001okay president proctor go ahead good evening everyone today is august 18 2022 and i want to welcome everyone to the san antonio foster city school district board of trustees meeting calling the meeting to order at 5 31 p.m we'll go right into item number two two a flag salute please stand and join me for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we will do roll call now um trustee watkins here trustee corzo here and trusty chin here and i'm also here we'll move on to item 2c approval of the agenda for tonight's meeting to approach tonight's agenda second thank you trustee watkins for the motion trusting chin for
002this second um all in favor please unloot and say hi hi okay that's all four of us um we can move on to item 2d which is approval of the minutes um 2d1 is june 9th and 2d 2 is june 23rd i motioned to approve the minutes for june 9th and june 23 2022 a second thank you trustee corzo for the motion and trustee welcome to the second all in favor please and say aye hi okay if you want to proves we will move on to item 3a public statements related to non-agenda topics the san mateo foster city school board cannot act upon any matter that has not been included and publicly posted on the agenda except under limited circumstances as permitted by law the board may refer matters raised in this forum to staff
003for investigation and or action where appropriate please limit your statements to three minutes and we have a handful we have one two three four five people in the audience here would anybody like to oh okay then um peter can we please go to zoom where we have 25 participants absolutely if we if there's anybody in our zoom audience that would like to make public comment please use the raise your hand functionality in zoom now i'll call upon you one at a time in order and you'll have three minutes to address the board and as a reminder again this is for something that is not covered on the agenda for this evening first we have julie julie go ahead yes awesome oh hi my name is julie flores and i'm speaking on behalf of the teachers
004at bearsford elementary school earlier in the summer was brought to our attention that our beloved custodian mr jorge would be involuntary trans involuntarily transferred for the school year and after some pushback from some parents it was decided that this would be revisited for the 2023-2024 school year and i'm just bringing this to the public's attention in case other schools feel the same way about their custodian um mr jorge has been at our school for the past 11 years during his time there he's formed relationships with the staff the teachers the parents the families and most importantly the students he's usually the first person to say hello to the students and families coming onto campus the first thing in the morning he greets the kids by name and give them a high five to start their
005day off on the right foot is multilingual which allows him to communicate with the majority of the students on our campus throughout the day he's out there at recess and lunch every day helping with supervision and modeling for the students the expectations students are not acting as they should he will redirect them and sometimes if the students don't make good choices they're assigned to help mr jorge at recess and lunch as a natural consequence he never makes them feel ashamed but helps them reflect and make better choices an extremely important multilingual male role model in our campus who is there all day every day and we need him to continue to be there for our students our families and ourselves mr jorge takes pride in his work keeps the school clean and tidy he's not
006just a custodian but he's a major part of the bearsford family he always stops to say hello to ask about what's going on in our lives he tells us about his kids and what's going on with them he shows us pictures and much more he dresses up for halloween and he never shares his costume um what his costume is going to be but it's always a surprise and he never disappoints coming out of the pandemic mental health the major concern for everyone in our district we've had multiple professional developments last year so we know it's a top priority for our district mr jorge is a huge reason for the overall happy morale of bearsberg the kids count on his high fives and joking around about sports the teachers count on his delicious food he brings
007in to share in his kind listening ear as you know the custodian and the secretary are the backbone of any school to take a pizza away that would be absolutely detrimental to the overall well-being of our community at bearsford the whole school has worked tirelessly to create the community that we have we're the smallest school in the district with the high turnover principles that we've had in the past we've worked hard to overcome this and jorge has been one of the constants on the campus kids look forward to seeing he's going to be retiring within the next five years or so we want him at our school for the remainder of that time once he retires on his term then we will happily accept another custodian into our welcoming family but for now we want
008mr jorge for he to stay we've heard that the reason comes down to equity and it's not fair that some custodians have smaller schools than others and again that could be hearsay um but once someone accepts the position that a school don't they already know what they are taking on just because bears for the small it doesn't mean that it's an easy job we're usually the last on the rotation for summers click summer cleaning and by that time many of the custodians are tired or burnt out from cleaning all the other rooms but mr jorge will go through each room ensuring that each teacher's classroom is an acceptable condition um okay that's all i'm gonna say because my time is out but thank you so much for listening thank you thank you julie okay president
009proctor we have no other hands for public comment okay thank you so much item 3b is public statements related to agenda items persons will be called on at the appropriate time so we can go right into item 3c which is the foundation and committee reports anyone have anything to report i can jump in um i haven't been able to attend the last couple of ed foundation meetings but just would take this as an opportunity to highlight the gala that will be on october 21st i believe and if there's anyone that's still interested in getting involved in any capacity we are looking for volunteers we're looking for continuing to look for sponsorships continuing to look for folks that would like to donate to the silent and live auctions so if you know anybody or interested please
010have them or you can reach out to me directly any other committee reports i will just share that the sanctuary task force took a well-deserved break over the summer and will be starting with meetings every two weeks fairly soon i don't have the exact date right in front of me but um i i'm happy to share out when i when i know more things thank you and i'll just report that the equity task force is going to meet on tuesday the 23rd from seven at seven o'clock okay we can go on to either 3d announcements um item 3e is the superintendent report please thank you president proctor members of the board and um community members from san mateo foster city you all can hear me very weirdly but so it sounds like i'm speaking to
011myself here but um just want to comment on my just my pride and my thankfulness to all of our teachers and classified staff members all of our administrators and the wonderful people who work in on behalf of schools in the district and acknowledge that we're six days into school our kids are healthy our campuses look wonderful after a summer of really beautiful um work that took place in terms of installing hvac and numerous campuses all over the district and the many many summer projects that took place over the summer and to just see kids back on campus with their teachers and with their friends is a really beautiful thing to see and it all happens because the wonderful people who work in this district are all working together to make this a reality and i'll
012keep it really short this month but that's my report for tonight thank you for the report um we will move on to item four proposed consent agenda agenda are considered by the board to be routine and will be enacted by the board in one motion in the form listed below prior to the time the board votes on the motion unless members of the board and discussed agenda the superintendent and staff recommend approval of all consent items recommended this time um can you hear me yes sorry about that sorry members of the public that would like to uh pull any agenda items from the consent and make comment please use raise the hand uh use the razor hand functionality within zoom now and i'll call upon you and ask you what specific item you'd like to
013pull okay president proctor we have no hands for the consent items motion to approve the consent agenda one second thank you trusty chin for the motion and trusty watkins for the second all in favor please and say hi hi okay everyone has approved we can move on to item 5a [Music] yes um good evening if you can uh you're open to the public hearing and this is uh we're pleased to bring this forward to you it's a preliminary environmental assessment report for the new school in north central this is the first step we're taking towards construction that site so we provided to the board and to the public a copy of the preliminary environmental assessment report and this is an opportunity for the public to comment on that report to you and to us it's
014our recommendation the board of trustees received public comments on the preliminary environmental assessment report from the new school in north central thank you i'm opening the public hearing at 5 4 p.m would anybody in the room like to make any comments on this okay peter can we check with people to see if they have any comments on this absolutely if there's any members of the public who are joining us via zoom and would like to make comment please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay president proctor we have no hands for the public hearing okay thank you um i shall close the public hearing at 5 4 p.m okay moving on 5b impact of enacted state budget on san mateo foster city school district 2022 2023 budget yes we're also really pleased
015to share this information tonight we have outlined for you and for the public a recap of the new source of funds which were not uh in the uh in our june budget we that you adopted and this is the tail end of june when the state budget adopted there are several ongoing resources which the state has enacted and some one-time resources for us as well they include expanded learning opportunities program funding it's estimated we're going to see about 5.7 million dollars our special ed funding base rate has increased to 820 dollars per ada and we're working with our selfa to determine the actual final impact to our district uh homeschool transportation we estimate that we may receive approximately two million dollars of funding relative to the home and school transportation funds and expenses we experience
016currently uh school nutrition uh there's funding for universal access to subsidized meals we're serving two meals a day and uh i know our staff doing a tremendous job these first couple days of school serving all these kids for child care and preschool the enacted budget provides some additional funding for new slots rate increases then through june 2023 there are waivers available for family fees so those are the ongoing resources and the one-time resources include nine million dollars for a learning recovery emergency block grant and there's a 6.4 million dollar estimate amount or received for the arts music and instructional materials discretionary block grant so will they incorporating these dollars into your first caring budget to reflect these changes will we work with the superintendent staff and our community to break these down as we get
017more details about how they're to be distributed amongst our community and uh i'm looking forward to seeing the the tremendous impact it has for our students in our community so that's a quick update for you on the enacted state budget that changes from the budget that we adopted in june thank you um do we have any clarifying questions okay um any public comment right here okay if there are any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay we have no hands for public comment thank you are there any board comments okay just really quickly um i know patrick you mentioned this but just to kind of reiterate that i think it's really important for us to continue to circle
018back to the community around how we're planning to utilize the money so just just highlighting those conversations being really important as we move forward comments okay we didn't have to vote on that it was just information okay then we can go on to item 6a human resources good update everyone can you hear me okay all right excellent well thank you for inviting me here this evening to report to you on our human resources department um i'm going to go ahead and share my screen with you so that you can see our presentation okay so for today's agenda we're going to be talking about staffing uh some of the challenges that we're facing in today's age uh how we're planning to address those challenges we're going to talk a little bit about our csea and smeda
019partners and of course the work that's ahead for us okay so currently right now we have new hires that are certificated in the amount of 97 which is approximately 20 higher than last year and for management we have 17 which is seven higher than um are hiring last year i would like to point out that these numbers reflect on the certificate in the certificated group a 60 increase in hispanic hiring a 30 percent increase in asian american hiring and a 33 percent increase in hiring of multi-ethnic people so our current challenges for today are that we have recruiting issues and that our our workforce is not currently representing the diversity of our students so we are going to be making a big push to resolve that and i'll explain how we're going to do that
020in the coming slides we are working towards addressing vacancies by using data that is also a current challenge for us and maintaining a consistent group of not just as permanent subs but all substitutes teachers one way that we're going to work on the staffing issues is to start our staffing process very early on we're going to be starting in approximately in november and we're going to be working on you know getting a report on the allocations for budgeting we will be working on figuring out what the student student body is going to be like for the following year and then we will move on into figuring out how many people were going to be hiring for the year and we'll do that early on so that when january comes around we'll know who we want
021to hire and we'll be out there in the community recruiting for those folks so the demographic data this current demographic data illustrates who our students are in the district and who our current staff are in the district um and you can you can see that there is a disparity currently um like i said we're working towards um hiring more staff that more closely match who our student body are so addressing our our challenges we have had we have very fabulous relationships with our smeda and csca partners we have developed several mous so far this year that will help with recruitment and and retention as well as safety of our staff while they're here at work and students i'd really like to thank csca and smeda for being here to help students and to be really
022partners in problem solving you know when they come with an issue they nine times out of ten they've already got a resolution in mind and and the district really appreciates that this that's very very proactive um we are working towards forming more residency programs currently we have a residency program with elder college and there are several opportunities out there that we can partake in to get more residents in into our classrooms another way that we're going to outreach is to san jose state san francisco state cal state east bay and csumb um to create partnerships with them so that we can come to their classrooms and give talks to their students and hand out information about our district and recruit with them very early on as well and that's something that can start in october
023and november when they come back for their classes we have also been at music in the park recruiting and at the food truck in foster city we are recruiting at all of our middle schools we went to the maze days for the middle schools we'll also be going to elementary um back to school nights as well as they happen so that we can really pull in our community to help us with recruiting recruiting their family members their neighbors just putting the word out so that we we do gather more diversity in our workforce and so that they more closely match who our students are so the work ahead we will be aligning all of our work ahead with our strategic plan uh that the board has approved it's a very dynamic plan that is multi-tiered
024and focuses on um making sure that students are getting what they need in order to succeed academically and social social emotionally and um hr's part is to do things like hiring ptosis and you know inclusiontosa math ptosis we've already hired uh five new math ptosis for this school year to serve our students um we have made it so that all of our administrators can be our partners in hiring screening and hiring new staff so they do have access unlimited access to edjoin which is the system that we use in order to screen new applicants and set up interviews um we have um a hiring let's see oh a hiring panel that we are going to be developing with some other partners at our district office and there will be pd that will professional development that
025will be planned all around cultural humility and staffing diversity another thing we're going to be doing is getting together with district other district staff to create a recruitment plan for hr and for the district as a whole so that when we go out to represent the district we are doing so in a consistent and professional manner that draws people into us and so that we can um gather some folks that we're going to be able to retain in in the future so with that i'd like to thank you for your time i invite any questions you might have um and uh thank you again thank you so much um do we have any clarifying questions from the board i just have a question about our permit substitutes uh we i believe a couple months ago
026increased our pay for permanent substitutes and i was wondering if you could tell me what that hour the grade is again or what the daily rate is do we know what that is yes if not you can tell me later yes it's 250 a day and i will add that we currently have 22 permanent substitute teachers and we are recruiting for another 14. we're going to be looking for some more we want our schools to be um well stocked with with substitute teachers thank you i was wondering if you could share um a little bit if you have particular goals and metrics around hiring particularly as it pertains to increasing diversity i know it's a goal but i was just wondering if we had particular metrics around what we're hoping to do over the next
027couple of years and if you could share a little bit more about how we're planning to do that yeah our our goal is really to have our staff reflect who our students are so that when they see someone in front of them either teaching or as a paraprofessional or a principal that they can see themselves in that person there's a lot of research out there that that that shows that that's a very valuable thing for students to see especially in their early years as far as what we're going to do the the actual plan we are going to be getting together in the month of september and have a number of two to three hour meetings to design a specific process for what we are going to do but i can tell you that we
028will not only be going to um you know all the neighborhood universities but we're going to go to places where there are people of color that we can recruit there's african-american associations hispanic associations the cabe conference california association bilingual educators there are all kinds of places that we can go to find professionals of color who want to work with our students and so that will be a priority for us and we will continue that priority until there is not a disparity between who our teachers and peer educators are and who our students are thank you i just had a question about um some of the the recent hiring and um whether we've been able to um hire like more local teachers or i think that would be like an interesting data point right how many
029teachers and staff are we able to hire that already live in the bay area versus you know how far out do we have to go look for for folks and you are absolutely right that is a data point that we will be gathering um in the future i don't have that at my fingertips but i can tell you that one of the barriers for local teachers is the housing cost thank you are there any other questions okay um we can go to public comment anyone in the room okay peter can we check with the people on zoom absolutely if there's any members of the public that have comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now president procter we have no hands for public comment okay then we will come
030back to board comments okay fine i'll go first um i appreciate the presentation i think it's um you know it's shouldn't be controversial to say that we would like our teachers and staff to reflect our student population but it can be right it can be a little bit uncomfortable because um you know that means that there's going to be a shift in the overall demographics of our staff in the long run so i just want to name that but i think we all recognize why it's so important and you know it's it there's like pretty clear data out there that when we have a staff that is more reflective of our students that we can get to better educational outcomes and um so i just want to you know support this this effort and um
031if yeah and always welcome like the conversation from the community and and staff and and um our leadership if if there's ever any like questions or or concerns because it's you know it can it can it can be like a difficult process to go through a little bit um and then i also just want to name that at times right like getting to a place where demographics more closely reflect students is important and you know sometimes it's not the most important thing right the most important thing always is do we have really well qualified educators that can can help our kids get to to where they need and want to be so like a balancing and i'll wrap up with that i mean i'll echo that you know it's been something we've been talking about
032in this district for a while the equity task force for a couple years was focused on staffing i know it's something that's going to be back before the task force in terms of discussion i think it's really important um i think you know a couple of thoughts one one is just as we continue i mean i hope that we continue to get updates on kind of how it's going and how we're actually seeing this change our hiring practices retention right every element of it who's entering the pipeline who stays in the pipeline like who's staying in our district um i also think about just at what levels right so how does our like entry teachers and then how does that match up to who our administrators are right because we know that that across all
033organizations is a challenge and i know you know we've talked about that um definitely something i know that for superintendent is really important and we've seen some of those shifts already um so i'm appreciative of that and look forward to just us really thinking about it's not just blanket lead does this match but where does it match and where doesn't it match and why um there's a lot to unpack there i think as we all know um oh there was something else um oh one other two other pieces one is just um i think important for i would like to know and then i also just think it's important for a community um as we think about kind of when do we plan to gather information or you know stakeholder engagement right so for example
034like sharing with the community about the equity task force is a place where that's going to be discussed are there other points that it's going to be discussed and just kind of laying that out so folks know when and how they're able to engage and then when and how they're going to get information about about what's happening with it i think is just important for folks to know because again i know it's something that's that's been on the radar for a while i know you mentioned um doing a little bit more to track and analyze recruitment and retention which has also been a conversation so i'm appreciative of that and just looking forward to learning a little bit more about that i mean i think the more granular we can get in data and being
035able to have that conversation the better um in terms of you know i know uh we trustee corzo and i in the past have you know met with some of our educators of color around some of the challenges that they've had in in our district and um i just again think it's just important to really break that down right it's working for who and why and and what does that mean that we need to do um so appreciate the conversation and the attention to um [Music] to this challenge that you know we're not unique in facing but we can be unique and actually doing something about it right so thank you superintendent thank you president proctor i want to share one um example from this summer our new director of equity and inclusion nancy bowie
036and myself got invited to visit a program that happens at bearsford elementary school every summer and it's in conjunction with a it's a summer uh enrichment camp that kids from our community the greater community go and do you know a couple of weeks of science and art it's really actually a very powerful program and so we show up and we're there to look at this program and you know see what it might teach us or show us about how to get kids engaged in some hands-on learning but you know as administrators we're always recruiting you know so if you introduce me to anyone in your family i'm going to ask them what they do for a living and try to figure out how to get them on the team so we come across one of
037their employees she's you know young person you know college age so we start chatting this person up and she says i grew up in foster city i went to boutique middle school i went to san mateo high i'm getting my master's degree in occupational therapy i live in the area i want to work in the area and we have our director of special that is in the audience we have years where we can't hire occupational therapists this is a bipark individual who lives in our neighborhood who does something we desperately need so the one thing i want to comment on our new assistant superintendent and john cosmos and what they're doing as a team is they're really taking it to the community they're going to these events to talk to people because so many of
