorities? >> I I haven't had the opportunity to go out yet and get feedback from our our teacher teams. Um so I don't think I could speak to that
105yet. I think any educator would tell you that those are actually some pretty tough things to accomplish. Um, I'm already teaching 34 kids. I already have all this stuff to get through. I can't get I only have 180 days and the book was written for New York that has 210 days of instruction. So, while I would say I I would imagine um that many educators would be like, "Yeah, that makes sense. If my class gets disrupted, it's really hard for me to be teaching." But they also understand how we're required to have fire drills once a month. >> Thank you. >> Okay, Mr. Buckman. >> Thanks. First of all, congratulations on the everinccreasing numbers of participants. It's I I've got to figure we're somewhere in the top of the state at this point. So, congratulations.
106Um you you mentioned this spark. You mentioned that we did benchmarks I think last year and um and some hand that's was some of the hands-on stuff. So I'm looking at the page where it's in summary and in this in summary page are these what would I see here last year if if you in this in summary is it dovetail are we finishing some and moving on >> the in summary um I'm unclear which slide you're speaking to is >> 23 >> yeah this one >> it seems to be the summary >> is this the so what we heard focus area one needs Focus area two >> slide 23 all the way in summary TK through fifth grade sixth grade get tier one core instruction right and MTSS tight >> yeah that's why I was
107wearing my big summary okay >> okay I thought you were showing something else >> and Mark um can you please repeat the question >> yeah so you did you mentioned that some that you're doing better in the uh hands-on in the benchmark that it was something that we saw >> that is one thing we are doing this year differently than in the past Yes. >> And so what would be something else that would be different than what we're seeing here in this in summary. What did we see maybe last year >> in the in summary? It's a little late to be asking this question and I know you probably it would might need more time to look it up. So >> maybe I could get back to you on that. Um I think this summary
108is in relationship to the research I just shared. >> Oh, the research. >> This is not a summary of the LCAP. This is a summary of what I read in the research. >> I thought this was in summary of the research. Okay, great. >> Thank you. Thank you for this presentation. Um I as we went through it, I couple of thoughts just kept occurring to me. Um well, one is that it it seems that education moves back and forth between pull out and push in models sort of like whole language and phonics, you know, it's and so we seem to be doing both. Um, but as we went along, I was thinking, how how are we expecting the classroom teacher to do um all of these best practice things that, you know, in in a
109perfect world, we would love, but we know that we've had to make budget cuts and we know that we've had to um we are in the process of changing our intervention. um plans and programs and I if I were a classroom teacher and I had, you know, 26 28 kids or whatever >> or 33, how how could would I be able to teach the whole class and also do the tutoring and also do the small group instruction and also maintain >> uh you know a positive atmosphere where no one's misbehaving or disrupting. I mean it seems like this is kind of pie in the sky. This is best case scenario. Um and would you agree? >> It is a very tall ask of our educators to do this. If you're an elementary teacher, you have
110to do this for six hours by yourself, like pretty much most of the time. And some of our teachers are doing this with two sets of content if they're a combo teacher and trying to meld those together. Um, that being said, right, this is about striving for the most perfect and most efficient. And I know that our educators all signed up to do this work because they care deeply for children and they love the job. And it is it takes time to be prepared because when it's time to plan for a reading lesson in elementary school, you're not planning one reading lesson. You're planning four reading lessons because there's the whole group lesson you're delivering and then there's the three separate small groupoup lessons that are based on what skill they show they need based
111on the thing. And that's only English language arts. You still have to do the same thing technically for math which is another four lessons. And then you still have to plan your science or social studies activity for the day and make sure that the guests speak. Like it is a lot that we are asking of our educators to design um a rich and robust learning experience for our students, >> which I know is what we want. And and I'm not discounting uh at all the intent of our educators to do the best possible job. I'm questioning the ability given the time constraints and you know in all of the various requirements feels a little overwhelming to me. >> I'm merely trying to share the practices that based on re search seem to I get it.
