001okay president check go ahead good evening everyone uh it is now five o'clock on october 21st uh i am calling our san mateo foster city school district school board of trustees meeting to order we are having our regular meeting and our closed session meeting calling to order our regular meeting but then immediately putting us into recess for closed session where we will hear three items or discuss three items item 2.1 which is government code section 54957 public employee discipline dismissal and release item 2.2 conference with legal counsel initiation of litigation pursuant to government's code section 5495 6.9 sub d and then item 2.3 government code section 54957 public employee discipline dismissal release district office reorganization and that is all we have so i'm going to recess to closed session and we will be back at
0026 30 for our regular session thank you okay president chen go ahead okay uh good evening everyone um we are reconvening our uh regularly scheduled meeting the time is 6 34. uh we have uh are coming out of closed session with nothing to report so we're moving on to item 3.2 which is our flagship so if everybody would unmute and please uh follow me with the pledge of allegiance begin i pledge of allegiance to the black united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under a little weird with all the echoes not guys um okay moving on to roll call um trustee corzo president thank you trustee proctor here trustee watkins trustee warren here and i am here as well uh next on the agenda is 3.4 approval of
003the agenda tonight's agenda does anybody have any corrections changes comments motion to approve tonight's agenda a second thank you trustee watkins for the motion interest to talk to you for the second uh trustee corzel oh yes sorry thank you justine proctor yes trustee warren i mean watkins yes trustee yes and i will vote yes as well item 3.5 approval of the minutes for october 7th there we have questions comments corrections that's one motion to approve the minutes from october 7th second thank you trustee corzo from motion trustee warren for the second local vote trustee corzo yes trustee proctor yes trustee watkins yes trustee warren yes great thank you uh we have an item of recognition here on our agenda um superintendent ochoa thank you thank you president chen i wanted to take this opportunity to
004recognize our school administrators during our last school board meeting we press a resolution identifying and recognizing the efforts of school administrators and school administrator week earlier today our human resources department did a wonderful job of setting up some snacks and treats for our all district leadership meeting that we held here in the boardroom actually just a few minutes before the rest of the board showed up but it is very important to establish a culture where we recognize uh the people that work for us this being the month where we celebrate school principles and administrators wanted to specifically call them out and thank them for everything that they do you're wonderful and we appreciate you very much thank you president thank you superintendent ochoa um before we move on uh trustee corzo would you mind making
005the spanish language translation announcement i believe we have our translator here sure no problem all right thank you um and we just as always as before i'll just make the announcement now we currently have 43 participants online and unfortunately no one has joined us in the public in the live in the flesh but we welcome anyone who wants to come down to join us or you can attend online as well moving on to item 5.1 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 reasons formed to staff for investigation and or action where appropriate uh peter if you wouldn't mind opening up
006public comment for non-agenda items please absolutely for those of you who may be joining us for the first time and would like to make public comment on anything that is not on the agenda for the rest of this evening please use the raise your hand functionality functionality within zoom and i will call on you one at a time okay we have jean and then marcella gene go ahead hi thank you i will attend the november 8th coffee chat to learn about math pathways with superintendent ochoa thank you for hosting i and many parents though would like whether we can attend that or not the district to please give a public update we can share on the changes in sixth grade math how is it going are we raising standards for all or redefining success with
007a lower bar what is the path to algebra and eighth grade is there an official update coming what is being done to get input from the community related tonight i believe the board will hear a presentation on the equity action plan i have no idea what this plan might entail but the community has a lot of concerns when equity issues come up because equity goals sound wonderful but what's critical is the means by which those goals are achieved it's easy to try and take a shortcut on a hard goal as we observing with the changes in math we seem to be in a gray zone as to whether or not equity will be achieved through lower standards or through investment in our students and community that will raise standards i don't see a vision for
008those raising of standards and investment coming yet i hope to i don't feel there's something i can rally around yet and get excited about yet and contribute to yet but i hope so but before we get into more equity proposals i urge the board to focus on the means by which any new proposal will be achieved at the ends can't justify the means thank you gene next we have marcela marcela go ahead hi thank you i just wanted to um comment a follow-up from the town hall yesterday and thank uh superintendent ochoa for advocating to create a vaccination site for our students as soon as vaccines are available i also wanted to just kind of connected to that encourage the district as we're thinking about communication to be clear in uh as we're waiting for