038these one-on-one conversations lead to a conversation that says you know i've always wanted to work in schools i've always wanted to work for the district so i hope in a matter of months when this person graduates from their university we're able to bring the person on board and have our own internal ot who lives in our community knows the families here represents the kids who go to school this is really a very powerful example of how our efforts are dated informed they're certainly regional but also they're super local we want to get in front of our community and talk to folks about working for the san mateo foster city school district um i was just going to comment on the creative ways that we are reaching out to people um and just thank you diana
039for your presentation and i appreciate that you're attending um community events but also um going to schools uh i've can you guys hear me okay um sorry so i was just in a meeting at bowditch it was a parent meeting and three of the parents couldn't come to the meeting because they're working in our schools and i thought that was pretty cool that um that that parents you know if anyone cares about our kids it's parents right they want to um make sure our schools are great and so i think going to back to school nights and all that thing all those things are um are awesome ways to recruit people and being out in the community and meeting local people is another way so i just appreciate all the effort here and um looking
040forward to hearing more updates as as we get through the year and also i i in all of the presentations and all the conversations we have i really love that we're weaving um the strategic plan into everything that we do which is the goal and so i'm glad it's happening so thank you um okay i made a little mistake and we hadn't heard from smita csca and smia so i was wondering if anyone would mind making a motion to go back to item 3c so we can hear from them and have that motion to return to 3c to get our updates one second okay thank you trustee watkins and trustee chin all in favor please say aye bye bye okay go for it i'm sorry um yes so translation announcement also uh we um i
041was actually okay with that because i didn't have anything to update you on this time because we haven't actually met as a chapter yet this school year but i did want to take the opportunity to thank all of the district staff members that came out the first couple days of school to help support all of the sites it was really nice i was definitely cracking jokes about the pics or it didn't happen selfies that were going on but we all really really appreciate all the help um i know heather morgan was at my site along with dr margaret herrera and they were very very helpful and then throughout the day different people were rolling through so we all really really appreciate it the office definitely appreciated it because as you know it's pretty crazy at
042the beginning of school in the offices so thank you all that's all i have hello everyone um i'm also pretty brief today uh my name is kathy i'm new president of smita and i just wanted we also haven't met as a whole a whole group yet but i do want to say uh we've definitely had a good uh first i think almost full week of school now we're kind of getting into the swing of everything i definitely wanted to welcome our 97 plus new teachers and ptosis and counselors and psychologists that have joined us this year um definitely i think um a real uh shout out goes to all of those teachers that were just spent a lot of time this summer going through professional development i know a lot of us got trained either
043in june um there were a lot of us in the first week of august as well as well as putting together our classrooms some of us at the very last second due to all the construction that was happening at all the sites unpacking those boxes and moving back resetting up our rooms right before school started i'm really looking forward to this year uh i think that hoping for more of a return back to school is what we used to know although we do know that school that covet is still there and we want to make sure that we have that safe and welcoming environment for all of our our members and students for sure but really um looking forward to um implementing some of the new things that we have done i know our middle
044school teachers have almost started their first or ended their first full week of block scheduling so looking forward to see how that comes through as well as everything that we will be implementing this coming year so thank you everyone that's all i have i think we can hear you guys can you hear us greetings superintendent board of trustees and community members i'm amanda driscoll principal at baywood elementary and next to me is our director of school leadership dr christian mubafa we're here to represent the administrators of our school district for members of the community who are joining us for the first time tonight you'll notice two administrators at each and every board meeting to deliver a greeting and update thank you amanda uh our association uh recently underwent a major restructuring and evolution uh we
045are now known as the cemetery foster city administrators association uh making it more inclusive by ensuring that our title includes both the regions and cities of san mateo and foster city um in the process of restructuring uh we assembled an administrators association board of which we are both members and this is also inclusive right we have representatives from principals assistant principals coordinators directors a part of this board our collective vision is to empower champion and lift the voices of our administrators in support of students families and school communities here in san mateo placer city school district as a man amanda my colleague here mentioned at each board meeting you will hear from two admin representing their schools and delivering the community greeting as she will just be doing the moment administrators across our schools have
046had a really strong positive start to the school year welcoming new and returning families to our sites we're coming up on our back to school night presentations and other community building events at baywood excuse me over the summer we had a summer full of professional development opportunities preparing us to carry out all of the actions and strategies in our strategic plan and we're so excited to start this work at baywood we're working on establishing our routines building strong positive classroom communities and getting to know each other in our classrooms and in our community on friday we held our first pbis assembly where we established and revisited our schoolwide agreements and had a chance to talk really specifically about what it means to be safe respectful responsible and a learner at baywood thank you so much
047for your attention this evening it is an honor to serve in san mateo foster city school district thank you for all of those updates and i won't forget next time sorry okay moving back to where we were in the agenda we'll go to item 7a report on california assessment of student performances performance and progress proctor david chambliss assistant superintendent of ed services give me a minute and i will share my screen with you all right so it's uh my pleasure this evening to spend a few minutes with you actually sharing um what were our preliminary results on our state assessment from this past spring which we know of as the casp assessment i met emphasized preliminary in that this is data that is shared with us in advance by the state we get a chance
048to have an early look and make sense of it even while the state does some final cleanup and ultimately in a couple of weeks of posting to uh to the state website uh where we can see more complete data um what i'm going to propose tonight is just really kind of a headlines approach some of the high level takeaways uh we're looking forward to the fact that next month we're going to have a special session with you where we're going to get a chance to go into more detail and uh kind of follow up follow the breadcrumbs as to where we think this data leads you'll see here uh overview of the um the data on the left is english language arts please note that there are four sort of rankings or achievement points for
049students did they not meet did they nearly meet did they meet or did they exceed state standard on the left is english language arts and on the right is mathematics again the sort of the standard data point that is often looked at is combining the green and the blue to get an overall percentage of met or exceeded you'll see here something very important that all of us have been spending a lot of time thinking about over the last couple years which is what was the impact of the pandemic and to what extent did our students experience learning laws that might be evident in our state scores so you'll see here our 2019 cast data which was the assessment right before the year which was uh interrupted and the following year two years really that were
050interrupted by uh the the pandemic compared to our most recent data and one of the things that we're we're very anxious about is because this is preliminary data we don't yet have the ability to compare it to the state overall or even to nearby school districts so we're anxious to understand you know what what is as a state and and what are other districts experiencing in their performance we're hearing anecdotally uh rather significant drops in student performance you'll see here for example that we've experienced a drop from 2019 of four percentage points we think within the context of what we're hearing about the challenges of learning loss that this is actually a rather modest loss and and hopefully indicative of um some good learning that is occurring over the last couple years but we don't
051we don't know for sure yet until until we get the actual published data so we'll be watching that closely i want to give you a chance to look at this now broken down in a comparison way by grade level so each pair of bar charts here the left one compares for example the third grade in 2019 to the third grade in 2022 and then you'll see a pair for fourth and a pair for fifth and basically what we're looking at here at elementary school is either improvement uh actually in the percentage of students meeting or exceeding standard which happened in third grade or basically holding serve so to speak and so again with this question of is this incredibly positive because we didn't experience really any learning loss as evident in this data that's that's
052a question that we want to return to uh but in our data we're not seeing a learning loss and in fact we're seeing some improvement and if you look at 6th and 8th 6th through 8th grade you see you know some similar data uh there's a slight learning loss we would describe in sixth grade and then seventh and eighth is you know approximately holding serve so again those same questions that we're looking to answer here it is by our various student groups including racial ethnic groups as well as english learner and socioeconomic so-called socioeconomically disadvantaged of course as we've highlighted in our strategic plan we have some significant equity gaps that we we hope to address through our strategic plan this data affirms that yes those are still um significant and urgent that we we
053address those here actually is a few of those equity groups and and here we're just we're really highlighting for you if areas of growth in our uh in our equity work um you can see from 2019 to 2022 um that there actually is um a modest increase in the performance of our black african american students similarly as highlighted for english learners and our special education students so again not only no learning loss but actual improvement for these groups let's turn to math overall you'll see here a 2019-22 comparison and again uh you know a modest uh decrease that we're hoping to understand um in more detail here are a few slides that allow us to do that um again this is that sort of third in to third in 2022. um allison i see you
054smiling at our lego work here um this is just you know affirming another aspect of our strategic plan which is the uh the lego work and and stem work in general um what you'll see here actually is again kind of pretty exciting that in third grade there was a very substantial increase and in fourth grade as well and um fifth grade um even more a seven percentage point improvement um over our 2019. so in elementary math we see very substantial again no learning loss and actually substantial gains and here it is in sixth to eighth grade and note kind of the same phenomenon that in sixth grade we saw a nice improvement in our scores um and in seventh and eighth essentially you know the same performance as in 2019 here are uh math scores
055by student group again highlighting the equity concerns that we that we have as a district and we're committed to correcting um let me also come back to those same three groups and again kind of from a highlights point of view um very very nice improvements actually for all three groups and just to note that um that uh that our english learners and special education students even overall if we look at approaching the the almost or nearly meeting standard we have an overall shift upward and that's a very high level overview for you and again looking forward to coming back and going into more detail back to mute david if i can chime in here one of the things that we are deepening our practice in the district among yourself your team and ed services we
056have a new coordinator for assessment research and evaluation her name is kyla ximena's i want to acknowledge her because she did some excellent work she had about 15 minutes to get ready to do this work and she jumped in and and got started on she's very talented and she's she's a wonderful addition to the team but one thing we wanted to know was we wanted to know when we had students who were with us in 2018-19 the last school year before we had the pandemic interrupt our educational system and those students would have been in third grade in 2018-19 which means they would have been in fourth grade in 1920 the year that the got the pandemic cut it short then they would have been in fifth grade in 2021 which means they were in
057sixth grade in 2122 so as much as we enjoy a nice pie chart and a nice bar chart we were really interested in finding out when children were with us when they were in third grade before the pandemic and took a test for us how many of those students stayed with us because i think we all know in this community a lot of kids didn't return after the pandemic for a huge number of reasons i think there's a fair amount of um thought in the community that families with the means to do so pulled their kids and put them into private schools or parochials or online schools with tutoring support and so it's just not going to be a mystery anymore we have a school board special study session on september 1st in here that
058will also be on youtube and is focused on what we're calling equity focused student achievement analysis so what i'm going to present that that night and we're going to talk about as a group is the fact that there were about 215 kids who were with us when they were in third grade and then didn't return back after the pandemic and didn't take their sixth grade math test for us and those 215 students exceeded or met standards in math when they were in third grade so would stand to reason that they would likely also for the most part do pretty well on their sixth grade math test but they're not in our district anymore so we would think oh our sixth grade math test scores are really going to drop down because we lost such a
059big group of kids who when they were in third grade were meeting and in many cases 144 kids exceeding standards and we didn't see that and what we were able to show was that the overwhelming majority of kids who were with us in third grade and were meeting or exceeding standards are also meeting or exceeding standards now in sixth grade and many of them who weren't meeting or exceeding standards are now meeting receding centers it'll be all very clear that night this would be really good conversation for us to have because i think as parents all of us are interested in the long game right like where is my child going to be when they leave the san mateo foster city school district and we're really excited about the reforms we put in place in
060sixth grade last year specifically in math the systems that we put in place to get teachers working together and the new instructional strategies we really promoted along with the heterogeneous grouping which i think we're going to be able to jump you know both feet first and really dig into that conversation i know trustee watkins is really ready for that conversation um and i think we're excited to have the community be a part of that conversation thank you so much do we have any clarifying questions from the board can you remind me um one more time what was the you said it was is it a study session or special study session okay can we say that one more time just for any folks in uh on zoomer in the person september first special study session
0615 30 p.m thursday it's basically two thursdays from now and it'll be single topic two and a half to three hours focused on these test results with a really sharp focus on equity thank you i'm excited okay um are there any public comments from the room okay peter can we please check with the zoom group absolutely if there's any members of our zoom audience i would like to make comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay president proctor we have no hands for public comment thank you so much let's come back to the board for comments thank you for the presentation um the subject data looks really good i'm just curious um when i look at the ela data for elementary to metal and we stressed that actually
062we've gone up in elementary third fourth a bit and just anecdotally sort of it looks like we went down in middle school i'm wondering if that is if we could kind of pinpoint like where where was exactly because this is just looking at it now and before this meeting but generally i mean overall the subgroups look really great i'm just wondering where we might dig a little deeper to figure out what happened there and of course coveted i think you know four percent drop is it'd be very curious to see how other school districts did especially in our county um but that's i would say is probably pretty good in my mind it's a lot lower than i thought it was just going to be um i just wanted to hear your thoughts in terms
063of you know where maybe we did drop well maybe let me let me make sure i'm answering your question correctly if stop me if i'm not i mean part of it i i think at the elementary level we began some preliminary work last year on what's now in the strategic plan around foundational literacy so in training teachers um in the orton gillingham method uh even instituting uh you know kind of a bridge foundational literacy um strategy with hegerty uh and i think some of that really you know resulted in some you know filling some gaps that we had that resulted in some of some of the improvements um i think you also would see in the strategic plan that in the coming couple of years we want to take a better look actually go through
064a pilot and adoption process with our ela curriculum in middle school i think the alignment we're looking for in middle school around the ela curriculum is not where we would like it to be and so um our director kenyetta cook is going to be launching a process this year first with kind of a deep dive with the the um piloting team around culturally responsive curriculum and practices and then coming back to you all really in about a year and a few months with a proposal for adoption of a new a new curriculum you know combined with some i think uh instructional strategies so i think we're we're seeing kind of the middling data at middle school and saying yeah we gotta put we think we have a sense of why that might be and how
065we're going to address it so did that that answer your question i want to yeah yeah no thank you i think it maybe wasn't as clear either too but no i i think it's great i think the overall message is that there was a drop obviously and we we knew that um everywhere up another state we've everyone's been trying to quantify the learning loss and so i think that um in my mind four percent is is is actually well well i'll hold my comments onto that until we actually know what everybody else did but um but yeah no thank you for the presentation yeah and just an ad i think some of the performance we're seeing with our english learner students in middle school for example the improvements there and with our special education is
066really some program focusing on the eld classes that we've implemented over the last few years uh and i know the special education team's efforts there so i think it's the result of good work you know focused on on on the gaps that we have fantastic thank you thanks for the presentation um i'm really excited to dig into all of this in more depth in a couple of weeks um just i guess a couple of comments that aren't necessarily to be addressed tonight but things that i hope that we can dig into um at that time i know that we'll be digging into data with more granularity which is going to be great and be able to have some of those concentrated conversations i believe we set targ or you all set targets for growth as
067a part of lcap i'd be curious to know what those were um and line them up to where we are um and for that to be a part of the conversation right are we tracking towards those goals do they need to be more ambitious based on the fact that maybe we didn't have as much learning loss as we thought we might like how how does that all fit together um and where are we you know against that i am super interested to see what other folks are doing kind of as a bar but also you know i think there's kind of two pieces to this i think it's worth like taking a pause and reflecting and celebrating which we're starting to do a little bit around some of the games that have happened and specifically
068tying that to what we have done as a district to do that right and i know you can't always draw a one-to-one um but you know there were a lot of things that were implemented this year to kind of try to mitigate learning loss right and you all and our educators and our staff should take a moment to pop themselves in the back for for some of that work because it was a lot right there were a lot of changes new curriculum there were you know the math interventions like there was a ton of stuff that we asked everyone to do and to pivot and you know if if our hypotheses are right about how potentially our district performed as it relates to just the state average the local average the national average right that's
069something to celebrate despite so there's that piece right and then of course while there's been improvements in our subgroups like we're still looking at 20 of kids that are you know 80 percent of kids that are not meeting standards for example in special education around that right like that's still not okay and we still have a lot of work to do and we have to have that conversation for sure um but i think starting with kind of what we're doing well and then what of that can we take over into some of these other places and then having that equity conversation around how we continue to get better and while these games were great you know if i'm a kindergarten parent of a student in special education i'm you know and i'm thinking about this
070level of growth over the next i'm not feeling super optimistic about what's going to happen for my kid right in the next six to eight years if i'm looking at this level of growth and so how do how are there ways that we can continue to accelerate that um and i and i know that these are conversations that are happening and i know it's built into the plan and i know all of the things that we're doing are in service of that um but yeah so those are some of the things that i'm just thinking about in terms of the conversation and how can we bring some of those pieces into to the conversation that we're having in a couple of weeks and then um you know i think there were targets too um right
071so we know like for example sixth grade math and the changes that we made there um are there kind of places where we can almost do like little case studies and and showcase that both to us right in terms of like there were difficult decisions that were made were those the right decisions do we have any idea about about kind of where that weighs um it seems like we have an inkling from this around like sixth grade doing well um as it relates even to seventh and eighth grade right um can we zoom in on that i don't know if i'm trying to think if there are other places where those things happen i mean sixth grade math obviously stands out to me but um so those are a couple of of just initial thoughts
072but i appreciate the initial overview and hopefully have a really fruitful conversation a couple weeks what i think is great about having this this in depth of a conversation and doing it in a special study session where the public can call in comment watch listen to the real thought process behind it i met with david and our new coordinator for math amy burke she's an excellent seasoned experienced math teacher who was one of our instructional ptosis last year and this year has become the coordinator and we said all right let's look at the tutoring program we put in place last year we ran the math boost program served a couple hundred kids district-wide did one in the fall one in the spring but because we're now a data informed district we kept the data on
073who participated in the program because now that we have the test score data we looped back to check to see how the kids who were in our program did on their state tests now i think we'll all acknowledge the number one most important thing to impact the student's test scores is always going to be the classroom instruction and their experience in school but we shouldn't ignore the impact of a tutoring program and what that might do to correlate to a student's success so we found close to 150 kids who participated in our math boost program nearly met met or exceeded the standards in that so we sat there for a couple of minutes and just kind of celebrated we're excited and then i said well let me break this down by school so i started
074to look for schools i'll give kudos to george hall elementary school they had about 25 kids participate in the program 19 of those 25. nearly met or exceeded that's wonderful so now i want to find out just a little bit more about how it was implemented there and what what pieces they felt really mattered and really go deeper into the program that took place there so we sat together for a couple more minutes and i said you know what i'm kind of curious to know how many of the students whose english language development level was at the top benefited from the tutoring program and guess what we found if you had a higher english language development level you are more likely to make that growth in math so then we sit together and go we
075have to put more supports in for our kids who are not at that level so it's this data informed approach is allowing us to go and keep pulling layers away and say okay i think i can now take this program that's so promising and acknowledge that for kids who don't have higher level english language skills it didn't really meet their needs as well as it met those who did so let's do something to just adjust that program that little bit and see what we might be able to produce in the next round of achievement results and i think that's what's exciting about how we're engaging in this data informed practice and i just wanted to to preview that those are the kind of in-depth conversations we're going to have as a team on september 1st