112>> They those are the things that must happen for kids to grow at different rates because the point is if we input the same thing to all the kids and all the kids grow at the same rate, we still have this gap existing. So we have to give different inputs to every kid to get them to grow different. >> Understand that we need the interventions and and we need the differentiation. I'm just commenting on the difficulty of it. >> Yeah, it's a lot. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. >> Thank you. Thanks for the presentation and um uh thank you uh for allowing me to step in late this evening to my colleagues. I can report that our schools are doing very well in mock trial competition this week. Um at least I can speak for
113the high schools. Um two questions just based on the presentation. um when you were providing some of the feedback that you received regarding the LCAP process um you mentioned uh the desire for maybe less jargon going forward in the survey instruments which makes sense. You also mentioned that CL Smith used a model of walking ELAC parents through the questions and eliciting feedback that way. So my question was was that was that worthwhile? Well, it sounds like it would be and is that a model that we can >> speak >> is that a model that we can use going forward to because you know I'm always concerned about ensuring that we're hearing >> as much as possible from the students that are supposed to be first and foremost um under the LCAP. >> I will say
114we've used this model within our DAC but we have not pushed it out to our ELAC communities. Um our job I think is to remove some of the barriers that we have unintentionally put in place such as the survey window for example was brought up as a barrier because of ELAC elections that are occurring. Um that timeline is right in that same window when we are opening up our youth truth survey and so we do have the ability to shift that and if we can then that would allow them to meet with their elacs and be able to follow a similar model as well. Um same thing with school site councils and other such entities that are already meeting already have parents that um are involved and well connected that can also help spread the
115word. So >> yeah well it sounds like a good model and I hope it's something that we can encourage and support um you know replicated across all of our school sites. And then my other um question was in was related to you know once again we're hearing a lot of support for hands-on learning and of course that makes learning really fun and engaging and keeps students uh interested. Um, so I'm just curious. I know that um the foundation got a pretty substantial grant to develop some hands-on learning with videos with, you know, featuring um local >> Those are called regional skills boxes. >> The regional skills boxes. >> Yes. Going phenomenally well with elementary level students. >> So my question is, are those being utilized in our schools? >> They are. Okay. It's grades um
116K through six. Anybody? Yeah, I think it's K6. Um and they are delivered once a month and it is focused on a particular work sector. I was in the foundation office yesterday and they were building the aerospace satellites that one of the grade levels was going to be doing. >> Good. I just I I was not clear whether I know that they were available. Um, first of all, it's open source, so they're available to anyone who has the website, first of all, which is really great for everyone to know. Um, but they're also, you know, serving local districts outside other districts and out and other counties. I just wasn't sure whether we were utilizing them. >> We are. We we were we're having great success with them. As I walk through school offices, I encourage
117you to do the same. Um, you'll notice sometimes the boxes are piled up when they get delivered, but then they disappear into the classrooms as I'm walking around to different classrooms. Um, I observe the boxes open and out. So, I I mean, we have several teachers here and I see some nodding in the audience that they're they're being utilized. Um, and well appreciated. >> Thank you. >> But it is once a month. >> Yeah. >> And I think the thought is is that once a month to have fun, work collaboratively is probably not enough. Agreed. Yeah. But it's a good model and I and I knew it had been wellreceived but I wasn't clear whether our students were also receiving it. So good. Yeah. Thank you. >> I I just have one question and that
118is um I think that the I was interested in the research. Thank you for citing it. I think it you know behooves any profession to to do our best to keep up with research and and development. So my question is that we're providing our educators with researchbased um ideas and re the best researched in I keep looking at our teachers. I know um with and in order to improve their their um knowledge of their craft. But are we developing then uh professional development opportunities on this research so that they uh is that something we'll look into so that they can then think of how to sometimes research is a little you know up here at this level and our we expect our educators to be able to bring that to on the ground with their