009that vaccine rollout there's still a lot of unknowns in terms of um what happens outside of the classroom and we just came back from our fall break so creating spaces where anyone can easily access information on quarantining isolation testing and and and also express appreciation for having those continued testing sites at our schools i think that will contribute to creating a safe environment for all of our students and i did want to just very briefly comment on i know we will be getting that update from the equity task force uh we will be getting a math update today and we will be getting a special education update and i wanted to comment on the differences that i have noticed in the past year on the format in how the information is being shared and the
010critical nature that i view our district taking as we're analyzing every aspect of student education i am excited about the direction that we're headed in i do think that our board our superintendent and our staff are working very hard to make sure that every student not just survives but thrives as we return back to school so i just wanted to say thank you for that thank you marcel president chen we have no other hands for public comment great uh thank you i'm going to officially close public comment on um non-agenda items which is 5.1 uh 5.2 states public statements related to agenda items persons will be called on at the appropriate time but before we move on to the actual next committee report superintendent cho would you mind addressing a couple comments in your superintendent
011report just to sort of close the loop on these comments thank you uh item 5.3 foundation and committee reports does anybody have anything that they want to report out at anyone no one shaking head okay i just wanted to report out that last night um the sanctuary task force had a session uh available for families um in spanish around accessing medical and families got the opportunity to make appointments to review their medical insurance needs and and yeah that is uh available to more families there were some free spots still so if you're interested please reach out folks need help accessing medi-cal and going through that process it could be a little tricky so this is a kind of a shortcut to to meet needs right now and i also just wanted to highlight that the
012sanctuary task force actually does have family and community resources on our district website available in english and spanish and i believe we're working on other languages as well but there is information there for support for families during covert around you know how to [Music] how to get help meeting needs in the family but also how to isolate how to be safe so there's a a one pager that the sanctuary task force developed last year and and so there are resources there available for folks um yeah that's it for now that a1l7a foundation committee report updates no no no uh okay i'll finish up and just state um well i guess it's i guess this would fall under like a samtel leagues on city council views on opposite update so uh this past monday on the
01318th i did speak um before the city of san mateo uh in a study session format with the city council about their speed zone reductions their possible speed zone reductions there were four city council members present but one had to recuse himself because he lived close to a private school but overwhelming from the three city council members they were all in support of continuing the discussion and reviewing potential speed limit reductions uh around schools uh not just public schools uh but also private schools as well so the conversation is ongoing um they will probably have a uh come to an actual vote at the full city council probably in december that's what they're targeting i would advise if you guys um so choose for us to write a letter of support for a reduction in
014speed commit zones around schools it's a safety issue we have had a lot of accidents uh pedestrian to vehicle collisions around our schools and it would probably be a good step towards increasing pedestrian safety superintendent kelly from the high school district did send in an email but i felt like it might be really valuable if the full board actually um sent in so if you guys agree then maybe we'll come back with a at our next meeting with a letter and we'll pass it by resolution if that's okay the other thing is just in terms of committees i had mentioned the last meeting we did have a sort of defunct homeroom committee that uh that sort of went away once uh covered started but it dealt with a lot about um affordable housing and educator
015housing uh in our inner area not in just the same to foster city school district but in the local area they are revamping it it's well it's it's kind of worked into this um home for all which i did attend uh before covid had started they do have a sort of welcome back on november 4th it's a thursday and it starts from 9am to 10 30 a.m this is their first meeting back the people on this committee tend to be other trustees in santo county along with superintendents and some additional housing advocates and county council to provide legal direction my advice would be is that if anyone is interested in this in housing overall in terms of um the area that we might want to attend if anybody wants to do it and then from
016there i would suggest to the new incoming president that that we officially bring back a liaison position for this um but that those liaison positions wouldn't change until december so that would be my recommendation but we can continue to talk about it later um but if anybody wants to go i can send this around um to everybody and so that they have their the information okay uh last any other final comments uh next item on the agenda is 5.4 our smita csca and smea updates peter if you wouldn't mind bringing in our representatives great hi everyone um i just wanted to say i feel like a slapper this week because i don't actually have anything to update you on so i hope everybody had a great break and i'm just going to go ahead and