076thursday at 5 30 in here um i was just going to comment really quickly because my comments were similar to trustee watkins um in being curious what our goals were obviously and then what our goals are going to be and i think one just because i'm i'm not um an educator i don't quite know um what would be a meaningful increase right like so we have our goals and i don't know is is three percent something to um aim for is 10 and so it's it's hard to know um going forward what like what would be a big deal and what would be exciting and um obviously any increase would be exciting but what how do our goals relate to um what would be meaningful and achievable and then my other question or comment was
077um you know a lot i think over the summer a lot of us received these cast scores from our kid for our kids in aries and continuing to remind parents okay so say you have a a child that didn't meet the standards for two subjects what are those resources what do we do from here because it could be um you know a little scary when you when you check the results and it's uh it's not something that you were hoping for and not knowing where to turn um i'm i'm thinking in particular middle school just because there's so many teachers that see your child it's not like there's that one teacher that you can go to and say you know how do i help him or her um but but i'm sure everybody has those
078same concerns so just continuing to remind people what the resources are and how how we can help our kids but thank you very much i'm looking forward to this september 1st meeting oh my goodness i was encouraging ken to speak and i didn't realize that he already i'm sorry i totally was listening but um so i will just quickly add that i'm excited to see this preliminary data and to dig into it i think um i'm proud of the fact that we are really looking at the past three years and that where we are now so that we can pull those lessons out because we're doing that for our kids so that we you know pull those stories out of the data about what they've actually experienced in the classroom and in their educational outcomes
079i mean it's so important because we have made some changes and as the largest school district in our county i think it's important that we remember that we can be leaders in our county right and we can take these lessons and share them and the impact the positive impact that it'll have on students will you know increase exponentially and um you know to allison's point about test scores and and you know school just starting and um it probably wasn't until like last year that i even um i'm gonna be super transparent right like i go to all of my son's um parent-teacher conference conferences and ask lots of questions but i didn't i never realized that i could pull out his like state test scores out of aries and i'm like i didn't realize that
080and i've been a school board member for almost five years and and now i'm like every parent that i know i'm like did you know you can you know just like making sure people know that and how to actually get to it i think because usually i'd like look at it on my phone and then looking looking at it on a computer is different like easier to navigate but kind of also to diego your point earlier about the correlation between you know how like language based math is and it makes me think about students that are long-term english learners who potentially reclassified but are still an eld and how you know their like they need more rigor right so that they can then apply that to mathematics and and you know to other um areas
081in their education so that's one thing i just kind of wanted to shout out to is that i i actually knew know of a student who i was like oh you know we can look at your help and we've got our elpac scores um in the mail uh this past week so i reviewed it with a couple families that i know and i was like oh well they reclassified and she still has eld so make sure you like talk to the counselor and let's let you know let's get her in the right classes so that she can take an elective and so that when she goes off to high school there's no you know misunderstanding about what level she she needs to be at so i'll stop there but i'm really excited and i'm excited
082about what it means for families and and kids and you know knowledge is power and um yeah i think our community is ready and excited for it and we also have to be careful that um you know that we tell the real story of what our district and our kids are um are achieving and not not be silent um when that's kind of challenged in the community or in the public because we have had those those hard topics that you know were politicized and um you know we can't politicize education we we have to keep our students first just quick question um are we we're going to meet again in two weeks for two weeks for the special study session on this will we have uh data from the rest of the region or at
083that point i know that this cast data is preliminary but i know that the state releases us information first before it's fully published but i wasn't sure if we're going to be able to compare so it might take an act of congress for us to get you a clear date on that so i'm going to reserve any guarantees but this is one of those things where annually we don't know sometimes we get surprised a little bit it's usually closer to about the 15th of september but some years it's been as late as october and other years it's been as early as september 1st so even without that data we're going to have the very very rigorous five-year review subgroups schools programs and i think that's going to make it for rich very rich conversation and
084then when we do get the statewide data we can bring back an update for the board any other comments on this okay thank you david that's really great we can move on to item 8a preschool program update good evening board of trustees and superintendent ochoa i'm pleased this evening that uh principal of our preschool program kerry hazleton is here to present to us an update on our preschool i'm good all right third time's a charm here we go um good evening i'm kerry hazelton and tonight i'm going to present some information and an update on our preschool programs we are located at seven different school sites that we have both part-time and full-time state subsidized programs we have blended montessori which means that we have state subsidized students and fee based students in the same
085classroom we have inclusion classrooms which are also blended in addition we have two language immersion programs spanish immersion and mandarin immersion so this chart shows our current enrollment numbers um across a couple years and from 2020 to 2022 our capacity was lower and that was due to the pandemic it was our state our county our licensing regulations we could only go up to a certain number of students so in those couple years you will see that our numbers are a lot lower than a typical year so with that in mind if you look at 2019 and our current school years what you'll notice is that from our cspp which is our state subsidized preschool programs our full-time students have increased um and are our part-time students have decreased and this is a result of our
086parent involvement project funding which is our pip grant funding that was a private donor and over the past couple years our funding has decreased and last year unfortunately was our last year with our private funding and so we had to restructure our state subsidized spots and in doing so what we did is we increased our state subsidized full-time and decreased our part-time slots and that was based on our community our community needs and more families wanting to be in our full-time spots and qualifying for full-time spots and less families wanting to have part-time and then also keeping in mind making sure that we meet our state contract allotment funds that we receive um our current capacity for our cspp full-time for this school year is 120 students so we can roll 120 students for our
087full-time and for part-time we can enroll 102. now these numbers that you have in 2000 for our current year is out of date because we're still enrolling and they're going to continue to increase until we are at our capacity so um at this moment we have 104 full-time students so we enrolled one more um and we have 78 part-time students and it's continuing to increase um every day we have both general ed and special ed employees so both with our preschool teachers our assistants our support staff and we're in the process right now of trying to hire two additional full-time assistance to help support our state subsidized full-time programs once we have those two people on board we'll be able to enroll the rest of our full-time students into those two classrooms and we're also
088posting for some new positions so we're looking for some part day and state subsidized assistance to help us in our parent involvement project classrooms so we're continuing to grow not only with our students but also with our staff last year we partnered with sunresa dental to provide oral health screening and education for our state subsidized students um so we did that with our state subsidized last spring um they provided um individual family follow-ups as well as follow-up appointments as needed for those state subsidized students and it was free on our campus so they came to the campus and did those screenings for our students we are going to continue that partnership this school year and we hope to start that education this fall and then shortly after that we will start the screenings and that
089will also be with all of our state subsidized students cspp so that cspp is our state subsidized preschool programs and we're expanding so we want to expand our csvp preschool programs we completed an rfa back in april for potentially a little over a hundred and forty seven thousand dollars we're hoping we will find out this september if not sooner if we are awarded the funds if we are awarded we are creating a new tk classroom which is a wraparound program so the students in tk will go to their elementary school and then be bussed over to us in the afternoon for a wrap-around program for our state subsidized after school program um and so hopefully we will get those funds that will be at turnbull as well um additionally we are always looking for more
090funds and so um if there's another rfa or when there's another rfa available for our state funds we will apply for that because we want to expand we want to continue to grow our program and provide access for families within our community and so i'm going to hand it over to superintendent ochoa so that he can present some information on the preschool data thank you carrie i'll need you to to um change the share screen so that i can grab the data here so i can stop sharing them here i think so yeah take a second here and i'll bring it right up for just a second there we go let's find that report here all right there we go i've actually loaded it into the into the um online form here for all of
091our public to be able to access this so let's open it up here all right now let me share my screen there we go all right so one of the things that we wanted to demystify this summer was to be able to evaluate what impact attending a california state preschool program might have on students and their subsequent achievement in our school district so i think all of us as parents and community members anecdotally would say it's really great when your child can get into a preschool program that works for them they're happier they play with kids a little bit better they seem to be learning more about colors and shapes and numbers so i think just as as adults and and parents we we sort of believe that to be the case and we wanted
092to be able to attach it to actual student achievement data so what you're looking at now are two pieces of test score data for this school district for 20 21 and you're looking at two different groups of kids whose income meets the state criteria as qualifying for the national school lunch program or their income is too high so the chart on the left hand side are the third grade reading test scores for every student in our district last year in the 2021 school year and how they scored on third grade english language arts if they happen to qualify as economically disadvantaged so seventeen percent met the standard or exceeded it and sixty one and a half percent did not meet standards so that's pretty low and on the right hand side you're looking at the
093test scores for the same age group but these are students whose income whose family income is above the threshold for qualifying for the national school lunch program the reverse is true 68 and a half percent are meeting or exceeding the standard and only 14.3 percent are not meeting the standard so this is a reinforcement that these income differences are highly correlated to a student getting to third grade and reading at grade level so my question is what happens when we give a california state preschool program to a child whose income does qualify for the national school lunch program meaning they would get free preschool and that's on this next slide so what you're looking at first there are the internal reading scores meaning first grade reading scores second grade reading scores and third grade reading
094scores we tested all of our students last year and if your income was above the state guidelines for the national school lunch program are reading at grade level or above another 17 or nearly reading at grade level and then nine percent are not at grade level when you look at that span that's really positive data we're already above at or above grade level for three out of four kids whose income is above that state threshold so what i'm going to show you next are the test scores of students whose income is below the state threshold and was were able to be in our california state preschool program so i went back to 2018 went back five years well now five years but went back and looked at who my three and four-year-olds were who were
095in those california state preschool classrooms because we now have this thing called the state student id it follows kids no matter where they go it's one id that applies no matter where they attend and i looked at their reading scores i jumped four years ahead and checked to see how they read in our district last may to try to create a line between participating in preschool when they were three and four and then how they were reading in second and third grade this year for us 60 of those students are reading at grade level or above 18 percent or nearly and 22 percent are not meeting when i look at that data i feel like we have a fighting chance we're really close for those two pieces of data to start to get just that
096much closer now i'm going to show you the test scores of students whose income is below the straight the state threshold but they didn't get into our preschools there it is let's build our preschool program let's work on the program quality let's get parents into parent education classes let's promote student and parent um literacy activities at home let's put books in kids hands let's get them into our state preschool feed them take care of them give them warm fuzzies because being in our california state preschool program is highly correlated to eliminating that achievement gap and not having access has a devastating impact on reading achievement perfect thank you i think the data shows that we need to continue to grow our program and get more families into our program to help them be successful in
097school so i'll open it up to any questions that you may have i have a couple questions um question around i probably should know this but what is the what is the income threshold and you sort of state that right it's not local oh at the top um i don't know but it's um it changes every year um it's on our website i'll tell you in one second here okay on my website yeah i've got it right here i've got it i'm gonna oh that i'm unmuted already perfect um so just as an example for let's say a household of two so just parent and child the annual income um for free eligibility is 22 000. yes are you with me trustee watkins okay let's go to my size because i have seven in my
098family seven two and five seven fifty one thousand dollars combined folks that's not per parent that's combined so these are families who we're talking about let's get them into these programs let's get them into these classrooms let's make space for them let's create some beautiful classrooms for them thank you yeah i'll try not to make comments um okay thank you uh and question around the data you shared superintendent this was for any participation in any preschool program full-time or half-day i mean in our district california state preschool so it's including the part-time and the full-time for an entire year they would have had to have been on the roster at the end of the school year so it's possible that they could have started like september or october but um we didn't pull both pieces
099of data like the august data because some kids do start just a little bit later than others so these are kids who we you know our assessment our judgment is they were in our california state preschool program at least nine months but even just nine months is a huge difference okay i have a lot of questions comments so maybe i'll just save all of that for comments any other clarifying questions i have comments too um but i just wanted to correct uh the actual age minimum age to enter into preschools three is that correct 2.9 um they have to be three by september okay thank any other you okay let's go to public comments [Music] all right if there's any members of our zoom audience that would like to make comment on this item please
100use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay president proctor we have no hands republican we have one in the audience here um so um i'm natalie don't hunt on the new ap at laurel but i've been doing reading intervention for many years before this and the amount of money we put into intervention programs in the upper grades the amount of time we put into reading intervention and taking kids out of classrooms pushing them in all that kind of work we do and to think that we could have kids in a preschool playing and having fun and getting those results is kind of my boring and shocking to me um just because i've seen the other end of it and this sort of really proactive approach is it's really beautiful actually and i just
101think we need to really seize this um we're so used to being reactive and if we could really grab this and be proactive and it's such a it's really preschool is great many of us have sent our kids there it's the kids would love it too right and think about what that would mean for them right there is a little bit of a stigma to intervention and that kind of thing this isn't this is you're going at school it's fun and it would really just benefit really such wonderful things so this data is just i love it thank you for sharing it it's so inspiring preschool thank you for that man super important okay we are at the time for board comments so go ahead it wasn't unneeded i'll start um thanks for the update
102carrie um as always i and you for the data had a little sneak peek at this during our one-on-one so it wasn't brand new to me um and you know we had a can are let me see if that helps ah much better thank you um yeah so i mean i think that the data around preschool like we all intuitively know that early education is important but to just like see it broken down in that way is just it makes me just think about and then i'm looking at the data that you're sharing carry around our enrollment particularly for our state subsidized students going down and even though we've increased some of it and decreased some of it right there's still over 70 kids that used to have access to that that now don't have
103access to that at a time where people are struggling more child care is even harder like i think we've spent some time on this board and i'm sure your team has already talking about quality which is an important conversation to have but this data literally says it doesn't even matter really right like at the core this is just saying if you have access to a preschool program we're not even looking at which ones are better with what the curriculum is like none of that and so for me i just feel like when we have this conversation moving forward over the course of the rest of this year like it really just has to be how can we get every student in our district that has a need into these programs and then i think about
104the income requirements and the fact that you're not considered socioeconomically you're really not considered socioeconomically disadvantaged if you're a family of two and you make 25 000 a year i that's a separate conversation but that's just also wild um particularly in this area i can't imagine where in california that is the case but here at least so that's you know that's just like at the core which just kind of leads me to what are what are our goals like when i and this is something i think about a lot with our presentations and i've talked to superintendent ochoa about just generally like as we have presentations across our programs how are they tied to our overall strategic plan what are the elements of our strategic plan that filter into preschool what does that then mean
105for what the goals are for preschool how does that then tie to this data around what we're seeing about importance of access what does that specifically mean that now we're gonna do and what does that mean that we as a board need to do whether it's financially whether right so those are like the pieces that i'm thinking about right now as as we have we're like seeing all of this data now that i feel like we haven't seen that's awesome now we can have these conversation and we have a strategic plan that's like really well aligned that we haven't had which is awesome how do we fit all those pieces together in terms of like actually making them decisions that are data informed that are aligned to our strategic plan and how do we get
106information in a way that allows us to do that um and so i think um just at a high level those are the things that i'm thinking about some of which are like preschool specific and some are which are just bigger picture i feel like i had something else that now i'm forgetting so i might pop back in but i'll stop for now um thank you for the data i'm sorry when my headphones went dead um fascinating data fascinating thanks um fascinating i think um [Music] yeah no i what i'm curious about honestly is beyond the income limits and everything else that what i was getting out in terms of the age limit or the minimum age 2.9 and all the way up to i'm assuming basically five essentially so as we look forward and
107i know this is something that we keep talking about and what's coming down from the state is universal tk and so when you look at it and you think about how you look at the data that that you just showed us and you think okay one do they start when they are 2.9 or three years old or do they start four years right and when we get universal tk in completely throughout in 2024 2025 was it throughout throughout the throughout the school district that'll take care of all of our four-year-olds so then i'm very curious to see how does our preschool program change for that 2.9 to almost four and so i all for expanding the program and making sure that we have we can fill as many spots as we can i also just
108think like okay a year next year the next year afterwards the numbers that you show i mean it'd be great to go up to 120 and what was it part time was but obviously those numbers will probably actually decrease because universal tk will start taking over as we uh roll out our uh our program so i'm very curious to see how this program evolves in the future and i want to make sure that we actually do have a plan to take care of them um the second part of my question right now forgot what it was so yes why go for it please interrupt me well you're thinking about that i just have one one question that i just thought of um do we know how many four-year-olds fit into the category of socioeconomically difficult
109yeah it's it's in the 350 to 375 range so pro rada it would in order to serve all qualifying students we would need enough space for close to 800 kids and we currently have less than 200. and then i also want to make a comment that um we've already seen a shift in our program so typically all of our um full-time spots are for four-year-olds because for state requirements we have to do enroll all qualifying four-year-olds first before we can even look at three-year-olds and this year we've already started enrolling three-year-olds so we've already seen a shift which means then they're going to be with us for two years instead of one year no that's great one of the other one of the other go go ahead and no no one of the other things
110is what the state is doing to encourage early childhood education is allowing school districts to blend programs so they're allowing school districts to start children off in the california state preschool program and blend it with the tk program program within the district one of the advantages for a district such as ours which receives funding based on property taxes and not enrollment is that when you operate a california state preschool program you are bringing funding into the district the 147 thousand dollars that kerry referenced is going to educate 20 kids it's going to cost more than 147 thousand dollars but maybe that gets us 70 percent of the way for every california state preschool program classroom we operate and apply for the funds that's additional money each time to serve children who need it so on
111our end we want to bring in those funds because we want to build that support structure earlier on and then as the kids get older you keep them in the same room but it becomes tk it's sort of a blended approach and then addresses the need you're you're referencing no that sounds fantastic and so i'm glad we're already actually having a plan and seeing some of the changes already um i will be very curious to see how it plays out over the next couple years as we as we make that ship the last question and comment is what are we doing to reach out to those families right so granted you know when you know my kids were younger and we were in daycare and then to preschool and everything else it we didn't really
112look around it was sort of word of mouth we asked around what was around us in our neighborhood and we kind of went with that um i'm curious if how are we reaching out to those families like you know these families who are in the lower income categories the the family too under 22 000 are we you know they seek medical help probably at the county hospital you know are we there is there presence you know in some ways and i i just want to make sure that we are you know with this new data that you're showing us which is very powerful you know how do you know and every parent cares about their kids you know how are we attracting those those families well let me start here and i'll give you an