119students. So to have uh talk about and collaborate or learn more about how to how to do that. >> Yeah, I'm developing and working on a slideshow to share with our teaching staff um at each of the the schools. That hasn't happened yet, but that is in the works to do um and through our various communication channels. Again, these research studies I've shared with you here are not like a study. It's a meta study. It's a collection of other studies that are generalizing multiple findings. So none of them are meant to be used really in a specific do this one thing but instead they are kind of general guidelines as I had presented them. Yeah. Yeah. Looking forward to that work. It's more me. >> You get to just stay there. >> Yep. Let's keep
120going. Um, chronic absenteeism, please. Should we should we take a break? >> Okay, awesome. Perfect. All right. Thank you for allowing me an opportunity to speak with you board about district-wide attendance. We know that metrics and data are very important to you as a board to make informed decisions for our schools and school district. Uh Mr. Dowler couldn't be with me tonight. He is fine. Um but he did help participate in developing this presentation along with Deb, my assistant. um and he is our main contact and support for all things related to student attendance. We are particularly focused on chronic absenteeism and that is any student who is absent for 10% or more of the instructional days in which the they're enrolled. So over a school year there are 180 days of school. So if
121you miss 18 or more of those school days, whether they be excused reasons or not excused reasons, you have still been gone from school for 18 days, 10% you are considered to be child chronically absent. This is super concerning because the data shows that children who are chronically absent, one, if you're chronically absent every school year, that's a month for 12 years of schooling, you actually miss an entire school year of instruction. Also, children that are chronically absent have significantly fewer rates of graduation. They're more likely to get D's and Fs and have also suspensions, expulsions. And so this is an at risk factor that tells us students and families might be in need. So the desired outcome in this metric is always to try and get a low rate of chronic absenteeism. So it's
122a little confusing. Um, this is a measure that is measured on the California school dashboard only in grades TK through 8. They do not count chronic absenteeism for high school because they consider your graduation rate to be the equivalent factor of student engagement. And if you want to see what our dashboard indicators are, you can click the link. So in 2324 school year um in the California dashboard you'll see we were as a school districtwide 15.4% of our students was chronically absent. We had actually declined 7% from the year before coming out of COVID. So we had been at 20 something% the year before that we declined to 15.4%. Um, so we were considered yellow, just kind of status quo because it's still a lot of kids absent, but we were moving in the right
123direction. For last school year, which is our most recent dashboard in 2425, we are now in the worst zone of orange. But I wanted to highlight for you that the percentage of kids that were chronically absent is really close to the same number of students. It's 15.7%. And really what the state is signaling here is that we didn't move in the right direction. We just kind of stayed static and that's why we were orange. But particularly concerning are exactly these student subgroups listed over to the right because these are the student subgroups that should be very familiar to you all having just reviewed our LCAP because these are all LCAP student groups and you'll notice that they are significantly different from the absenteeism rates of our students as a whole which definitely indicates that we
124need to continue to focus on reducing our chronic absenteeism in our LCAP planning moving forward. Um but foster homeless youth at 30 almost 35% is almost it's double it's actually more than double the rate of just if you look at our children in aggregate um socioeconomically disadvantaged homeless students with disabilities and long-term English learners are all up in the 20s more than 5% greater absenteeism rates. So to make and affect action in this school year, that is all kind of what we call autopsy data. We can't react or control to any of that data because that data ended in last school year, June. So we try and look at well how are we doing this school year as compared to last school year. So in the school year we're currently in August to December, our
125chronically absent student rate was 13.2. Last school year we were at 14.8 at this same point in time in the year. So it does appear that at this point in the school year we are trending a little bit more 1.5% in the right direction. I want to do better but we are at least trending in the right direction this school year. But you'll see as compared to the uh postcoid years we were up in those 20s like I was talking about. And then precoid traditionally school districts are down in the 9 and 10% range. I don't know that we will ever get back to that 9 and 10% range because we all know lots of children would come to school really sick. Um and I'm not sure that that's ever going to return. So likely