017pass it right over to julie thank you alicia um good evening everyone um i'll start by just a quick shout out the rain is here and so i want to acknowledge everyone on school campuses who are being flexible and making it work this is always a we love the rain but we know that it takes a little bit extra um from both uh for administrators teachers and our csa colleagues so we want i want to just extend a little bit of an appreciation um to them and pay it forward a little because we know more rain is coming and i'm excited tonight to share with the board um two initiatives at two different school sites that have been spearheaded by some of our smita members the first is um laurel's caring community initiative which was
018the brainchild of janet chapel jana is a long time teacher in our district and she worked with christian last year on creating this initiative with the goal of creating a sense of community at school this initiative includes campus cleanup days monthly community building assemblies complete with um cheerleaders leading the assemblies um celebrating up standards in their community and they have even created a golden sneaker award um to encourage kids um to walk to school so i want to make sure the board is able to recognize janet chapel in her hard work and the other teacher i want to share with you about is lisa della pietra she is a teacher at brewer island she's also been in the district for a long time and she has started a she worked with students to plant and
019maintain a garden of native species the garden includes a coast live oak california poppies and blue pines which attract squirrels deers crows doves and insects and this provides the backdrop for students to study their natural environment her students researched new native plants learned about their adaptations sun and water requirements how they were used by other organisms and they turned their finished research project into informative garden plaques so other students could come and learn about their community so um i just want to make sure the board has the opportunity to appreciate all of the different initiatives that our smita members are bringing to students and um with that i will turn it over to who's whoever next great thank you guys for those um updates um but very grateful uh for everything that you guys are
020doing uh we and president jim we do have two members of the public enter so um peter cazanes will come in and try to get the sound turned on thank you that's exactly what i was saying i'm about to not so thank you and thank you for attending our meeting live uh we'll get the sound working shortly i don't want to scream into this sorry thank you everybody we just um i didn't want to scream into the microphone here so while we're getting some technical issues here uh worked out uh i we are going to move on to our next item which is announcements 5.5 sure and i have fun as most of you know our moonlight masquerade the san mateo foster city education foundation second annual gala is taking place tomorrow night if you
021have not yet registered you can get information about how to register on the ed foundation website or through the district website or on social media so please make sure that you are registered for the event tomorrow night and there are some incredible uh the silent auction is open there's a lot of bidding wars happening already um amazing things from principal for the day at most of our sites to wine to local restaurants it's been there's just an incredible amount of items on the silent auction so you can definitely find something get that holiday shopping done and find something for everyone um and then the live auction is going to be incredible so folks will be getting a sneak preview of some of those in the brochure i think tonight and so join us live for
022some of those incredible live auction lots and a lot of fun you can um wear your pajamas or dress up gala fancy if you want no one will see you um and uh there will be some surprise guests and it's just gonna be a really incredible evening so the pre-show starts at 6 30 and um the actual uh villa starts promptly at 7 00 p.m there's really incredible giveaways and just it'll be a really fun time so i hope to see everybody there if you have any questions you can feel free to reach out to me directly shara watkins smfcsd.net right is that my email address i think so and uh yes looking forward to seeing everybody tomorrow night and thank you so much for all of the community support uh so far we're really
023looking forward to it i actually think it might be s watkins but it's not special okay thank you yes definitely everyone please attend the uh gala if you have time it's a lot of fun from last year although i don't think there's any tick-tock dances this time right sure no tic-tac but there's some student jokes and pet costume competition and some really incredible special guests so it's gonna be a blast awesome can't wait uh anyone else with any other announcements yes i have an announcement i just wanted to share that the county is engaging in an equitable equitable recovery community engagement on october 23rd from 9 00 to 10 30 a.m and the topic is an equitable recovery from the covet pandemic so they are seeking input from the community and it's an opportunity to
024you know speak up for the needs of let's say your specific family or other people in your community who are still struggling to re and and still um you know recovering from the impacts of covid so i wanted to share that thank you great any other announcements no okay thank you so we're going to move on to item 5.6 the superintendent report superintendent ochoa thank you president chin i'll keep my uh superintendent remarks focused on two topics that are very important and the first is a thank you to the staff at abbott middle school who helped coordinate a podcast recording earlier this week where two students at the school wanted to interview me as part of their school-based podcast their interest was to find out what i felt about uh identifying language for latinx and