113opportunity for me to chime in um there's like seven administrators in here who all want to answer this question well it's true um i think what you can see in sense the passion in the room um for this program and the development of it and the growth as carrie mentioned you know the pandemic we were required to have less students in the program but now we recognize that obviously the data shows that this work is really important for kids and as natalie della pointed out just getting him in a school right to be a student is so exciting so we've hired four community service specialists that are spanish-speaking bilingual working in the community being very aggressive if you will to reach out to the community with you know um at the school sites making phone
114calls helping with registration that that the registration process has been quite cumbersome for families a little anecdotal story around that um they need a medical evaluation exam to enter the program and we have looked really um at perhaps paying physician to come and help us out to make that happen it's really difficult believe it or not um to get a free medical exam for your child in this county not okay so that's just it's a roadblock but it certainly isn't going to stop us and we're going to get around that but that's just one piece of it so i just am just sharing the passion around this that this is really important work and we do have systems in place and we're moving forward to really be aggressive about letting people know about the program
115and working with them around the structure that's in place that maybe for some is quite difficult to get their child enrolled and we're going to make sure that happens for them we as a district spend tens of millions of dollars in remediation programs and in prior years we have tried to run our preschool program so that it does not impinge on the general fund that's a mistake we should be spending three times the amount we get in our preschool program because you won't invest the tens of millions of dollars in remediation programs because fewer students will fall behind we now know the actual impact we have the numbers in front of us so two days ago myself two of our community services specialists our assistant superintendent of student services did a test case with the
116family whose child needed a physical free physical we were routed to a variety of websites to call i personally called 10 different phone numbers who put me on hold told me to call back told me they didn't provide the service told me to call different number got zero information from anybody about free physicals so i assigned one of our community services specialists to call every name on a list a separate list that we were given with over 25 providers who all confirmed they do it for adults they do it for 12 year olds and above they only do it once a month on such and such place six miles away from north central san mateo so it's really difficult and our our approach in being data informed and knowing that this is important is also
117connected to the same conversation we had just a few minutes ago pertaining to hr and pertaining to finding employees we're going down to the base level of what our parents go through because i can't in good conscience ask our community services specialist to call families and direct them to do things that won't help them that will frustrate them because i can just call my doctor and my kids can have an appointment next week no problems no worries but if you're earning 21 000 a year how on earth are you going to make it to east palo alto from north central san mateo between 10 and 12 on the third tuesday you know what i mean the other thing is our community services specialists in the next three weeks will call every single family at leed
118elementary school who qualifies under these income guidelines to ask do you have any younger brothers and sisters who are zero one two three or four and to begin building a database so that i can come back to the school board in november and report to you at leed elementary school there are x number of kids who are siblings of students who are four three two and one so we can plan long term how many classrooms lead needs so when you have a two year old you get a letter from us in the mail that says congratulations you are pre-identified for our preschool program starting on august 10 2024 so you as a parent go i belong here there's a spot for me this district is planning for me to be in this program and our
119starting point becomes 40 kids in preschool instead of the six that we start with or the eight that we start with and then i think we all know what happens once they get in the program as trustee watkins pointed out even just access has a huge impact but can you imagine if we bring our director of english learner services our director of curriculum and instruction our math coaches are reading ptosis and have them spend time with our early childhood educators and just build that alignment between the ece program and our k2 our k8 program can be very powerful folks say thank you for that information it's absolutely fascinating i mean it's it's really powerful so i i can't wait to see what happens in the future thanks so lots of things to dig into here
120um thank you for the presentation um yeah sorry i'm having one of those moments where like i kind of want to cry because i'm so excited and happy and also like sad that like you know we not that we couldn't because a lot many of us are you know fairly new here but that like our district couldn't have done this like 20 30 40 years ago right um but here we are and we get we get to be a part of like a really pivotal moment for many many kids um yeah i don't know if anyone remembers but uh i remember when i applied for my son to go to turnbull and it was literally i think by like less than a dollar that i didn't qualify for the for your subsidized preschool and that
121meant that i had to take my son to a visitation valley in san francisco to the only free child care that i could find and then i had to make sure that i had a job in that area because i have this like thing where i need to be physically close to my to my little one in case of an earthquake or something but anyways um but i couldn't be here right i couldn't work here i had to commute i had to you know take these long drives and be like there wasn't a place for my son or i in this community and um that was about income limits which is different but it's related to the point that i'll make in a little bit but um yeah i just i'm just so happy that
122we are doing things differently because it's necessary um yeah we definitely have to be proactive and again knowledge is power so um i tend to do this but like i'm so excited for us to do this and we haven't even like completed it and i'm already thinking about like what we could do next so i'm just gonna like plant the seed throw it out there i know we've talked about it before but like some kind of like um like sliding scale right for those families that you know make like chara mention 25 000 for a family of two but who we know in this area with the cost of living like needed just as much as other families so i hope that's something that we can we can get to and and plan for and
123um maybe some of those uh measured i always get confused now measure v right measure v funds um can be invested in that way and um do you go to your point about what it's like to try to help a family or do a test case with the family like as a social worker i have seen that over and over and over again and it's frustrating for the families and it's also disempowering because there is this belief in our community that oh like there's so many resources and they just go here and they get everything they need and that's not reality it's not that simple and i don't blame like nonprofits or our core agencies necessarily but you know they're nonprofits and they pay their workers nonprofit wages and it's all you know like it's
124it's all kind of um [Music] it doesn't have like a super quick solution i know that like every agency tries to improve their internal processes etc but um you know that kind of test case and i think i read an email about doing some like empathy uh nancy's gonna be leading some like empathy uh shadowing days that kind of um experience i think is really necessary for people to to know what it's actually like to have to call 10 different numbers and never get the help that you need and then you just give up and you walk away feeling like this community doesn't care about me right um and i actually have this vision i was talking i was talking to diego about it a couple of weeks ago that our north central and san
125mateo foster city school district despite having i believe one of the top five areas in our county where kids health outcomes are concerning does not have in the area that is needed the most a a health center like um fair oaks health center in radar city like um oh my goodness like is it raven no what's what's it called in east palo alto ravenswood like ravenswood health center and he's palo alto um and so when i think about like the north central school and the space and like you know what we approved earlier which is you know just an initial um [Music] assessment of of the property or land um i think about like what could we do if we moved our buses somewhere else and we had more space and we could collaborate and
126you know bring a health center to this community that desperately needs it that we know will improve our health and educational outcomes in the long run and yeah i'm excited so i'm gonna stop there but um thank you all i'm really grateful to be in this work with you all um i want thank you for all the information um carrie ann diego um i when i looked at this last slide on the l3 information i i did kind of tear up because i think regardless of anybody's economic status everybody wants the best for their kids and to see like right in front of our face that it that preschool does make such a huge difference um it makes me sad that there that there are barriers that people you know that make it so people
127it's not easy to to access this and so i appreciate the work that our district's doing um calling the doctors and seeing who can do that work it's it's frustrating that it's not it's so complicated and um if you are making not that much money you don't have time for that you need to work like you're trying to live here so um i appreciate the work that we're doing i would be in support of allocating more resources to preschool um i think that this is like this data you can't argue this data and i think um this could make a huge impact on so many people's lives i think um just looking at 60 of students that went to um were in the program meeting or exceeding it's like we could make a whole bunch
128of kids love school and love to read and like this would make this would change the trajectory of their life and um you know they'll come back and be the doctors and and the people that take care of everyone in our community so i would i would love to do whatever we can do to get more kids in this program if it means allocating more funds to that i would be curious to see what that looks like um and i think that this may be um a picture that not everybody has seen but like trustee watkins says we all know we all kind of know this information but seeing it right in front of your face um it's i mean it's very eye-opening so i appreciate this information and look forward to where we go
129from here i also want to comment on the timeliness of this analysis of data if the board recalls one of our decisions last summer that has been implicated in almost every presentation you've received tonight we went into contract for a program called illuminate which is a data warehouse and our ed services team and our educators agreed to implement a small number of assessments three for reading three for math for every student k one two three and through the system so what's so important about this is that once those state test scores got to us in the middle of july it took us less than a week to be able to take those test scores clean them up because they come in these very large cumbersome formats and then use our internal capacity to go back
130into our files to pull where these kids were four and five years ago to be able to make this analysis possible so i think a lot of school districts look at data as pictures they'll look at a chart and say this picture is telling me something and we aren't like that our team is interested in how the data connects across time and through schools and programs because looking at our test score data or reading test score data without asking where were these kids four years ago is a missed opportunity but it's only possible because we've invested in the system to allow us to warehouse house this data so that we can get to this depth of analysis to then bring it back to our work with families and with our principles and um and to
131really see this transformative work take place i'll be back to the board in 60 days with a series of action steps that we'll want to include in our strategic plan moving forward so that we can realize the vision of greatly expanding access to all of our students can i just add a couple comments um that i might be back just one is i i just want to appreciate um you know dennis when you were sharing the story in and diego around you know just what it takes the medical forms and what it takes for someone to be able to apply and gain entry i think it's like it's a constant reminder and something all of us i know need to continue to do right uh everyone sitting in this room has layers of privilege and
132like for me that was not something that i would have ever thought of right and the fact that we're really like walking in the shoes as much as we can of of people that are trying to navigate these systems that were not intended to be navigated by them which we've said a lot of times on this board right like our systems are doing what they're meant to do um to produce the data that we see and we're fighting against it and so it requires doing that it requires peeling back all of these layers and it's just you know i know again we've had this conversation over and over again but like you peel back the layers and it's everywhere you know and so um i'm just appreciative of like you all continuing to do that
133despite how challenging it is and you know despite all of the other things that you have to do like this is the work um and it is the only thing that's going to get us the outcomes that we want so i just just highlighting both like the importance of all of us doing that and continuing to acknowledge that and just like the gratitude that i have for you all for doing that um two other one is a question and one is i guess a request the question is this analysis specifically looked at students that are not meeting particular income thresholds or that you know i'm curious about if there are other subgroups that you're thinking about when we look at our data and seeing long-term impacts needing to prioritize like and we're about to move
134into special education that's something that like i'm thinking about right like is there a plan for thinking about how we might tap into some of those students and families as well in terms of having access to services early intervention you know those kinds of things so not a question i necessarily need answered like in this moment but just something that i'm thinking about if we're continuing to get engaged in this analysis like it do we want to widen that at all um and then the other thing is it sounds like maybe you're bringing some format of this back to us but i'd be really curious to see like a long-term plan that includes like budgetary implications and getting us to where we want to get in terms of all students right so like over the
135next five to ten years i don't know how long it's going to take like we plan to increase enrollment this much that means it's going to cost us this we anticipate it's going to have this impact on the interventions that we need and so like what does that picture look like in terms of dollars um and in terms of what we would actually be doing right i'd be curious to have like a very like high level draft of that um i don't know if that's doable in your 60-day presentation or follow-up but i'd be really curious um to look at that any other comments on this topic okay i think that was a really great conversation and thank you for all of the information um if it's okay with everyone do you mind if we
136take a five minute break okay be right back recording has resumed thank you welcome back everyone um we are going to go to item 8b special education update thank you board of trustees and superintendent ochoa tonight we have director of special education with an update um director heather morgan thank you heather okay there we go good evening uh board of trustees and superintendent coachella thank you for having me um it has only been a short while since our last update so tonight i'll be giving you some more specific updates um and also adding some information per our conversation in june now go down i want to get down peter i want to go down there we go thank you i may have to call on you peter yeah okay um so we will be reviewing
137um some content presented in january some uh sorry not january uh my apologies that means june uh program updates physical updates staffing updates and our cdac report i wanted to start tonight with a look at some of our most recent cast data as we've already discussed tonight we um we all know that the overall numbers are a concern however there's something there's some light to be shed here and i'm going to see if i can close that or let that go somewhere else there so if you take a look at the 2018-19 data especially for standard met and exceeded we had 14.7 percent of our students within the special education program who were tested that um met or exceeded their standards back in 2018-19 and you also know that one of our big concerns in
138the last year or so was the learning law specifically for students who have special needs and what's interesting is if you look at 2021 we see a little dip there and then which is our most recent data we actually had an increase which is something to be um celebrated it's a small percent it's three percent um but it is better than we were in 2018-19 prior to the pandemic so i wanted to draw some attention to that i think it's good news and it means that the work we're doing is um making a difference and we'll continue to do so again okay let me get rid of thank you okay okay um one of our goals this year as you know was to more evenly distribute the programs within the district providing more opportunities for
139students who live in different neighborhoods to have special education classes in the neighborhoods where they live so this slide has the placements of our programs for 2223 and you can see uh the distribution is um far more equitable than it was a year ago and um i included last year's information for you as well just for a comparison and actually just the visual of it alone is kind of startling if you see here it looks pretty evenly distributed and i'm going to scroll down to last year and you can see where our programs work so we're moving in the right direction we still have some we're growing some of these programs we've added i'm gonna go back to the other side we've added programs in foster city and in the berel complex we added uh
140two mod severe classes at san mateo park school and um we'll continue to build and grow those programs we also added k2s at both brewer and beach park k2 sdc courses okay there's last year all right and at the top of this this is data that i shared with you previously with the dollar amounts from 2018-19 all the way through last school year for our npa actuals and nps actuals as you know this is another one of our goals is to reduce the spending on mpas in particular one of the questions that came up last time was how many kids does this actually serve and who are these students and where do they go um and also who are these employees and what categories do they fall into so for nps's um the dollar amounts
141there's currently serve 39 students this is across 14 non-public schools that specialize in different areas so some of these are deaf and hard of hearing schools or emotional disturbance schools or schools for students who are medically fragile or who have severe disabilities for example um also for our non-public agency members we have 129 employees that fall under npas we have made a huge push this year to reduce the number of agency teachers and as you can see right now we have only one teacher that is an agency employee we did a really good job of hiring internally this year we continue to have a large number of pairs and bts and that is another one of our goals this year to reduce that number and to bring those employees on as our own um internal
142employees that work for us within our departments that we evaluate and um have the accountability and also the training and we have more control over them so that is another one of our goals and a little digging down a little deeper here um also one of the pieces of data that was requested last time was the number of students at the different nps's um that are that we send students to because they offer things and programs that we may not have here in our own district you can see um many of them only have one student here and there we have a large number of students who do attend esther b clark and the total number of students in nps's right now is 39. okay and i wanted to present to you some information about
143initials initials are the very first iep meetings so that's the meeting where we talk about whether or not a student qualifies for special education and um at that point we either decide that they do qualify or we don't qualify them and that's called a dnq and i wanted to look at the total number number of initial evaluations from the last year because as you can see it's far higher than it was the previous three years this is a concern to me because we're looking at our significant disproportionality which i shared um with the board at our last presentation and this means that we are um assessing exceedingly high numbers of kids and it may be that um we are going to special education as the cure very quickly before using our other interventions and initial
144instruction that we are obligated to do okay and dnqs i just described those are students who are assessed but don't qualify for special education in 2021 we had 88 students who were assessed but did not qualify this is a very high number and dnqs are included in the number of initial evaluations of last year so these are 88 students who were evaluated for special education and didn't qualify meaning all of those resources that go into a full psychoad evaluation and academic assessment um these are probably students that we should have met on the gen ed side a little bit closer with more intervention and um mtss behaviors all those things that we're putting into our program this year that we've really built out our behavior plan and our behavior team this year which is another
145one of our goals so um this is just information and a number we need to keep a close eye on and it's something that will guide us in our direction with our school psychologists and our school teams for this 22-23 school year okay and i just wanted to circle back also on disproportionality because i mentioned the last time that we are in our third year of monitoring by the state specifically around the over-identification of our latinx males and the primary grades for specific learning disability that is our area of focus for the state so we have three um things that we're doing right now to address this challenge one of them is the behavior team development which we now have the three bca's the rbts and um we're cultivating and training our para threes we
146are insisting and this is where my other friends in the student services department come in we are insisting on approved pre-referral interventions um done with fidelity and a cycle of inquiry typically eight weeks or more so that we're using those interventions and those approved um the path and uh footsteps to brilliance like david shared and also st math prior to saying and jumping into referrals without some proof that um some good strong intervention and education could make a difference for kids and then also just our district-wide uniform at sst and mtss procedures which are being unified throughout the district in the past that they were more site-based and that's my work with student services and ad services to get those things in place prior to referrals also some of the data this was requested in
147june so we took a look at students these are the students that we are being reviewed under through our the significant disproportionality um by the cde so um students who qualify under a specific learning disability of them 214 students were identified as hispanic and of those 166 are english learners and then one of the other areas that is noted in our cygnus report is that sli or speech and language impairment these are students who qualify for speech services 154 of them are identified as hispanic and of those 110 are english learners okay and moving on this is our staffing update and um as i mentioned every time this changes daily so these are as of last thursday um we uh we're looking for a resource specialist still and we're doing some internal magic to cover
148these but i am still looking for permanent solutions so um ultimately what that would look like is a 1.0 and abbott 0.5 at laurel the college park and audubon position is shared that would be a 1.0 and brewer island and beach park also share and that's a 1.0 and then we have temporary staff in place right now to cover college park audubon and rural and then we have no special d-class openings and we are have currently 3.5 ftes for speech therapists okay and then our cdac report i am sharing on behalf of our cdac leadership um we will be hosting a barbecue on saturday at uh san mateo park school on the blacktop we are inviting all of our families and staff to come have a good time and enjoy some barbecue together from 11
149to 1. we hope you can make it too this has been shared we have a really good turnout so far we had we had did the rsvps on parent square and so we know how many people are coming and it looks like we're expecting a little over 80 families right now which is exciting and i hope we'll get even more in addition to that um we these are our cdac dates for the school year we've set them now we do not have all of our agenda topics in place typically we do have opportunities for not only input and collecting feedback from families answering questions having really transparent and open conversations but we also do some parent education and we like to listen to our families and see what they would like to learn about or
150if there's any networking that they would like to do so we'll take that input into consideration when we're designing the agenda for the year and also we are actively looking for and recruiting more leadership within cdac so anyone who's interested we are please reach out to me um because we would love to build out the leadership team um of cdx so that um it's not so that we have just more voices and you know can share the wealth a little bit and that's the end of my presentation tonight thank you very much thank you heather are there any clarifying questions thank you for the present okay guys thank you for the presentation um just a quick count in terms of our staffing needs we're sort of down which is like five seven that it just