126somewhere between the 15% we're at getting down closer to that 10% is what we're trying to go for. But more concerning is just focusing on those groups that are more than double the rate of everybody else. This is another way to look at this school year's current data. The way to read this across the top is for all of our students, which equals 7,613 students as of December. The number of students that are chronically absent is 1,08 students across our school district. The percentage chronically absent is 13.2 and we were 1.6 better than we were last school year because remember if you get a minus that in good that means you're moving in the right direction. I highlighted in yellow the two groups this year that continue to be of concern because they did not
127move in the right direction like everybody else did and that is our English learners and our foster students. Um, also as I've personally been meeting with principles, which I'll tell you more about in a minute, I'm con particularly concerned about our students with disabilities and their challenges in attending school regularly. That is definitely a theme across our schools. If you break up and look specifically at our middle schools, you'll see Lagona and Lossos combined with,200 students is about 13% chronically absent. Um, but there is a significant difference between Losos Middle School and Laguna Middle School. And that's a pattern that's going to be repeated with our coastal schools having more students that are chronically absent than the city schools currently. This is looking at our title one schools versus our non-title one elementary schools. Um
128I do look at the data specifically by school when I'm meeting with principles, but we were not sharing that school specific data with you today at the elementary level because the groups of students can get very very small down to single digits in some groups. Um, with our with our Title One elementary schools, they were down at 7.4 before the pandemic. Last school year, they were at 12.7. This school year, they're at 12.5. Um, so inching down a tiny bit, but not making that much progress yet. And this was slide was particularly concerning when I discovered that our non-title one schools actually definitely are moving in the wrong direction of increasing chronic absenteeism up to 12.6. So um our key learnings in this data is that for this school year to date we are moving
129in the right direction about 1.6 six is a district. The student groups this school year showing the greatest uh improvement is students with the disabilities is down 1.5. Uh the white student group is down 2.4 and our Hispanic student group is down8 almost 1%. And our student groups that require our greatest focus and resources are our foster youth with a 15% increase this year. Please note foster youth is about 40 students across our school district in total. Um English learners has also a 0.5 increase in the wrong direction. And again we do see a very consistent theme of our coastal schools having higher absenteeism rate than our city schools. So what action steps are we taking? Um, we're obviously reviewing the chronic absenteeism data with all of you monthly in the Friday focus. We also
130shared it and reviewed it with our site equity teams, which is six of our elementarymentaries and all of our secondary schools and they wrote specific uh site equity challenge goals related to small groups of students and their absenteeism. Um, in addition to that, all of the SIPs have goals in them related to reducing chronic absenteeism and increasing student engagement. We implemented this year a parseek attendance dashboard which gives principles access to real time current data on this year versus last year versus student groups. You can drill down to specific student names, which students are already missed 50 days of school. they're irreoverable. Which students have only missed 16 or 17 days of school, which means as long as we can keep them from missing those last two, they're going to stay not chronically absent. And
131then which students are trending in that 10 absence range, which is really when we want to intervene with a family and students to figure out what's going on. Um, in addition to that, I told you Mr. dollar and I are meeting with every one of our elementary schools and every one of our middle schools to go through the specific list of students with the attendance clerk and the principal and tell me about this kid, why are they absent, what's going on, what have you tried, make sure you try this, we'll check back in with you in two months. So, it's a very detailed um process. And then finally, as I mentioned, we are collaborating with the St. Louis Abispo County Office of Education on two different fronts. There is both the direct assistance plan that
132we're required to write because our foster homeless youth are read on the dashboard for suspensions and absenteeism. So, we're doing that work with Melanie Crawford and a school-based team to craft a very specific plan for our foster homeless youth, but we will also write it for the English learners because we see they are moving in the wrong direction. In addition to that, you you know that all of our elementaryaries and our middle schools are also working on the PBIS work with the county office of education called the social emotional behavioral teams. And the most effective way to change attendance is intervening for attendance just like we do for academics and behavior. meaning that you need to have tier one systems in place that all the kids and families get to experience that encourage positive regular