025hispanic students um for me to give my personal opinions on what words i would choose to describe myself or to refer to others um and so i i invited them to work with me on a simulcast so a dual recording and i took diego perez with me um so when they finished their questions for me i turned my to my questions for them and you know i asked them about what characterized something that that they could take with them from abbott middle school and they both said a different version of at abbott middle school one of the best things we have is we have a culture where we want to accept other people where we want to embrace other people who are different from us they both talked about having friends who were from different
026ethnic cultures and what their experiences were learning from their friends and sharing with their friends their identity and their culture so it was a lot of fun and i asked them to share an experience that they had in elementary school with me and what they took from that experience and they both actually went to laurel elementary and said at laurel elementary the the most sought after game on the playground was they called it states tag i guess the school has a painting of the united states and there's some game where they call out a state and you have to run there and tag somebody there's you know but you know their their connection to that feeling that joy of playing with their friends and of being at a school where they felt cared for and
027felt loved it was just really really great so that podcast will come out next week we're putting the finishing touches on it but it's really great for the first time to have students on our podcast and we're excited about that the second part is that we have a strategic plan committee meeting coming up next week so we're excited about that this will be a strategic plan committee meeting where we focus on what we're going to talk about at our next school board meeting the foundations for success for our strategic plan i'll be making the longest remarks i've made so far during the process i'll probably take up 45 minutes to an hour of the time that the group has next week talking about the importance of things like fiscal responsibility talking about the importance of
028things like professional development community engagement all as the foundations for the goals that this board would ultimately select in january and february of the upcoming year so looking forward to that work um i'll have an update for the board at our november fourth meeting and those are my remarks for tonight uh thank you superintendent choa uh there's a couple of things would you mind just i i know you touched on it briefly last night in their youtube yes session but the two things the the math and the vaccine site yes so at this point in time we have confirmation from the county that we will be hosting a vaccination event the second week in november i don't have the firm details so i can't give the exact date i do i can say that the
029site that we've identified to host this first vaccination event is bayside academy um it does as you know have a new large facility and it's located in an area where we want to reach out to families who need that resource more information to follow and to the extent possible that we can have a second and a third and a fourth i've made it evident to our partners that our district is willing and able to host as many vaccination events as they're willing to allow us to do i think right now they don't have the doses in hand so they're you know sort of you know taking it slowly through that process but once we get more clarification we're ready to act very quickly and we have a series of of schools in order that we
030would then put second and third and fourth down the line yeah the second comment that i wanted to address and thank you for reminding me president chin was the question of how we move forward with our decision making around 7th and 8th grade math and algebra so i think what the the community member articulated was wanting to know what the process would be and wanting to know how the district would achieve getting information from stakeholders so there are multiple ways that we're going to go about that process they started last night in the youtube town hall it is showing up at all four of our cafe con diego events next week and the week after we have four cafe con diegos between now and the next two weeks we'll be hosting two additional youtube live
031streams focusing on math which will take place at their regularly scheduled time that are live that allow the public to answer questions while the meeting is taking place that we answer and respond to in the moment in addition every 6th and 7th grade parent in this district will receive a survey from the ed services department next friday asking for their feedback and opinions about the process that the district should take in order to offer math next year so when we arrive at our november 18th school board meeting we'll have a recommendation for the board to consider but it won't be a recommendation we do on our own behind closed doors it will have fair and equitable access for every parent as well as deep coordination with our teaching staff and our administration great thank you
032superintendent toa just a couple things once the vaccine is actually approved by the fda and the cdc then then i believe everybody's going to start rolling into action and so to clarify we have a tentative date the second week of november that's right if everything gets approved on time we know there's a big meeting next tuesday at the fda where hopefully the they give emergency authorization for the vaccine so if that timeline works then it's definitely a second week in november but from my understanding if it does get approved that's not the only location where you can get the vaccine i believe from all of our information from superintendent nancy mcgee and public health and that it will be available from your pediatrician and also our pharmacies and it's potentially possible to have a mass