151if you can go back it's about seven spots if you mix all of them together yes um i look at them more by the credentialing and the classroom types so um my my most urgent need right now is the rsp that's what i would like to fill the first to get those schools covered okay thank you thank you okay thanks heather i have a couple my viewers in here i have a couple questions um [Music] this is not a question well it's a question but um for the getting an act no you didn't have the echo is it me maybe okay just pulling up the presentation again too okay perfect for the d and q's um do you have um the breakdown of how many because some of them are teacher staff initiated and some
152are parent requested right yeah do you know that i know the exact number but i can tell you a pretty sharp ballpark that almost i'm going to say most i'm gonna say it probably above 90 are stack generated it's coming from us okay we're not parents we do get parent requests of course but um especially in um the primary grades with the kids that are under you know review for sickness it's mostly staff okay great comments on it but i'll save those um i maybe i thought i had a lot of clarifying questions but i think oh um one was sorry i'm going back and forth between my questions presentation uh disproportionate oh you talked about um the pre-referral interventions like having a more systematic way i'm just curious if you can share a little
153bit more about kind of what that looks like um i have a couple follow-ups to that but one question is is that something that we're requiring outside of just addressing the disproportionality like across the board before referral before referring um and then if you can just share more about like what do we mean by with fidelity like what does that process actually look like thanks for asking that um so i'm i've actually been sort of on a campaign of sharing this information with our different groups so school sites our principals our aps i'm going to be starting to visit elementary schools too so yes it is universally the direction and the goal that we have this year to first of all ensure that they they understand what lre is that means least restrictive environment and
154we're obligated to provide that and so when we do a knee jerk jump to assessment with nothing in between what we're doing is we're limiting that student's least restrictive environment because we're saying they must need special education we don't know what to do and so we do know what to do and we now have district adopted interventions in place and instructional um materials in place even in the gen ed setting like path for our littles and their um literacy instruction in kindergarten and first grade and so the idea is that our we're not going to be assessing kids until they've had a chance to participate in those as well as doing the sc math and even more important the um footsteps to brilliance a typical cycle of inquiry is about eight weeks it could be
155a little longer when i say with fidelity it means we can actually go in and check and see are you doing your lessons are you completing them are you doing them every day how many minutes are you doing every day so if they're not completing those things we can't say that they need special education now i have to be really really careful when i say that um because the concern with special education is everything is individualized there are cases where students come in and we're not going to say oh you have to wait eight weeks because there's something like clearly that needs to be assessed so i have to be right that's my caveat i always say it at the beginning because i don't want it to sound like we cookie cutter just say no
156no no no assessment for you um we will do some we will assess in certain circumstances when kids um are presenting presenting with an obvious disability or something that is clearly requiring assessment um however that being said we do what we will expect in that eight week a minimum cycle of inquiry sometimes we repeat the cycle of inquiry to see know if that didn't work but try something else to really prove that even with that good instruction and those interventions in place there's still something missing and then when we get to that point then we can consider okay now we'll assess and see what's missing for this child and maybe there's something else going on but that's a typical pattern and that's what i'm encouraging with everyone this year thank you i have two follow-up
157questions that one is um keep losing my train of thought gonna have to come back to me can i can i jump in and give you an opportunity to remember um one thing that we want parents who are tuning in and we want our educators who are tuning in to think about is let's say ken's child goes to brewer island elementary school and ken's child is a first grader who can't name their letters and doesn't know the sounds that the letters make in our district there's currently no process by which your child receives an sst meeting a specialized meeting for a group of educators at brewer island to sit down and talk about you and devote 30 minutes only talking about your child now if noelia's son goes to fiesta and is a first grader
158and can't name his letters and doesn't know the sounds the letters make it's possible that noelia's son will get an sst meeting so what we're trying to do is eliminate that variability we're trying to say as a school district we want every school who has a first grader that doesn't know their letter names and letter sounds to sit down and devote time to that child to start interventions in first grade and in kindergarten and not wait until the middle of second grade to start tracking interventions because the real goal is to help the child never need a special education assessment our past practices at some point an educator becomes so alarmed by how far apart that student is from grade level to where they're at that they submit a request for assessment out of a
159sense of desire to help the child and what we're trying to do is be data informed to go as early as possible to enact the many effective programs we have in place so like in your son's case ken we would have special time during the school day for our reading tosa to help your child for eight weeks we would ask you to have your child do the recommended number of minutes on footsteps surveillance and st math at home we would ask you to log the non footsteps related books you read with your child at home we would ask your child to to attend the reading boost program from october 1st until november 15th and give your child a pre-test and a post-test and if your child improves we keep it going another eight weeks because
160what we're trying to identify is when we help you in general education does your child improve and if they do testing for special education is not warranted it's only warranted when the programs we have in place are implemented for an extended period of time and don't work then we're like what can we do to help this child and that's the change that's happening this year thank you that did give me time to think about my questions i had two follow-ups one is we talk about interventions that are part of um the pre-referral process i have two follow-ups so that one are the job the general education intervention some of which we talked about for example the math boost are those things accessible to special education students which i guess is separate from the pre-referral because
161the students are not students that are in special education so maybe it's not a follow-up to that but it just made me think about that question yeah they're available to everyone okay i asked well this is more of a comment so okay um i have a hard time distinguishing uh and then what does what does support for staff look like when we're thinking about some of these things right like if this is the way that we're changing practices um and i'm just curious kind of what that process is looking like we started um this summer with a great deal of professional development with a heavy push in both june we had five days in june and then five days in august prior to school starting for um all for especially with pac which is the
162early literacy um that's really important that our kindergarten and first grade teachers receive that we've also made it available to our sdc teachers because we want them to have that same training and then i know david has more information about the rollout as we move forward but it'll increase up the grades so we're starting with the littles teachers receive that training they're also receiving training on the other interventions that are available and we'll continue to build those in throughout the course of the year to make sure that anyone who didn't receive them in june or august will um get them to because we want the 100 of people trained in the interventions i have just two questions um talks about the third year of monitoring by the state can you talk a little bit more
163about um how is that process right yeah we want to get out of that so um they look at um there are certain flags for our district that have come up over the years and um like i said before it's the it's our primary um latinx boys or some males um in like kindergarten first grade so we have way too many that are identified under um slv so every year they go through and the numbers do fluctuate i can get those numbers for you i don't have them off the top of my head but they kind of draw a line as to what's reasonable and expected in a district of our size and considering our demographics um and so i think i i did share in in june and um i'm happy to bring that
164back to if you want to compare but if you look at our other demographic groups and the other eligibility criteria it's glaringly high in um specifically in that one area um i think we have about 500 students total in special ed that are um that identify as hispanic or latinx and i think it's about 215 are identified as sld of those kids so that percentage rate is is what's red flagging us with the state um i don't know the exact number how many more like how much further down i have to get before they stop calling and i can get that for you um they give us reports every year and actually it's way more than just every year we meet regularly with um we have a specific person assigned to us from the cde
165and we meet with him regularly and we go over you know what what our action plan is what we're doing to reduce these things um and that's and so in in doing that we um our goal is obviously to reduce that i think that this last year is the first year that something is actually there's been an actual action that will impact that so this this push to require um our staff to engage in these um interventions and the cycles of inquiry is the first time we've really done something significant in terms of reducing that so um we will need to monitor it closely and see what the results are for the year but i anticipate we'll see a reduction great thank you and then my second question was yes i hope you come okay
166and bring your appetite any other questions sorry just to follow up on that on the um over identification of the uh latinx males students if you sort of charted out wouldn't they have to essentially leave our district at some point before our numbers start decreasing because once you're in you're kind of in great and so we're looking at primary students reducing that number you're still going to be high they'll still be high as you go along until those other students graduate so the goal of special education is to no longer need special education and we do have a process for exiting students i agree with you it hasn't been we don't see high numbers of students exiting but that's because we haven't had the correct interventions and training in place in order to support students
167so that they're we're reducing the number of minutes that they need in their you know getting their special specialized academic instruction and i mean eventually the goal is that you would you know receives enough support that you no longer qualify and we do exit students um we hold triennial re-evaluation so every three years we do a full cycle eval we do a full um academic assessment and that's when we determine whether or not a student continues to qualify so um yeah absolutely the goal is that we would slowly you know improve that and so that we're we you know what that's that a lot of people feel like no i need to keep it and you know that's what i want but um actually the goal is to no longer need it so that you're
168just functioning um like the rest of your peers in your gen ed classroom thank you um so i got really excited so i i will ask a question about like the data and the presentation but i want to focus on the bbq for a second um because i went out through school loop i'm assuming that it like automatically translated and so i'm hoping that we're gonna see and i know it's been like a goal of cdac and the special education department to like have more um parent engagement from the latinx right so it went it went out through parent square which is the new oh sorry is a wonderful um assistant in getting that out to all of our families and um so we it was sent in both languages to all families and the
169wonderful things that it comes with this automatic um rsvp so i i people could answer right away and we were they came back quick we got lots of good responses so i think we have a really nice representation of our families um 80 families is a lot so i'm really excited about that number and i'm really looking forward to seeing people on saturday awesome okay and then so at the barbecue will there be a translator um we have several spanish speaking members of our group that'll be there um i can actually that's a great um suggestion i can ask to see if we can bring some extra translators as well and you know it's really meant to be a like a very nice social time and just you know kind of informal but also my
170whole team will be there i want all the coordinators my assistant director teachers to be present and just available to say hi this is me um we're here to help you and you know get to know your name and just kind of you know have a nice social yeah yeah absolutely yeah i'm that's i'm sure that'll happen i just know sometimes like you know in those social settings there are families that want to communicate with that speak other languages but that's great that you have staff there um and then i had a question about the disproportionality and um i know i know we've like i've asked this question before but how so we know how many are potentially over identified right this is the number that we should have this is a number that are
171over identified do families like how has that been communicated to families and um because i just imagine right if families like have this information and they i've kind of seen like two different things in in my experience working with with um like younger folks and children that have special um needs it's kind of like there's some parents that are like oh they have special needs like they they just can't do it right and then there's other ones that are like like i'm gonna push for my kids to learn every single thing that they can and be as independent and you know have as many opportunities as possible and so i'm just wondering like if that's kind of a dynamic that's been noticed or like you know how do we how do we try to encourage
172all families that are whose kids are in this category to be those parents that like push right so i think that's something that we can really focus on through our cdag and our parent education and our outreach that's really important to you know just to help parents understand what they can do better and how better to advocate for their kids um also the the thing about special ed is that each case is so different um and so whenever we're meeting with families and going through that process that's an our opportunity to educate families also and let them know what their children's strengths are and not always focus on the deficits we really need to look at the strengths and build them up that way also um but no i love the idea of doing more
173parent outreach and education around um just best practices and you know what works and what you can do to get your kids really um excited about learning and then also just successful in general outside of just being in school yeah thank you okay any other questions okay peter can you please go to public comment there's any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay amy go ahead hi everyone this is amy fincher um thank you heather for all of the information and for the shout out about cdac volunteers i'm looking forward to meeting people um this weekend as well um i was really encouraged to see that special education was the first topic for the new board study session
174model and i know that um meeting ended up getting cancelled but i really hope to see it rescheduled i'm so um interested in hearing that deep dive into information and the discussion from the board i did want to bring up two concerns that i believe impact all students but in particular students with learning differences and special needs and some of these i've spoken to some of you about already but i wanted the to take the opportunity to talk about it here um so the first is professional development on new curriculum it um it's been given on essentially a volunteer basis so teachers haven't been required to attend it and you mentioned tonight that special education teachers were invited to participate in those professional development sessions as well and so my concern is that the model
175doesn't provide parity or equity and instruction district-wide or even within one grade level team at one school site and so my ask is or my concern is that if it's not given if it's not if excuse me any professional development on a curriculum that's not adopted by the entire school and doesn't seem like it's supported structurally feels like it could be set up for failure and so i would just advocate that if the district is moving towards these um really great sounding og based reading curriculum and instruction that all teachers general and special education should be required to attend them and to that the district work with the union to ensure this can be done so that all students receive this best possible instruction and teachers feel prepared and supported but are also being compensated
176for their time and then the second issue i wanted to bring up is one i've spoken about several times it's the fact that teachers and paras aren't contracted until the day before school starts it seems impossible to expect a teacher particularly an fcc or rsp teacher to be able to be well-versed in all of their students ieps and prepare to implement them support their students with only one workday where they're also prepping their classrooms materials and attending meetings at their school sites in particular is a parent of a child who has high support needs it's really hard to feel confident that my child's teacher or aide or other classroom staff are can really be adequately prepared to support him not to mention all the other students in his class with such little time to familiarize
177themselves with ieps and prepare for that first day of school i know that this is a union and contract issue as well and i would just encourage the district to really prioritize providing teachers with more contracted time prior to the first day of school with i'm happy to discuss this more in other forums as well but wanted to take the opportunity to share this concern here today thank you thank you amy okay president procter we have no other hands for public comment okay thank you let's go back to board comments now i have some comments but was there something no did you want to say no okay um okay i might be a little bit all over the place i'm trying to follow my notes um a couple of just like follow-ups to some of
178my clarifying questions um one is oh i just kind of wanted to make the comment around the dnqs that part of the reason for asking is i know sometimes we've had folks share that there's a concern of parents wanting services and then us telling them that they don't qualify and so it's just helpful to have context in terms of how many of those are requested by parents and not um in the grand scheme of things so um i'm glad that it's not mostly parents requesting and you know us saying that students don't aren't qualifying for them for various reasons um i i also had a follow-up too i know i asked the question about general ed interventions being accessible to spend um i've had quite a few parents reach out to me um wanting their
179students or being surprised about the math boost and their students not um being asked who are in special education so is it possible for us to do a little bit of a deeper dive into that program in particular um and any other kind of district-wide interventions to make sure that we are including our students with special needs in those and and if we're not that we do okay um also just a request for we have the nps npa numbers from the previous years can we start to just do a year to date for this year i know it's not all-inclusive but i know we just approved a bunch and so it'd be super helpful just to know like where we are as we continue to move forward um and then a follow-up to the referral
180process um super glad to see that we're doing something a little bit more systematic with regards to that i have asked about that at nasa over the past couple of years and so i think it's really really important um and i know you gave a little bit of context around like being able to track it i'm just wondering i don't know maybe this is a question if there's even more that you could share but like do we have a checklist is there one form that everyone's using are we moving towards something like i would love for it to be just like real like everyone knows every parent knows you know kind of like what that looks like um so that if they get that email from a teacher or you know whatever around like your
181like everyone knows what to expect across all of our sites so i guess it's am i allowed to um so yeah actually our so my gen ed counterpart which is dr herrera um is actually working on and and kind of finalizing right now a more uniform ssc process an mtss process that will be implemented district-wide every school every classroom every principal will know what those steps are so it is kind of um like the checklist um and for the first time it will be uniform so like i mentioned that just a little bit earlier is that previously every school had an ssc system but they were all different and so now we're going to have one that's the same for everyone the same requirements will be built in the same expectations will be built in
182so we are able to work through that process and it's very um it's really transparent what those steps are so that we're not just jumping ahead we'll also collect data on the implementation of those strategies so that as we engage in our ongoing analysis we can identify any program that isn't producing a positive result to to analyze why that may or may not be happening i definitely appreciate that it also made me just think about um you know i think about the fact that it's inevitable that there will be some teachers that have a more challenging time providing those supports than others for a variety of reasons and i'm just curious do we have interventions to support teachers so that they are able to provide you know adequate interventions etc to support students so that
183we don't have a situation where students are getting referreds because you know teachers don't have the support that they need part of the design that our ed services team and our student services team over the last seven months put together in conjunction with the strategic plan committee was a design focused on getting more concentrated academic support to earlier grade levels so you can take a school we have our assistant principal here from laurel elementary school that has multiple reading teachers on special assignment assigned to that one school reason we did that is because we analyzed their data and created a calculus that resulted in her school having more reading support teachers than brewer island brewer island had x number of students who needed academic support and reading is far lower than laurel laurel has more
184kids also more kids are behind in their reading laurel has more staff so i think throughout the year our work is to analyze and make sure that the staffing is sufficient because those reading specialists are working in classrooms this year with kids and with teachers not separate from or working with only a handful of kids our reading specialists are going to be working with david you might have a better eyeball number on this but a really substantial number of kids on a on a daily basis so the design is intended to facilitate that in class support footsteps st math and path are available to all students any child that needs a chromebook or a hotspot is provided that resource and then the other parts are built into our mtss process and i think our teachers
185will be sort of relieved to see how many people are going to help them get this process off the ground because every school also has a counselor that's assigned to be involved in this process and a principal and a tosa and so you start to make the list there and it really ends up becoming a support for classroom teachers thank you for more context there not quite done with my comments slash questions um [Music] uh you know you're going to hear from me about the desire for a special education strategic plan or whatever you want to call it and just similar comments as i made to carry about preschool just like how do we ensure that when we're sharing that we're really grounded in our overall strategic plan we're grounding ourselves and what our goals
186are for special education we're just sharing on those every single time i don't you know i i don't think it's too much i think it's actually like really helpful i know that we've had more organization to these presentations which i appreciate and i would love for us to grounded in those overarching goals and um data around those goals and how we're monitoring progress around those goals and how we're getting feedback on them and then how we're making adjustments right like every time um again kind of to the point that i need to carry i just i think it's helpful in terms of just like all of us being aligned and communicating really clearly to the community i also think it just helps us to be better in terms of the decisions that we're able to
187make if that's how things are organized so we just um appreciate that and then um yeah would love to see kind of like a one year three or five year plan around kind of where we're going which i think is something that's happening yes yeah i can sort of speak to that so um the two big focus areas for the strategic plan as it relates to sped are the inclusion task force and the dual identified task force so we have two groups going this year um we're calendared out for the year my goal is to have our team make a recommendation to you and to the district for what inclusion will look like in 23 24 and then likewise for our dual identified study team um that that team is still sort of um developing