133attendance. And then we need to have developed tier 2 interventions for small groups of students and families to experience when they get to that like 7 to 15 range of absence. And then we need to have very intensive tier three types of interventions that are very specific plans related to specific kids and specific families and intervene at a tier three level. And so our PBIS teams as they're writing their tier 1 and tier 2 plans, we don't have anybody officially working on tier three yet, which is why Chris and I are the coaches for tier three planning and intervention right now with our with our principles. So, we're very hopeful that all of those efforts will have a big effort. That is all I have. What questions do you have? Okay. First, I'll go to
134the public. Anyone on this topic? Right. We'll come back to the board. Any questions? I Okay, go ahead. >> Yeah. Again, I'm so happy to see the advances and I'm really happy to see Parseek starting to be used to its just full capability getting down to that single student. I I'm just really excites me. Um I I'm going to just So this will be the first year where parents are not threatened with fines or jail, >> correct? >> And so laws have changed. >> So I'm wondering whether that's actually going to be have a good effect. If I was a parent, I'd be kind of scared to come in and say, "Gee, teach me about chronic absenteeism because I want to go to jail." Um, so I'm hoping that there's going to be some kind
135of good good effect from that. Did your gut tell you anything? >> I think that we are still in the landscape of shifting educators understanding about their role in getting kids to school. And I believe that formerly the understanding was this that it's a parent's job to get kids to school and that has shifted in the landscape of California Department of Education to very clearly land on it is the school's obligation to get kids to come to school. And many of the conversations I'm currently having with our principles is exactly related to that idea of sending a letter is something that's important that we document that we notified parents that their child has an attendance problem. But that very rarely addresses the underlying need or barrier to the child coming to school. And so that
136needs to be seen as the first step of engagement, but by no means resolves the issue. And instead, the educators need to be asking probably the child, >> why aren't you coming to school? And some of the interesting stories I've heard lately from our principles include, well, when Ros's out, her friend Susie doesn't want to be at school with her bestie, so she doesn't come either. Um, some other interesting stories. There's a lot of still fear around health concerns. A lot of my child is sick. My child is sick. My child is sick. Well, maybe they have an illness that needs medical attention. Maybe they're having an social anxiety and they need counseling support and peer support help. Maybe they're having academic performance anxiety and they need academic intervention. And no one is more powerful
137than again these friends sitting in the blue shirts to connect with the students that may not be coming cuz I think in my experience often times if children want to come to school they get their parents to bring them to school and if a child doesn't want to come to school they will find a way to keep their parent from getting them to school. So really, we need to be focused on if someone's not coming regularly, what's the barrier to them not coming regularly? Why don't they want to be here every day? And how can we change that? >> Thanks. And my second question is, um, appreciate working with the county office of education, but as I did some research, there are districts in the state. >> Yeah. >> That have improved their chronic t
138chronic absentes at 62% 51%. Yeah. Um, San Miguel in our own area is 11%. Los Nettos is one of the one of the double digits way up there. So, I appreciate our county office, but have we made any outreach to some of these other they certainly outreach to us when they want to start a student senate? Um >> yeah, we we have been um both connected again to the chronic absenteeism network through the county which would include San Miguel as well as lots of uh research and state programming information. It's there's a little bit of challenge um that we have related to again our funding sources and statuses because many of um I read a fantastic article about Fresno I think Mr. also maybe had sent it to me, I don't remember. That was related
139to like putting washing machines in every middle school because kids weren't coming cuz their clothes were dirty, which is a great idea. Um >> I have a used washing machine. >> We do not currently belong to any of the community school grants because we don't qualify. We do not currently re right we we have the funding for although 44% socioeconomically disadvantaged feels like a lot to St. Louis Coastal compared to many of the other communities up at the 90s we we are not getting the same kind of funding or resources that they do for that kind of thing. So we are utilizing um the resources again Mr. dollar and I and the LCAP and Stephanie and Dan and we're trying to use the resources that we have available to us. But yes, we are definitely