188in terms of like the inclusion task force we have a pretty clear idea of exactly what you know we want to be able to do for you like by april of this school year and then the dual identified group is sort of like developing and growing as we build we now have a director of um bl and so she's cooperating with us too we're looking at reclassification for students with disabilities or all of those conversations so it's that's um it's broader but we're working to kind of refine those goals and make them more specific so that we can report them out to you sounds good how who's who's like on those tasks so i'm running the inclusion task force and our assistant director kira is um running the uh dual identified task force and then
189i have a team of it's a broad cross-section i've got administrators teachers parents um special education teachers everybody a little bit of everyone got it i think your target is about 18 we said something like that for your your task force group so enough to have the richness of the diversity of opinion but not so much that the conversation can't get going where it's just too big of a group so we're also doing the same thing with our culture responsive curriculum and practices task force which is about 18 to 24. sounds good um the last point i was going to make is just you know um it kind of builds off of just just grounding ourselves and goals and data and et cetera i know we're doing a lot of work on data and you
190presented a lot of data and i think um i i think there's an opportunity to highlight some of what's going well right i think when we when david shared the cast data you know our data for special education is nowhere where we want it to be right we can all acknowledge that like it's not okay and there were improvements that were made at a time that was really challenging and we'll see how that measures up with how other folks did and um i just i guess i would just like push you and us to take a moment to celebrate that too and to really think to your point that you just shared diego like what did we do to make that happen what were the strategies how do we know they were effective what do
191we want to continue doing what strategies are we not going to do what does that mean for what families can and should do and how do we ensure that we're communicating to families around around some of that to make sure that like they have the resources which brings me full circle to what we were talking about with preschool which is just um you know i was thinking as you guys were sharing a little bit about like you know the barriers to accessing preschool and just thinking about like there's a lot of parallels and special education right around barriers that people are experiencing um and i think there's an opportunity to do some similar sorts of whether it's empathy walk as trustee corzo mentioned or whether it's um i don't know exactly what it looks like
192and you know don't don't feel the need to like dictate that but just um are there some ways where like i was thinking about you know you mentioned the community specialists like is there a way to have somebody that like runs like it helps parents navigate the process helps parents navigate helps get like are there some things like that that we can put into place that we have been working for our students in our english language learners and our students that need other kinds of supports that we can think about replicating in the special education space to help make those connections stronger because i still think we have some work to do there right um i think we all do so a little bit all over the place but i'll stop talking now any other
193comments on this one okay i'll be real quick i always say that but this time i promise um does cdac also have access to parent square or is or do you collaborate with them and like do all that hear me um right so diego perez works really closely with our cdec leadership and myself so that he does all of the um news share for us all the publications and all of the announcements um so yeah the answer is yes but yes so we um when we set all of those dates up at the beginning of the year he collaborates with us to make sure that all the information gets out to everyone okay okay awesome i i'm just wondering because like i don't i'm still learning parent square just like everyone else so i'm like
194do they have like their own um or like if diego's managing it for them and parents want to ask questions does that go to there's a couple of different ways that can work um it depends so if we're um if we're like in an active meeting then they can just ask questions in a meeting several times last year we put some sort of simple surveys out just to get feedback on you know what's working and so we were able to send those out and collect those in multi multiple languages um just to hear and often it's just really individual um questions so that that helps us know who needs what and how we can reach out to them given the answers they need um when we see trends that's when we decide to address it
195on a larger scale and maybe make it like a topic at a cdc meeting or you know invite a specialist to come in and talk about that topic it's something that we're seeing a lot of families being interested in i don't know about the two-way i don't know i don't know if it goes by working that way or not i'm still figuring it out myself as a parent so we're good yeah that's it thank you i think i have comments about that as well uh parent square that is um going back to the to what trustee watkins had mentioned a while ago about um when i look at the mps's and mpa's and the chart and the thought about having something as of like today right we've got the last is 2122 where are we
196at 22 23 right as we're going into this and you have here you know you mentioned done a really good job in terms of like bringing we only have one agency teacher um but we're trying to now work on the paras and the resource specialists as well uh one thing that i'm interested in in when you break up between the npa and the mps right we've had an increase in terms of the mpa costs by about 2.6 million or so and the nps has been just like 1.2 we have like 39 students in mps's i'm wondering if you went back to like 18 19 19 20 20 like how many students were in that category because i remember when i joined the point i'm pretty sure i think it was maybe only like 20 or
19722 were in like the mps you know and that was that sort of 1.7 maybe and maybe this is my numbers are all off but i'm curious to see how it fluctuates throughout the years and then i'm assuming that the costs actually increase i mean you look at the actual cost per student in 2021 is probably much different from because everything has gone up um i'd also be curious that if you project this out just in terms of 20 to 23 and then years later some of these students are going to also premiere their comment if they're going to graduate out and so you kind i kind of would love to see whether it's a strategic plan or something where you can kind of see like this is what is going on and this is
198where we're going to like so as we are maybe not going to over identify people we'll see a drop here we'll do this we'll see something uh and it would be really interesting to see just in terms of the breakdown of just the numbers uh over the years so um that's my comment i mean yeah it's it's just it's it's a bit concerning of course but um from what i hear of course it all fluctuates um uh and so i would maybe just love a little more data on that but um thank you for the presentation thank you i'd be happy to put that together for you and take a look thank you for the presentation i don't have much to add other than um i appreciate all of the information you share every time
199i think i learned something new every time you're up here so i appreciate it and um thank you for her comments and at some time and we can we can um uh briefly discuss that now i'll ask david to chime in um on this point um because his department did coordinate and put together the professional development but part of what the district did last november was begin a process of setting aside funding to offer professional development to our educators this summer and we decided that because historically in the district our teachers come back a day before school starts and they receive their professional development three days throughout the year that are separated by at least 60 days each time that that wasn't going to result in the kind of transformative educational practice we wanted to
200see this year so we decided to offer three days of highly concentrated content training alongside some inclusion and gender spectrum spectrum training for one day and implicit bias training a full day of implicit bias training so you had several hundred david would know more than i but it's in the multiple hundreds of educators who came to those trainings and so in doing so we were able to um honor our employees by paying them their their per diem rate which was also not a pre-existing practice so a teacher that's been teaching for 25 years earned their actual salary to be here this summer but we acknowledge some people have a wedding in june and we're on vacation in august and couldn't be here on those days because this was so brand new for everybody so we
201have a plan to get that reading program training for every teacher and the dates have been identified they're about three weeks from now and the reason we chose to delay that training for the group of teachers that weren't able to come to the summer training is because we want them to bond with their students and not miss the first 25 days of school so we acknowledge that for those classrooms it is going to have a delay for that implementation but we're okay with that because we wanted to establish the importance of the training and set the money aside we set up set aside about a million dollars to do the training i know that our special education teachers had some predetermined and set aside training on those five days in june and august and i
202believe some i won't say many but i believe some actually attended both they went to the five days in june for special education and then came to this five days in august for general education so i think many of our special educators came to those summer trainings the key is that because special education is so varied a teacher that teaches in a moderate to severe program where the children have social and um executive functioning and life skills goals attending a three-day training on a reading program isn't going to facilitate them working with their students but teachers who are using the spire program many have received the training but would have benefited from continued training in the reading program that we have in place there but also we're invited to attend the june and august training
203for the early literacy implementation that we put together and again david has more details than i and we do have professional development coming up as a topic for this board to receive a presentation and i know you go into a lot more detail then yeah let me i you described it well let me just add that um you know i really want to honor kind of amy's question and the the concern because historically the way we've managed professional development has been sort of a you know a one-shot opportunity and then there wasn't this the consistency of follow-up to make sure did everybody get it and whatnot and we're really shifting that model so um so yes you know the opportunity to optionally attend in june and in august uh the opportunity to support more teachers
204in september but also to recognize that you know we're committed to this program for many years and we're going to look at this year the whole year as multiple opportunities so if a person doesn't get access to it in june and august and let's say doesn't get access to it in september although that would be a concern we will follow up we have a list of every teacher that should receive the training we will make sure that we're checking that box so um so i you know i appreciate amy's concern and and the questions that are raised and and because we're being sort of much more methodical about it now also asking for sort of the patients to say if you didn't get it right now we've got you we know who you are and
205we will make sure that over the course of this year we will get everybody trained so um that would be my ad to what superintendent ochoa said thank you so much all right well thank you heather you find my agenda okay we're ready to move on to the ninth game which is california community schools partner programs there you go can you hear me okay great um hello everyone um again my name is uh dr uh christian druvarkawa and i am the director of school leadership um this thing is [Laughter] thank you peter appreciate it um and i'm here to talk to you in addition to the gulf's operation here um also here to talk to you all about the california community schools partner grant uh the program that our district under the direction of our
206superintendent ochoa applied last spring and we received a little bit of background the application was submitted in the previous school year toward the end of the year and not too long ago we were notified the district was notified that we had received a 200 000 grant to engage our title 1 school communities in a two-year stakeholder process this is really an incredible commitment and investment in our title one schools um california you know in july 2021 they passed a hefty three billion dollar investment uh and this is kind of our uh our our kind of introduction into getting a piece of this uh a hefty uh investment in california community school partnerships so as you can see here this is really community schools is really the approach on the whole child which i will talk
207a little bit more about and whole school model for equitable school improvement um the these are the title one schools in our district uh we've got laurel leed park fiesta gardens and sunny break and in this first part of the grant we're in the planning grant phase uh which means in the next two years starting with this current year uh we will uh begin to you know engage these five school communities um uh with a lot of parent engagement uh professional development um what's really neat about this is is the why right we know that uh school communities embody all voices right all hands on deck all of their voices so this is really sort of uh a process of empowering uh all of our communities uh in in these title one schools uh toward
208a common goal which is to ensure uh that we provide every imaginable opportunity for children to thrive and succeed uh so again the approach here is whole child and being in approaching it through this cultural responsive um what's also really great um is that all of this work uh in this current year and in the next year which i'll talk a little bit more about what that will look like it's all aligned to our current strategic plan um you know as we look at our three goals achievement equity and wellness it's really you know the work that we will be engaging on these five title one school communities is really aligned um to to our strategic plan goals including the five building blocks right there's going to be a deep family and community engagement as
209part of the process professional development a lot of data analysis and decision making um when reaching out to our stakeholders shared leadership um uh we will focus on you know including the student voices and to our leadership councils um and uh and even you know the responsible fiscal support next week there will be some budget meetings that um our district uh myself will be intending uh to give us more insight onto this so this this key here um is really important because this is what uh explains to you kind of the framework of the california community schools partnership program they really have these four key pillars that are uh under the expanded learning time and opportunities which as you know we've been talking a lot about right integrated student support collaborate leadership practices active family
210community engagement so continuing to listen to our community voice members from every stakeholder group um the framework also believes in the four key conditions of learning which are supportive environmental conditions productive instructional strategies again all aligned to our strategic plan uh social emotional learning right sel component systems of support uh to help the whole child and our families um these are the four cornerstone commitments that this uh framework believes in right is this asset driven and strength based practice uh racially justin restorative school climates uh powerful and culturally proficient in relevant instruction uh shared decision making uh and participatory practices so as you can see you can start seeing kind of that that convergence of our strategic plan strategies right it's it's kind of uh embedded through all all of these uh pieces here and
211then the four proof practices uh which are community asset mapping and gap analysis uh community school coordinator which you know i will play in in that role as i lead the march on this we're under the direction of superintendent ochoa um site based um an led-based advisory councils uh that we will strengthen and build and integrate and aligning all the relevant programs so this is kind of the framework that really undergirds and underpins uh this grant this uh california school community program uh so what to expect as i stated earlier um we are in the first phase which is the two-year planning grant phase which we just received and this will then allow us to fulfill these five areas um then there will be like this huge data analysis and we will submit an application
212at the conclusion of the second year to then uh receive hopefully right and we are uh at the end we will go for that implementation grant uh which will then funnel uh funds and and literally listen to the stakeholder feedback on all the important pieces so we will engage our communities this first year in professional development on teacher instruction restorative justice pbis early childhood education then that parent engagement which we know is so key right we know that we need to include parent voices in in how we frame a child you know the whole child uh in their experience in our schools so we're really going to hone in on that key question what does it take to effectively be involved in one's child education right so again is that engagement and bridging that gap
213between the school and the homeless and i think what's key about the way this process will unfold is that you will be at these schools this year like in 30 to 60 days holding a meeting with a room full of parents talking about restorative justice and then come back a month later with that group of parents and talk about early childhood education and pbis and then three months later take that group of parents through an analysis of our tk through eight program basically turn the focus on what we're doing to try to educate their kids to hear from them what's not working for you what what's missing for you what what sounds like wait you do that i've never heard of that right so what are we missing in terms of not hearing from families
214from these five communities at that point kicking forward to about february march sitting with these folks and doing an asset-based analysis to talk to these families from these five school communities and create time and space so we can talk about the good things that this community brings to the table so that we can then identify the barriers getting in the way of their kids getting an education such as i never got my kids into preschool because you don't have enough preschool classes at the end you're going to have a team at each five of these schools of super involved informed leaders who dr robert is going to hand to the principal next year of each one of those schools to keep this process moving forward create a plan for each school so about february march
215of 2024 we're applying for funding each one of these schools is a little bit different in size so laurel's a real big school they would stand to receive multiple millions of dollars over a five-year period which their staff and parents this shared leadership group would decide how to spend those monies in alignment with these pillars a smaller school like park might have one and a half million just as an example but it would be sufficient to meet the need for those kids and then at that point in time as the superintendent and our director of equity our directors of curriculum and instruction we'll make a case to the school board to say if the state's going to give us 2 million let's add 750 000 for each school so we have some investment in this
216community schools program so when the funds dry up in five years we can keep this working we've budgeted for this it's it creates value it addresses needs on the front end um it's very very powerful very powerful work um and you know superintendent ochoa emphasize um you know the focus is restorative right i mean we're looking at how to enrich you know these families right um and communities through a strength-based approach asset-based approach this restorative component and you know we're moving away from deficit thinking deficit models um and really looking to advance inclusion and equity right and empowering our families to be a part of the decision making process because we know that they have opinions they know you know what services that they need that our system might be failing to capture right and
217that's kind of speaks to the superintendent ochoa's uh comment on uh this piece here on you know identifying the key barriers that are coming in the way of that and so this deep meaningful engagement is really going to help us bring in the resources that we know these communities need that you know to make them even stronger and and provide these whole child uh uh kind of a approach to ensuring that every child has every opportunity to succeed and not just reach potential right there's all this talk about reaching the potential but reaching beyond that potential right there's a big difference there right everyone's got a potential but i think it's even better to go beyond that potential and give every child the keys that they need for that [Applause] and that's any questions questions
218thank you great great presentation um a couple of questions uh the first one superintendent of choi you touched on briefly a little bit in terms of the finances and sort of the long-term plan um is there so we have so the way i understand it two years we got a 200 000 planning grant after the two years i mean we're doing all this stuff uh we're planning we're going to apply for implementation grant for our five schools is there just as the state capped out how much money we will be receiving is it more of like well we are going to plan and our plan shows that we need x amount of dollars in this and then we apply for that or is it like here's how here's the limit that you can have this
219is what you're working with uh i think the limits are going to be determined by the site you know report um there will be a very deep data-driven analysis for each site and that's really going to determine um the actual number of funding that will be funneled to that cloud one of the things working to our advantage here as well is our willingness as a district to take in this potential opportunity and say we should do this because this is a lot of work and this does not happen during the regular workday this is all stuff you know dr rubel cabo will be at these schools from 5 30 until 7 45 8 pm multiple times every month for the next year and it is a matter of fact that there are many many school
220districts regionally and throughout the state who qualify for this program that did not apply for the funds so many that they're going to do a second round to try to elicit more now if i want to be a pessimist and say i don't think even that second round is going to drum up the kind of applications they're hoping for what will happen is the three billion dollars doesn't become 2 billion or 1 billion they take those income those budget stratifications like schools with less than 100 can qualify for 50 000 a year schools between 101 and 300 can qualify for such and such and they increase the available amounts for each one of those schools that's the reason when i meet with administrators and staff i say could be as little as seven and a
221half million could be as much as 10 to 11 million based on how many people applied and who was granted the funding for those applications and then assuming we were successful we would then have five years to go ahead and spend that amount of money down and the way that you explained it is we will put in some of our own money and so at some point tips so therefore we won't actually have a successful program that now just runs out of money because we want to have the program give us the results we want which is more kids ready more kids coming to school more kids reading more kids doing math at grade level so where you might spend 220 000 the first year in a tutoring program you want to plan the second
222year to have that number come down because students more students are at grade level as a result of the in class instruction and changes that we've put in place and the effectiveness of our tutoring great um thank you second question which maybe is i should ask maybe in the next agenda item maybe but i'll just raise it as precursor is obviously fiesta gardens is one of our title one schools pam is going through with an analysis so i'm just i don't know if we want to talk about now or or our next item thank you one clarifying question that the current grant for 200 000 um is that solely for the stakeholder engagement piece or it's also to begin implementing some of the strategies that were are coming do you have the second part of
223money you're talking about is for the implementation so would be let's just use laurel since our illustrious assistant principals here still with us by the way wonderful to see there that school could potentially receive say a half a million dollars each year for e for those five years but it would start in 24 25. so 24 25 25 26 27 28 28 29 so you're talking far down the road and my recommendation to the school board will be in our long-term planning to allocate funding to take this this potential opportunity and say let's put some of our own skin in the game so that when this funding does go away because it will go away there's still that that historical connection to what we tried to do through the community schools grant and maybe maybe
224none of us are here six years from now in the positions we're in but we'll have left something in place that's really powerful and and has that that feeling of sort of it belongs in our district and it stays in place the follow-up to that is just you know obviously there are some pieces that we know are best practices um some things that are already happening like i'm thinking about for example like boys and girls club after school services that's happening at park now are there any aspects of that that we plan to begin implementing prior to like completing this process yeah so if you take a look at our strategic plan and the very very cutting-edge very um ambitious goals that we have there and the strategies that we have in place you pointed
225out trustee our vice president watkins the the impact that we expect to see from the boys and girls club program that we've initiated at park and serving 126 kids as we speak this program is the kind of program that if we can get a foothold and expand next year and build upon the program then this gives us that opportunity to put it in place in 12 months the community schools grant program and processes designed to facilitate exactly that extended day supports are built into it so we want both things to happen at the same time we want to be able to build and then also engage and plan for the future so that it becomes long-term and not solely tied to this group of school board members and superintendent but rather it like just think
226about it's actually sort of very like beautiful to think about like parents at each one of these school communities saying no we fought for our tutoring program we want to keep our tutoring program with the boys and girls club or with the annex or with newton um with homework central what have you so that we've we've brought them into the decision-making role any other clarifying questions i have one um i'm just wondering i know we have a lot of community partners and um i you know we celebrated them at the end of last school year wait what yeah it was okay everything june 17th time is a blur for me um but i um how are we planning on collaborating with them and and because that because i think about how you know with their
227resources in ours and and we we can you know just be a little bit more effective and another many of our community partners that that want to be part of this and are excited and actually see some folks like who have cared about north central getting a school um i'm jumping to a different topic but like um about all of our title one schools and the needs of the students there um yes so i see some folks on the call but my point was yes how are we collaborating with our community partners and are is there going to be some time spent on identifying other community partners um yeah absolutely and so part of that stakeholder engagement with parents and families is to identify what it is that would help right educate the child and
228provide those opportunities so that that data that qualitative data is going to drive our decisions and the recommendations that we propose to uh the implementation grant i'm looking at like the cornerstone commitments and um i'm all about i'm all about them but i'm just wondering how how like the second one specifically like how we thought about rolling that out in in the training um which one is that one the racially just and restorative school climates um so that component there's different ways right um one of them is you know providing you know pd professional development i know our director of equity is you know heavily involved in connecting us with um you know you know respectable folks right in the field who have been successful and engaged in communities and stakeholders on that topic so
229a lot of that again will be you know holding those conversations with our communities and and guiding them right and into thinking about how we can imagine ourselves as you know racially just community right and that's part of the big vision of the california community school is to be you know a part of a school community that is run democratically where everyone is feels safe to voice and be a part and integrate themselves and so a lot of that will be you know a part of the engagement and the conversations that we have the families that i certainly will plan to be having with families in spanish you know what you know the languages that that they speak um and doing that's the same right with staff so i mean i think you know our
230different stakeholder groups will be receiving you know that meaningful uh conversation and professional development okay peter can you please public comment on this item if there's any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay president proctor we have no hands for public comment okay thank you let's go back to the board for a board comment i'll be brief we talked about everything i'm very excited that this is happening i i can't wait um and i'm very curious to see how the whole plan and the planning goes forward it'll be really interesting and then i guess the only other question is is at what point uh will you come back for updates um so but i'm generally very excited about
231it and can't wait thank you i will also be brief this time [Laughter] thank you so much for uh the update on this also really excited um and looking forward to updates on how the stakeholder engagement sessions go and what we're learning and how that what that means for the work that we're going to do but this is really important work so thank you for leaving it i'll be brief as usual thank you so much for all of this i'm really excited um like superintendent ochoa mentioned we may not all be here when this when we fully see this um whole plan go through but it feels really good to be kind of building this foundation at this point and i just can't wait to hear updates and and learn more about what's going on
232so thank you so much i will just say that i'm so excited that we're doing this and as one of the resources that i was kind of asking about before i want to like flag again that um and i and i want to be clear i know that the north central community is not the only community or area that needs support but north central did get a grant from san francisco foundation and there's a like a fellowship that will have about three hundred thousand dollars to invest in to north central in the next three years and so um i'm gonna be one of the fellows and i've already said like oh we need to collaborate because we have this opportunity and we can do all of this at the same time and work together and
233be more effective so yeah i want to make sure to elevate that again thank you very much for your presentation tonight we will move on to item 9b pan presentations north central san mateo school design district equity review and systems mapping thank you president proctor tonight's presentation will be probably the most unique presentation of the night as the board is well aware dating back as far as november of the school board entered into a contract with the pedro noguera consulting firm at the time to begin work equity related work for the district related to north central san mateo focus group work resulting in a presentation a couple weeks before i joined the district as the superintendent which led to a follow-up agreement with uh bond to engage in three projects for us a school design
234project that took place over a seven month period a district equity review which took place concurrently and a process mapping review which is a real specific focusing on early literacy for english learner students that took place also during the same time frame and our lead consultant joaquin nogueira dr nogara is out of the country but he and i have been working together on this project with his team he sees delgado and others who've done excellent work and we didn't want to risk trying to make a phone call over to over across the pond so he's going to join us via recorded presentation to the board and he has made an agreement to come to your next school board meeting to have a very thorough conversation so unfortunately you can ask all the questions you want
235but he's not going to answer them tonight but the good thing about it is it's sort of like putting this information out there to digest it to think about it to really formulate some really well thought out comments and questions and to give the community an opportunity to digest it and to learn about it we'll also bring those documents to our special study session because they do relate to the idea of equity focused data analysis and just include them on that agenda as something folks who choose to attend that meeting can can log into and with the help of our illustrious director of technology peter he's going to cue up dr nogueira and there's two different presentations the first is the school design presentation it's about 17 minutes long and then the second he has
236a doctorate remember so the second is a 30 minute long presentation so we're gonna lock in i'm serious greetings community members peter foster city school take it away okay i'm about to play the video please let me know if you guys can hear it appropriately because my zoom is acting up but hold on greetings community members of the san mateo foster city school district board of trustees and superintendent ochoa my name is joaquin noguera i am a member of the pond team and it is a pleasure to be able to share with you all an update on the work we've been doing in the district this year uh this year following the work that we did last year we were asked to support three initiatives today i'll be presenting on the three initiatives however i'm
237going to begin with the work we did to support the design of a new school for north central san mateo this work involved the creation of a draft for the school's vision and mission recommendations for the educational program and recommendations for the district's next steps to continue to move this project forward we created a school design team this school design team was comprised of 16 family members from north central san mateo eight educators who work for the district some teachers at least one school leader and some district administrators as well five of my colleagues supported this work the team worked over the course of six weeks from april on through may and they got together on a weekly basis six times to do their work as a team in addition to the six meetings there
238were two two-hour community town hall meetings that were open to family members from north central san mateo the school design team meetings were conducted in spanish with english support we initially planned to facilitate these meetings in english but we soon learned that the family members that made up the majority of our team were predominantly spanish speakers and so our team pivoted and those who were unable to speak spanish were provided translations to support uh the purpose of these meetings was really to lift the voices of family members from north central san mateo community members and other educators who have worked in north central san mateo for years so that their views their perspectives their experiences can inform the educational program the vision and the mission of the future school that will serve students from north
239central san mateo and families as well the work that we did was grounded in first the community schools playbook a resource that was created by the partnership for the future of learning as well as the four pillars of community schools which is another research resource that has been used and is used across the state of california to support community school uh initiatives i am including the characteristics of high quality implementation that came from the community schools playbook this is the family and community engagement principles i'm not going to explain all of them i'm leaving it here so that um board of trustees the board of trustees can can review this themselves and and get a sense of the praxis the theoretical and practice based knowledge that informed our work but to just kind of highlight
240a few areas the first is that school and district staff incorporate local knowledge from the communities that they serve into community school practices and curriculum staff members have to be trained in and demonstrate cultural competency so they can build trusting relationships with family and community members number seven um is that schools include family and community members in decision making planning and asset and needs assessment etc this is really what guided our work um and and uh it was in the spirit of really mobilizing but also empowering community the north central family member community members from north central community um that that we worked in this way in addition the four pillars of community schools were the focus of our work together um so the findings that i have which which are really the recommendations for
241the educational program to share today are uh organized by these four pillars four pillars of the collaborative leadership and practices integrated student supports active family and community engagement and expanded and enriched learning time and opportunities these are the characteristics that make community schools what they are which are much more than traditional schools aim to be in terms of our engagement with the school design team it is worth noting um the different steps that we took so we first met the community members that that were brought together um and we sat and listened to them to learn about their experiences and their perceptions of the district and of what north central san mateo students and families need the next was more what involved more of their listening we intentionally worked to build the capacity of the
242team members so that they understood the work that we were engaged in the part of this had to do with learning about the four pillars of a comprehensive community school we next brainstormed ideas for each component and worked together to determine three areas that the group felt would be most important to prioritize and uh the school design team created subcommittees to develop ideas for those areas those priority areas the school design team then reviewed drafts that were created by the subcommittees and updated them by giving each other feedback before going out and holding hosting a a town hall a community town hall where additional family members from north central san mateo were invited to provide feedback that feedback was then incorporated into the work that the school design team was working was creating generating and
243updating uh with that feedback we then went back to the town hall for additional feedback and made additional updates um in the end our school design team had to vote on the resources that were generated and a the vote for approval was meant to represent quote i love it and i will advocate for this that is for the new school the school's vision mission the educational programs and the recommendations that are outlined here so the drafted vision and mission for the new school uh it's important to note that a school's vision and mission can exist as wallpaper and unfortunately in many schools it does however in high functioning learning institutions the vision and mission guide the development of systems structures as well as practices that the individuals within those systems those institutions use it should
244guide day-to-day work the vision is what we want to become and what we want to create what we want to accomplish but the mission is how we will get there it speaks to our commitments so with that said the draft of the vision ex that as it exists now is that our students will deepen their intellectual curiosity to navigate and transform their diverse communities by centering culturally responsive teaching and building relationships with families our students will be bilingual and bi-literate advocates for equity and justice the future school is a rigorous spanish dual language immersion k-8 community school where our students are celebrated for the gifts they bring as emergent bilingual learners our school prioritizes serving the whole person by embedding academic and social emotional services into all programming plans and engagement opportunities to ensure that
245our students and families thrive all members of this community have a shared responsibility for the growth and success of each student and work as equal partners rooting rooted in loving respectful relationships the school design team as i said before was guided by the four pillars of a community school so um what i'm about to share now in terms of outcomes relate directly to those four pillars it's worth noting though that what i'm sharing are highlights and abbreviated versions of what was generated by the school design team so let's begin with leadership and shared responsibilities school design team focused first on roles responsibilities in hiring they charge us with establishing a hiring timeline that accounts for candidates from other san mateo foster city schools and beyond to ensure the district and school are recruiting from expanded
246pools of educators that understand and embody the community school model we need to ensure that all roles within the school are intentionally designed for impact on student learning with delineated responsibilities as well as collaborative relationships and connection to other roles we must protect roles so that personnel are supported to do the most high impact work and establish accountability measures for the unique roles in a community school for example mental health services coordinators need to have time and space protected for them to do the work that they do they will need to be available for walk-in appointments and should not be pulled to cover other logistical needs as we know those of us who have been working in schools for for many years there are times when we need help and people are brought away from
247their their roles and responsibilities or simply lend an extra hand we're going to need to be really intentional about the utilization of the people within this school enrollment provide inclusive guidelines for enrollment that appropriately address students developmental needs for example the consideration of a sixth grade student should be different from those of a kindergarten student applying for enrollment you'll need to develop some systems to work out those differences create an enrollment process that attracts students and families that align with the mission vision school model and graduate learner profile this school is intended to serve those who the district had determined were underserved that should not be lost as we move forward that reality should not be lost as we move forward and create this school so we will need to create equitable and transparent policies
248for enrollment that offer priority to members of the north central community integrated student supports the school design team has suggested that we develop clear roles and responsibilities for all support personnel especially those with positions that are unique to the community school model within these roles there should be clear structures to in place for data-driven decision-making meaningful collaboration and measurable impact consider hiring an intake specialist this is a different role than what is it's likely that this role does not exist in other district schools but this person will research and communicate with the enrolled families prior to the school opening this staff member could work to ensure the proper integrated student supports are in place and also do outreach with local community-based organizations to supplement with additional supports for students and families we'll need to create
249a safety plan that is holistic inclusive and aligned to the community school model carefully consider the impact of police and security presence on campus ensure other supports for example mental health family liaisons etc can be leveraged to support a safe learning environment while also ensuring the campus is open and welcoming to key family and community partners next prioritize after school programming to ensure it is designed towards student interest cost efficient open to all families of interest and prioritizes families with the greatest needs and scheduled to meet their needs family and community engagement in this particular area we recommend that we actively engage the school design team members for continued and future work and draw on their expertise to understand the team's experiences decision-making tools and their vision we should provide leadership development for families and
250partners engaged in design work to maximize their impact we should support community leadership by establishing teaming structures appropriate staff partners and relevant data sharing we will also need to build meaningful partnerships with community-based organizations that include include values-aligned criteria for partnership this means we are selective with our partners we should be working with cbo's to develop measurable outcomes for the school and cbo to accomplish through their collaborative work finally academic programming and expanded learning opportunities we need to build an intentional research-based model for bilingual learning we've heard discussion rich discussion important discussion by the board of trustees about a dual immersion dual language models there are different ways to approach this we suggest that you leverage bilingual education research to build a comprehensive approach to bilingual learning based on those you are serving the approach
251should account for differences in pacing curriculum and work to actively and intentionally dispel myths while holding high expectations we need to design unique supports within the classroom and through the integrated student supports to ensure success of the bilingual model we should be really intentional about empowering families to analyze the different bilingual models and make informed decisions about what is best for students finally we have to consider the impact on enrollment when designing the bilingual approach ensure that students and families have equitable access to enrollment with consideration for home language heritage speakers and newcomers throughout this work it was clear to us that the research out there on what helps schools to be successful across different kinds of schools is going to be useful for this initiative the chicago consortium for school improvement has for more
252than two decades studied schools and and and arrived at five essential areas that are that that must be addressed for any school to continuously grow and improve we recommend that the school design team that that the board of trustees and that the district as a whole support the use of the five essentials to guide the growth of this new school the five characteristics are effective leaders collaborative teachers ambitious instruction supportive environments and involved families this may seem seems simple but is through prioritizing these five areas that they come together to have the impact on students students and families and the wider community as well as teachers and those who work within the school this is the most promising path forward so in terms of what's next we believe that the the next best step will
253be to develop a hiring committee to recruit and select individuals for the core school leadership roles based on the recommendations that the school design team has outlined we'll need to ensure that leaders have a record of being collaborative and community engaged that they are competent in building teacher and staff capacity and experienced in dual immersion settings we must also ensure that they have a laser-like focus on equity once the leaders are selected the hiring committee will transform itself into an advisory board that supports the leaders to recruit and hire staff and begin to develop school systems and partnerships i have here a brief quote from those uh scholars that are responsible for the five essentials being lifted up and being made useful for educators across the country and the world they argue that leadership is
254the driver for change and they say quote these school-based leaders build agency for change at the community level nurture the leadership of others through a shared vision for local reform and provide the necessary guidance over time to sustain a coherent program of school-wide development thank you and president procter has promised earlier uh david if you can help thanks as promised earlier we do have a follow-up presentation from joaquin and this upcoming presentation is going to really start to look closely at the district equity review which was a project that was put together involving a series of in-depth interviews with key staff members and an analysis of the district's programs and then separate from that a deep dive into a process analysis related to early literacy for english learner students so i'm going to put it
255back with peter and he can get the video queued up for the district equity review and the process analysis greetings it is a pleasure to again share some of the work that we have done this year within the san mateo foster city school district as i shared before fun limited was engaged in three initiatives this year uh this presentation will first address the district equity review and then i'll move on to discuss the systems mapping work that we did so a district equity review what is it district equity review is one strategy for understanding a district's capacity to know about and respond to school and student equity needs it's also an important and important strategy for establishing priorities for development and improvement that guide growth through an equity review we examine the systems structures practices
256and processes used by the organization in this case the district that shape patterns and trends in the experiences perceptions and outcomes of students and community ma stakeholders but the process is ultimately intended to illuminate the strengths and areas in need of growth and establish a shared understanding of those needs so that we can use it to inform strategic intervention it through the process we engage district staff and other leaders through interviews and focus groups and learn about their roles and responsibilities as well as their perceptions and experiences with the district's strengths and needs uh that is but one approach and it is a powerful one it is a we've used this approach across many uh districts we've also used a similar and modified approach for schools to understand what is working well to support equity
257and what could be or needs to be adjusted or done away with to address equity at school sites uh so this mixed method approach uh is the first step in a cycle of continuous development and improvement and as you see here this representation of a cycle of development and improvement has the vision at the center as peter sengay has written you can't have a shared learning or you can't have a learning organization without a shared vision the shared vision it provides a compass to keep learning on course when stress develops and as those of us who work in schools know schools can be stressful places they are stressed themselves by what happens around and outside of schools so a vision is really really important but based on that vision the first step is to understand
258the context and that's what the cycle of uh the district equity review is intended to do to to clarify the current context when we understand what the current context is what's working what's not working well to support equity then we can actually develop priorities plan for those priorities and take action and be intentional in in how we approach uh change we should then assess the impact of our actions and that takes us back to a new place um a new start new beginning for the cycle a new context for where we are now so questions that we ask as we are reviewing a district what is happening and why what's working well do the people who work in this system know what's happening are they able to respond in a timely manner what are the
259mechanisms that they have that they rely on for knowing what's happening and for for intervening what then should be the priorities for development and improvement uh our approach to the district equity review involved uh stakeholders at the district level um as well as uh parents um principals and occasionally teachers as well being involved in focus groups interviews and other discussions we also reviewed documents and we use a rubric we created a rubric that has a four point scale with four being exemplary which means that there's evidence of high impact equity practices three being established that equity oriented engagement is embedded in the system a two being emerging that emerging equity practices are visible or apparent are felt are recognized and one ineffectual that efforts to address equity are limited brand new or do not exist