140staying a breast of all the movement in the state as a whole. >> Okay. And so overall, I just applaud your work and again I applaud just pushing Parseek. I knew it was there. Thank you, >> Mr. Anger. >> So I was just curious speaking about community schools. I I think I I was just wondering is it possible for Pacific Beach to become a community school because clearly what is it 75% of their students are considered uh you know low lower low socioeconomically your socioeconomically disadvantaged students >> would that that of all the schools like immediately rises to the top and I think the students there >> would probably benefit from the community school um model more than just about any other school given the high need for that kind of support for students who
141are living by them, you know, living on their own, all employed, you know, things like that. There's something. So, so if I was to take away one thing from your >> your presentation, it would be that it's going to almost be to be impossible to close the achievement gap at a level we want without dealing with chronic absenteeism. Is that correct? >> I definitely agree with that. If the kids aren't here to learn, like that's step one. You got to get them here so they can learn. And then our beautiful teachers can take over and do the teaching and learning stuff. But if the kids's not here to access it, they're going to have a hard time. Thank you. Um just a couple of things. Uh if if I understood you correctly, we are not
142tracking truency at the um high school level because >> we are we have that data. The state of California does not track that as a metric on the California school dashboard. We do still SARB truency stuff with the high school level students. >> Yes. And then also I would just throw in there having been the the child of a single parent um that one of the reasons for truency I think may be that you have a single working parent and a sick there were eight years between my sister and myself. So if she's a sick first grader I am probably staying home so my mom could go to work. And that is true I think for a lot of families. >> Well, I also heard um you know a really challenging story today of a
143Monarch Grove student who is of a split family home and he always misses school on, you know, one parent's day. And I imagine it's because that child could very well be missing that person, right? If I only get to see my mom half the week as a child, a six-year-old, I'm probably going to prioritize and do whatever I can for very good reasons to be at home with my mom on the two days I get her. So, um, these are really complex uh, deep challenges for families and students that takes very careful, right? These aren't this isn't going to get solved with spreadsheet numbers, which is exactly why Chris and I are meeting with every principal and their secretary and talking about every kid on the list. And it's really the school teams like IEP
144teams for every one of those children who are in the atrisisk category need to have an IEP to document are they in the right program? Are they getting the right supports? Are they making progress towards their goals? All of those things need to happen. So unfortunately um it also is not a problem that's just handled by the office. It's going to require engagement from all of our educators that know and adore and love that child to get engaged with the family and the child to fix the barriers >> and rather than taking a punitive approach I guess um >> are are we incentivizing attendance Yes, we are we are trying to do schoolwide incentives, classroom level incentives, and for some students like uh single student plans. And we're also doing um losing rewards for not
145attending, right? So, if you offer this is your prize for coming to school every day and if you don't come to school every day this week, this is what happens. so we can get both sides engaged if necessary. These are all ideas and strategies that we apply when appropriate. >> Thank you very much. >> In collaboration with the family >> as we have um take as we continue to take advantage of parseek. I know you can go school by school to see what the attendance rates are just what you do. We don't need to see it at that level. Um, but I'm curious then if and I'm looking at Mr. Black because I know that when he was principal at CL Smith, um, chronic absenteeism was a real sort of a personal goal of yours
146to, you know, your goal was to eliminate it, you know, was to just get rid of it. And I know you had great success. So I'm wondering if if as you identify schools that perhaps are having a greater success with that if if there's an opportunity for collaboration uh between those principles to find out to share strategies and what are you doing and kind of brainstorming thoughts. I would love to get the opportunity to share out actually um interestingly enough at Baywood and Pacheo have our very lowest elementary chronic absenteeism rates. So I know one of the concerns of the board was that with all of the ICE immigration and fear about coming to schools, those two elementaryaries along with teach um have significantly lower rates in the single digits as compared to all of
147our elementary schools. So good work to Pacheo and uh and Baywood for helping support regular attendance. >> Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I think it's just so interesting to share what's working and great um celebrations to those schools that are have made it a a goal because I agree I know during co a great concern was you know we need kids in school we need um kids sitting at at their in their classrooms and um the now that now that we have that it it has been a change since in our postco era of how do we get back to those numbers? >> Um, so I I didn't realize you've had it by by site and I appreciate your but could if it's all right could if you haven't done it already. Could you send it