260the research that supports a district equity review um or even a district audit uh equity audit is robust these are some of the resources that we used to develop the tools that we used in the district equity review process right now i'm going to highlight one of the most important ones that was uh useful for developing our framework and our rubric this is the district's advancing racial equity tool dare tool the dare tool um has six domains six areas that it looks at or that district uh leaders can you can can focus on um we adapted adopted and adapted this framework and created our own of course this is intended to address specifically racial equity and give a sense of direction but also instruct work instructively to provide a sense of what matters and what
261what you should have or what you should address for district uh leaders so in adapting this dare tool we chose to explicitly consider um three areas that that research suggests are predictors of student achievement that is race socioeconomic status and language background so this equity review district equity review looked at these four domains and takes into consideration how [Music] we address issues of race socioeconomic status and language background in san mateo foster city school district domain one uh is around is is related to there being a vision for district-wide educational equity that accounts for appreciates and targets different racial socioeconomic and linguistic needs domain two is around um access to rich deeper learning and culturally responsive curricula and practices in a school in all schools and for each student population domain three safe and healthy
262inclusive learning environments domain four financial human and material resources that are sufficiently appropriately and equitably allocated across and within schools domain five meaningful partnerships with families and communities and domain six systems for gathering communicating and using data to drive change equity driven change so in all uh we did quite a bit in the time that we worked within the district on this district equity review uh we reviewed 86 documents uh engaged in 16 interviews eight focus groups and there were 55 participants in our focus groups uh 32 parents 14 principals nine teachers on special assignment we had 71 participants in total so we felt good about the data that we gathered and the the reach of our inquiry and ultimately our findings we feel confident in asserting that these are the necessary areas to focus
263on that our asses our assessment of the district's capacity is um is is uh reliable and accurate based on how deep we went based on the people that we spoke with the documents that we reviewed and the experiences that we learned about across stakeholder groups so here on the left hand side you'll see each of the domains and on the right hand side you will see what we scored each of the domains every domain was scored either a two emerging where there are budding and perhaps promising practices or systems in place or one ineffectual either um systems or practices were inconsistent non-existent or too new to really see the impact of again this is in relation to equity this does not mean that there are not people working hard there are people working very very
264hard good smart people across the district we've met lovely people who are really want to see change and are ready for change it is partly because they are so ready for change that they were so very honest with us about the inconsistencies across the district and the the history the past um practices that disregarded inequity there were there were many stakeholders were very vocal about three areas that have shifted noticeably for them um and you'll notice that i'm not identifying any people because the district equity review is really not an evaluation of individuals it is an examination of how the system structures practices and processes shape people's experiences the outcomes and the perceptions that come from those experiences and outcomes um so people shared with us that three areas have uh been developed grown a
265bit since uh the arrival of superintendent ochoa one is a vision for equity it has not gotten to the point that it's been committed to paper but equity is a part of conversations across change efforts the second area and and this is something that that um has been a breath of fresh air for most of the people that we've spoken with saying that there's no ambiguity here we're very clear equity is important we're going to talk about it it's going to inform our work it's going to inform our planning there's no way around it equity is on the table the second issue is data-driven decision-making that is that superintendent ochoa has been giving people practice but also requiring decisions to be supported by data and this is really important this is what the research shows
266we need to do this is kind of working smart right we have to know what we're doing um if we don't know the impact of what we're doing how do we know if it's working at all or having the effect that we hope it does so we've got vision is is we're beginning to clarify the vision beginning to um use data more intentionally and the right kind of data and the third area has to do with developing meaningful partnerships with families and communities particularly those that have historically not been included or not in in decision making or or that have uh historically that the district has been less successful and engaging and supporting so uh that is important that is important to note we we want to lift that up here in this district equity
267review that even in just the one year since uh leadership change had took place at the at the highest level in the district those who are working at the district recognize the difference and they are beginning to organize themselves differently as a result that said because these changes are so new we were unable to uh score any of these domains higher than um a two and what that means is that there's a need to develop quite a bit of infrastructure in in the district so that the district has um new ways of knowing and uses those ways of knowing more consistently with shared understandings of their use and so that intervention can take place meaningful intervention can take place so based on our time within the district based on this district equity review we uh
268put forth the following recommendations first we must prioritize development of a more robust infrastructure within the district to better support the district's capacity to know and respond to student and school equity needs within the district we suggest that the district focus on addressing domain one a clear ambitious vision for educational equity domain four financial human and material resources that are sufficiently appropriately and equitably allocated across and within the schools and domain six developing systems for gathering communicating and using data to drive progress these are needed because they are foundational for monitoring providing support as well as accountability when it comes to practices systems that are necessary and that are recognized as being important for supporting equity once these areas have been developed and progress has been made in some ways we we also just i'm
269gonna take a step back domain one four and six there are pockets within the district there are systems that some district employees use that are helpful here but they are so inconsistent in their use or they are not shared at other school sites or they exist within elementaries but not middle schools or the other way around that that the development doesn't isn't the same all around right what i mean here is some things will need to be created other things will need to be expanded okay so the longer report will detail what exactly we need to create and what needs to be um expanded once progress has been made in these particular areas we recommend that the district focus on domain two access to rich deeper learning culturally responsive curriculum practices domain three a focus
270on safe healthy and inclusive environments at schools and domain five meaningful partnerships with families in the community these areas are not simply add-ons but change efforts in these areas are less promising if the infrastructure related to resource management and distribution a shared vision and the use of data are not established so those those are our recommendations from this district equity review and um we have very much faith in in this this district's ability to to proceed in a promising manner because we met people who um have the skill have the knowledge but need to be supported to be able to work together to develop solutions to the problems that they've been facing some of whom some of whom have been facing for many years but others who are new to these challenges and are bringing
271um the potential to to innovate and provide some of the solutions to the challenges that you all are facing i'll now move on to the work we did to engage in systems mapping of learning and teaching for emergent bilingual students to be clear systems mapping and process mapping work is they are strategies that are used by the learning sciences okay one of the best known uh books on the learning sciences is learning to improve how america's schools can get better at getting better this was our main resource that informed our work and our analysis and the practices that we engaged in with district employees but we also drew from the other two resources that i have shown here improvement science promoting equity in schools and the educational leaders guide to improvement science improvement principles guide
272improvement science work okay learning sciences work the work of learning sciences in schools so um i'm just just sharing some of these principles right now because uh one of them is what guided it most directly impacted the work that we did the the principles are to make the work problem specific and user centered to focus on variation in performance to see the system that produces the current outcomes that to recognize that we cannot improve what we cannot measure and to use disciplined inquiry to drive improvement so that we can accelerate learning through networked communities okay so the issue of seeing the system that produces the current outcomes is what we have hoped to address through the creation of systems map a systems map of of learning and teaching for emergent bilingual students so what is
273a system we're talking about systems mapping so we should clarify what a system is i have here four definitions i'm going to read two of them i'm sure that you all can find uh additional definitions of systems but this this is some of what the scholarly scholarly literature says about systems first a system is a configuration of interaction interdependent parts that are connected to a web of relationships forming a hole that is greater than the sum of its parts you may have parts of a system that work very effectively but when understanding the whole system you can't only look at that piece right for example you may have a very high functioning school where students are high performing you have another school where there's a lot of teacher turnover and students are not performing so
274well these are all in the same district so what is the system doing who is it impacting and why how okay another definition systems are overlapping nested and networked they have subsystems and operate within broader systems the point here is that systems are not one thing systems are what we must examine if we are to address equity because student achievement is not the result of any one thing there are multiple factors that shape how students show up in classrooms and teachers and so a systems map is an attempt to identify the different variables and portray them in a manner that makes uh makes for a useful resource for decision making or further inquiry so in our work uh we took four steps to engage in this systems mapping work the first step had to do
275with answering certain questions we asked these questions aloud with participants participants answered these questions and asked us other questions some of these questions are what are the systems structures practices policies and and and processes that contribute to the educational outcomes we're seeing among emerging bilingual students who are often referred to as english learners in in your district think of everything in the district that contributes to these outcomes we remind folks we are not diagnosing this is not an assessment yet we are simply in this first step wanting to identify the different factors that matter what matters what happens why next step once we have identified the different variables that impact the system that are part of the system we group them we come up with themes and we organize those themes if we sometimes we
276collapse the themes we do so in an attempt to organize our thinking about the system next we engage in a brief kind of preliminary analysis one of the activities we use is called the a fishbone activity which is intended to narrow the many factors that influence the current patterns um the issue that we centered again is the inequitable experiences and outcomes for students that are um emergent bilingual students okay so how do these different variables shape have some kind of impact on the inequity that we see in the data as it relates to student achievement for immersion bilingual students so this work took place um with a diverse group of community stakeholders uh we had uh a core team that met four times we also had six additional one-hour interviews with uh one to two
277people at a time those interviews were conducted with individuals from the following stakeholder groups we had district leaders school leaders teachers non-classified staff including those that work directly with emergent bilingual students and newcomers and we also had a few parents this allowed us to develop themes we came up with nine themes from all of the data that we gathered from the variables that we identified and these are leadership beliefs and mindsets of employees service delivery models and practices curriculum and instruction professional development data and data use family and community engagement schools as a whole issues like staffing structures were part of that enrollment policies and then nine is allocation of financial resources some of these themes were collapsed and reorganized into rep models that we believed would be more helpful for analysis we also developed
278a in our preliminary analysis the kind of uh five things that we looked for we looked for opportunities for responsiveness where practices or systems were new equity issues that relate to racial socioeconomic or linguistic inequity system structures or practices or processes that are not systematized or inconsistent and finally promising practices systems structures or processes and this here is a a simplified representation of this very same diagram this this um graphic representation of the systems and after further distilling it distilling the themes into seven categories we have identified these areas as the most critical areas that impact how students and teachers show up when it comes to the educational experiences and outcomes for emerging bilingual students these are beliefs and mindsets leadership service delivery model and practices financial resources and allocation of those resources family and
279community engagement data and data use and then professional development just zeroing in on one of those uh issues again i'm distinguishing between an issue and a problem people often use the term problem of practice we resist that in this part of the work because there is a culture a tendency to blame practitioners when anybody who's ever taught anyone who's ever led in a school knows that it's not simply about skill or technical knowledge right there are multiple factors that shape how we show up and how others show up and the effectiveness of of how we show up um so we're not calling this a problem of practice this is still at the level of um not not specific enough these are issues problems are much more specific so um when it comes to the issue
280of service delivery models and practices we we began to look and and and see some patterns here one was that most of the variables associated with service delivery models and practices are not systematized they're inconsistently used across the district as well as at school sites this became an area of focus for us because this includes how teachers plan this includes uh the resources that teachers are provided the support that teachers get any kind of interventions when learning and teaching is not working well and it's not very consistent so this this particular issue this area of service delivery models and practices is actually one of the areas that we are making a recommendation about okay however the research is quite clear that there are many views on how we can change systems some perspectives are grounded
281in theory and others are grounded in practice we are not beholden to any one particular theory and we also know that it's important that practitioners maintain a wide view angle and recognize that people have worked on these issues for a long time so we can't ignore theory so we we try to adopt and adapt um from the different perspectives one perspective that we find promising again from the work of peter sengay is a view that suggests that there are six conditions of systems change and three areas that must be focused on in order to have a promising change effort there is the structural areas there are structural areas so these have to do with policies practices resources there are the transformative areas which have to do with mental modes this might be the belief systems
282or even the ideologies of the practitioners involved in the system and then there are the issues that are in the middle have to do with relationships and connection and power dynamics so if we're able to address all three of these areas the explicit the semi-explicit and the implicit remember mental modes are not always made explicit unless someone says something explicit if we can address the three areas we we have a more promising um approach to changing a system focusing on only one let's say bias training from a mental modes while ignoring the policies the resources and the relationships is not as promising as addressing the three areas just as changing a policy without affecting or addressing people's mental states their their habits of mind is kind of a hopeful strategy but hope is not a
283strategy unless we're talking about interrupting hopelessness so our recommendation is that there are a lack of shared systems and so we believe that the next step should involve working with district leaders as well as effective highly effective practitioners those who work with emergent bilingual students and their families those two groups those two stakeholder groups the practitioners and the district leaders will need to get together to determine which aspects using this resource that we created which aspects of the system require further inquiry focusing specifically on the service delivery issue we believe that they should determine which aspects of the service delivery require closer examination and should be prioritized for development and improvement through that collaboration and the experience of those practitioners who are on the ground working with students and families we believe that the district
284will have a promising path forward when you couple this work with the district equity review you have a rich data set that provides a greater level ways of knowing about the district about where to channel our energy and our resources thank you so much for your time president proctor my recommendation to the board is considering that the presenter was able to put together these two videos for us but isn't here to engage in the in-depth question and answer period i want to just suggest to the school board that we think of this next 30 days until our next school board meeting is an opportunity to allow the public and our stakeholders to have time with this report because there's quite a bit in the findings for the equity review this the process analysis as well
285as the school design and then as i stated before we do have an agreement for bond to come to our september regular school board meeting um and answer questions and engage in a more thorough conversation with the board so that would be my recommendation is open up for any public comment that might be there but then on the board side of it maybe just reserve more of those questions until bonn is here and can respond i'm sorry president proctor you just cut out was that the call for me to go to public comment okay we might be having audio issues with you but i will go to public comment if there are any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom
286now okay president proctor we have no hands for public comment okay i don't know if anyone can hear me but yes okay we can hear you um okay great uh any final comments on this or we'll just save them okay we'll see moving on to item 10 board member statements and requests for future agenda items i have one i would like to request i don't think it has to be like at our very next board meeting but sometime in the next couple of months for us to to revisit the conversation around ethnic study i'll just make a couple of statements um first one uh last night i attended the uh burrell back to school night which my son was at um and i will really want to thank the bureau staff and district staff anyone
287was helped out i thought it was really well run it was it was something that actually we really missed last year because obviously last year we had what the omicron surge right at the beginning of the school year and so we weren't able to we had to do a virtual back-to-school night but um being in person walking to each classroom meeting the teachers it was it was actually really really great and it was really great community building sort of school community building with that i thought it was it was fantastic um one of my son's teacher who was a 20-year veteran there at burrell she did say without knowing of course who i am or anything or because i'm masked up and everything and uh dressed down she's like she's did say the air conditioning
288is life-changing it was it was at of course our art meeting last night was our back to school night was from 6 to 7 30 and it was still humid and warm outside and the air conditioning was just flowing inside the classrooms and so i just want to thank patrick and amy and everyone else i know that the construction season is very short for us because of our summer and our modified school schedule but uh it it really worked out and and i think that um at least burrell and i hope other schools will really see the difference second thing is i don't necessarily need a um agenda item on this but i've been asked a few times uh we've now got parent square but there's a lot of questions between what's the difference between
289aries parent square google classroom and school group and it'd be great to have some sort of answer whether it's an infographic or something some kind of thought to it um i know that both the elementary and middle school systems were separate and different and that just like tonight i received a school message from middle school burrell but i received an aries message through for elementary and so it it is slightly confusing and so it'd be great if we could just have some sort of pr piece about it thank you um i was going to say that i also went to back to school night but my mine was at bowditch and i have an eighth grader so this was actually my first time going to an in-person back-to-school night after being there for two years
290and it was really awesome to go to the classroom see the teachers see friends that i know and it was just it was a really good event and i appreciated although we didn't have new air conditioning we did get to see what that is going to look like in a couple in a few years so that was exciting and um i could tell that people were really excited about that and then um the our principal did a really good job of talking about some of the things that we've been talking about here at the board meetings including the new discipline matrix and obviously yonder pouches and just really keeping um parents informed because i don't think everybody's able to log into these meetings but it was nice to hear um and then i just wanted
291to say that i thought tonight's meeting was really great we had some really amazing topics that we've all talked about tonight and it just gives me a lot of hope for the kids in our community and for our future and um i'm just really impressed by all the work that everybody's done um this past year and she's really excited about the future and so i'm proud to be part of the school district so thanks to everybody for their hard work okay that's good let's move on to future did you have some okay future meeting dates um our next one's september 1st which is the study session and then we have september 15th okay okay um so we'll um okay this is our first time doing closed session at the end so um item 12 are
292public comments on closed session items so um peter could we check if anybody has any public comments absolutely if there's any members of the public that have public comment on any of the closed items closed session items please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay president procter we have no hands for public comment okay then we're going to recess to close session there's four items we're going to be talking about um existing litigation government code section six point 54956.9 one d case well that's a really long case number um it's on the agenda and then existing litigation government code section five four nine five six point nine one d a second case um anticipated litigation government code section 54956.92 in anticipated litigation government code section 5.5.54956.92 so we will go into closed
293session now at 10 20 thank you president proctor go ahead okay we're going to report out from our closed session um id item 13 or 13a sorry a majority of the board in closed session voted four to zero to approve a compromise agreement with parents of a student where the board has approved funding for an out of district private placement for the fall semester of 2022-2023 school year in exchange for releases and waivers of potential or threatened legal claims against the district item 13 b a majority of the board in closed session voted four to zero to approve a compromise agreement with parents of a student in office of administrative hearings case number where the board has approved funding for students private educational program for the 2020 2021 and 2021-2022 school years in exchange for
294releases and waivers of threatened and actual legal claims against the district item 13 c the board took action in closed session and unanimously approved the recommendation to deny claim number 2022-01147 13d the board took action in closed session and voted um three yeses trustee chin trustee proctor and trustee watkins and one abstention with trustee corzo and we approve the recommendation to deny claim number 2022-01013 uh we are moving on to adjournment uh can i get a motion motion to adjourn second thank you trustee watkins and trustee corzo all in favor please say aye bye bye okay good night it's 1105.