148by site so we could see the chronic tanks? >> Do you want this here? It was in the SARCS. Every school SARC has a page that had their overall attendance and broken up by subgroup if you would like would you like this year's data up to date where we're at? >> Sure. Won't make me look so foolish. >> Okay. And I I'm just wondering I that's fabulous for Pacheco and and Baywood. And I'm wondering if you have any idea what you might attribute that to. Friday, >> fun Fridays to get kids there. >> Um, Yeah, I I I think that we will I will provide an opportunity for Pacheco and Baywood to update the board on what specifically they think the due to >> to hear what's they feel is working for them. >> Yeah,
149I can do that. Thank you. You you may sit down. All right, we are moving on to the um consent agenda. Please let me know if you need anything if you'd like to have anything pulled. Uh 9.01, approve revisions to board policy 6162.5, student assessment, second reading. 9.02, approve revisions to board policy 5131.9, academic honesty, second reading. 9.03, 03 approve revisions to board policy 3550 food service child nutrition program second reading 9.04 approval of minutes 9.05 approval of warrants for January 2026 and payroll for January 9th and January 30th 2026 9.06 Measure C22 approval notice of completions 9.07 07 approval of furniture and equipment requests. >> Please pull that >> 9.07 >> 9.08 approval of purchase orders and cow card purchases 9.08 >> 9 January 7 to January 27 2026 >> 9.09 approval of certificated
150and classified personnel item. So, if I could have approval from 9.01. >> I I move approval of items 9.01 to 9.06 and 9.09. >> I'll second. >> Okay. Motion by Mr. Anger. Second by Mrs. Roger. Mr. >> Yes. >> Mrs. Roger. >> Yes. >> Mr. Buckman. >> Yes. >> Mr. Clawson. >> Yes. >> Mr. Banfield. >> Yes. >> And I am a yes. So that carries 70 9.07. and Mr. Booker. >> Yeah, I'd like to combi combine my comments on 9.07 and 9.08. Um, as I looked at these, um, I'd like to give a big handout to staff and to the parents. Um, there's when I added this, it's about $40,000 worth of new musical instruments. And, um, I was I was so impressed that we're moving forward. And, um, Mr. Pinker, can can you
151tell me where that money came from? Is that from the the $100,000? >> Yeah. So, a couple things. So, no, it did not come from that those funds. Um, >> so again, as the board heard in back in December, right, that there were some issues with musical instruments. So, we reached out to each of the four um well, Mr. Cooch does LOMs and Lambs. Um, and what we heard back basically was at LOMS and Amoro Bay High School in terms of instruments. You again, my my concern was if we have broken instruments with kids, we need to solve that problem right now. So, um, in Loms and Lamb or LOMs and Mororrow Bay hearing back, they were fine. No issues. Um, I did finally hear back from Mr. Coochie about Lagona. And so, the instruments
152that you'll see tonight, the clarinet, the uh the tuba, the bassoon, the um, and really the Tony um, concert Tony ride set of five. So, those were all things that he got back to me. And so, we looked at a few different vendors, got those forward. um we use the same funding mechanism like lottery funds that we use for buying purchasing books or you know other things that um that kids should have and so I'm each week I reach out to solo high and trying to get their list of broken instruments so we have continued that reached out to Mr. enough again this week, right, to get that information. So, um, we'll be seeing one hopefully in the future here soon, uh, to, you know, with St. Elizabeth High School. So, long-term goal is that
153they're going to put together inventories of all their instruments so that we get in front of that aspect of it. Um, and then that will be kind of on the side and then their their actual functioning budgets that they use each year will be something else that's developed, right? So, we'll kind of treat instruments like we do with books or any other type of equipment that kids need, right, for their classes. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'd like to move approval of 9.07 and 9.08. >> I'll second by >> Roger. Mr. Buckman. >> Yes. >> Mrs. Roger. >> Yes. >> Miss Baltadano. >> Yes. >> Uh, Mr. >> Yes. Mr. Banfield, >> yes. >> Mr. Clawson, >> yes. >> And I am a yes. >> So that's for both both of those. >> Um,
154all right. Next on our agenda is uh any uh any advanced agenda items? >> Mrs. Schffer. >> Yes. >> May I insert a question here for the board? Yes. On this topic? >> And I'm I'm glad uh Mrs. Baltadono is with us now because I didn't want to mention this earlier, but I have a request. There's a conflict on our annual board workshop in June. Um, it was originally scheduled on Thursday, June 11th. And what I'm asking the board is would you be available on Tuesday, June 9th? So, that's the week after graduation. Um, it's a Tuesday. There's no board meeting, but um but it would allow for um for us to make sure those conflicts the majority of those conflicts are addressed. But I don't want to plan it until I had a chance
155to ask you if you were available on that particular day. And it's a it's a full day. So think 8 to three um 8 to 4 if that's um if and I Yes, I know Mr. Aner. I know. Um but um >> I I can't commit at this time. I need to check my calendar. >> Okay. Okay. So I have put it out there and I'll circle back in Friday update to remind you guys. Please let us know next week if you can um so we can get that in in because that impacts our admin follow-up retreat um which we'd like to do in that week as well before our administrative team finishes for their summer. Right. Thank you. >> Yeah. >> All right. That's that's why I brought it up to you. So, thank
156you. >> Um and then uh reports by board members. >> Mr. Banfield. >> Real briefly, I did attend part of the um Miscast Newsies. I wasn't feeling so hot because it was because of this, but it was it was amazing because they had only had a couple of days really to pull it off, right? for a couple of weeks and it was just amazing how they were getting their lines. They had a screen up and you could tell that, you know, some of the kids had already committed to memory some of their words, but a lot of them were kind of drifting their looks over to the screen so you could see, you know, what they were getting. But it was just a hoop. It was good. >> Thank you. Um, >> well, um, >>
157I I wanted to talk a little bit about something that Mrs. Baltadano and Mr. Buckman and I did today, and that was the mock interviews at St. Louis Abyispo High School for our AVID students. Um, and and I know they'll they'll have comments about it, too. But, um, I I and Mr. on and interviewed four four of probably just you know all of our students are amazing but but each of these students was was absolutely in incredible doesn't doesn't do them justice. Um these are these are students that have overcome um that have overcome barriers in their lives. These are students who who are the who are absolutely the American dream. They are students whose parents came to this typically came to this country with the with the sole idea that they by that being
158here would give their students opportunities that they never had. One of our students talked about how her parents never finished third grade. And and this is a this is a woman. Um all of all all of our students had had high aspirations. All of them had university had applied to universities. Um I think most of them had been accepted to universities. Uh they they truly were there working hard because they knew that they had opportunities that their parents had never had and that their parents expected them to have. It it was it was an amazing absolutely amazing experience and and g gives me great hope for our future. >> Mr. >> Yeah. Um I just want to I I want to follow up on what Chris said. Um it was it was amazing. Um kids
159that were so poised and and confident um that went through this nervous process smiling. Um, and I have to tell you, I I was talking to Mr. Anger today and it was like what would be kind of just cool would be able to see if we could do the interviews before Kyle got them and then could do them after and just see the growth, but I can just I just can't imagine the growth that these kids went through. Um, some of the stories some of the stories the backtories they could have gone to chronic absenteeism I guess would be one way to say it. I have another statement to make and um I I just I have to say this. um the news today. Um the parents in in Minneapolis now after seeing what happened
160on the streets and being treated as if they were a an enemy of the United States and and losing to of our our citizens um and being shown up there, ICE has now gone to the school sites. Um and I I for one can't believe it. I want to send a shout out to the staff at those schools and to the parents that are coming around those kids. >> Can I just share one more thing? After after we did the interviews, um I was given a tour of the library at San Los Bispo High School and and and and I'm a library guy, you know, as you all know. I worked my way through college in the library and the librarian has organized the library in a way that is completely studentfriendly that showcases books.
161She's there to to guide kids uh toward books that will help them with their lives and books that reflect their lives. It's it's it's it was it was also just a really wonderful thing to see. >> Thank you. Um Mr. Buckman, Mrs. Baltadono and I had the opportunity to attend student senate and um and that was really wonderful and I just want to end on a high note that um the there was the presenter from student from youth truth and then there was another woman who also was with youth truth and I don't know exactly what her her story was if she was observing the presenter or just their learning but in any case. I had an opportunity to speak to her and she said that she had attended uh student senates in North and
162Southern Northern California and Southern California and she had never seen students so engaged. So, and that you know that was also my impression. Our kids were really working, really interested, really considered that what they came up with was going to be it wasn't for drill. It was going to be implemented and um and I'm I'm so appreciative that Dr. Prader instituted student senate and that it has continued to live and thrive over the last I don't know eight years perhaps nine years. So hats off to student our student senators and that's my report. >> Thank you. It seems that we're ajourned. Thanks for coming. Thanks for sticking with us up there.