033site a mass vaccination site at the event center again just like we the county has had in the past so um i think it's fantastic that we're having something on our campus and just look forward to the vaccines emergency authorization approval the second thing is in terms of math and your comments about town hall we do have a board community workshop coming up next thursday and that will be at boreal middle school and so if people want to attend and talk about math we could do that then as well okay all right moving on to the proposed consent agenda uh item six all items on the consent agenda are considered by the board to be routine and will be enacted by the board in one motion in the form listed below there'll be no discussion
034on these items prior to the time the board votes on the motion unless members of the board staff or public request specific items be removed and discussed from the consent agenda the superintendent and staff recommend approval of all consent items movement of any recommended consent item is appropriate at this time does any board member have any comments want to pull anything from the consent agenda okay does any member of the public live here in person have anything they want to pull from the consent agenda i don't think so okay peter would you mind asking those online please yes if there's any member of the public that would like to make comment on any of the items on the consent agenda please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now i'll call on you and
035ask you what specific item you would like to make public comment on okay president chen we have no hands for the consent uh consent agenda uh thank you peter uh now returning to the board on the consent agenda does anyone have any final questions or would like to offer a promotion make a motion to approve the consent agenda i will second thank you trustee proctor for the motion trustee watkins for the second we'll call vote trustee corzo yes trustee proctor yes trustee watkins yes trustee warren yes and i will vote yes as well the consent agenda has been approved and we are now moving on to item 7.1 which is our presentation regarding uh school district special education and cdx update thank you president chen i'm going to ask peter if you can go ahead
036and invite our guests in we have two representatives from the cdac group that are going to discuss with us tonight their update for the board i'll all begin making remarks while peter lets them in as panelists and what we're doing tonight is uh i'll share my screen here in just one second there we go what we're doing tonight is we're gonna have a conversation um with the board regarding the executive summaries that i expect to present to the board on a schedule and basis that is determined by the board of trustees we've discussed that each of our last two meetings the frequency and regularity of the type of updates the board is requesting and tonight is our first attempt to make that presentation knowing that we'll have regularly scheduled updates to the board on this
037very item so the first is to redefine what these special education board updates actually look like for the board the second is to review content that was presented to this board in 2021 of june the third fourth fifth are all specific program updates fiscal updates and staffing updates with what i'm going to determine or describe as being implications of those updates so as opposed to simply giving information and moving on my approach with the school board is to always have an open a conversation about what the implications are of the information you're being given so that we can discuss that here on the diocese and give the public an opportunity to hear our thinking about the consequences and outcomes of the different program updates we're giving and then the last and this is specifically for
038tonight is a summary of the department roadmap that i want to present to the board peter would you send give me some kind of thumbs up so i know our guests have arrived once they have arrived i guess i'm here and have been promoted thank you um so i'm gonna just transition over to our guest making a presentation tonight i want to allow them to introduce themselves so i'm going to turn it over to amy if you want to introduce yourself and then have your your guests introduce themselves hi thank you so much for having us tonight i'm amy finkenster and i am the chair of the cdac the special ed district advisory committee and also here tonight is our vice chair jennifer mayman and um superintendent ochoa did you want us to do our
039presentation now or at the end of yours oh absolutely right now thank you amy perfect okay um i will get our presentation pulled up and just make sure that um jen can introduce herself as well sure i'm good evening everyone i'm jennifer mayman the vice chair of the c-deck along with amy sorry one second let me get our presentation going i love the background by the way amy that it's a lot more festive than what we have behind us here all okay i will share my screen and then we will get started [Music] okay hopefully everyone can see that all right good evening so i'll actually kick things off just with a quick recap of our last cdac meeting which was on august 31st alma presented a who's who in special education so she shared
040information on special ed leadership and program specialists she also provided updated org charts which can now be found on the special ed page of the district website we also um sent out a parent education interest survey um and it was sent out in both english and spanish we had a really robust response we had 321 respondents around 70 from the spanish survey and you can see a list of some of the topics that parents were most interested in receiving training on so ieps specific learning disabilities both the eligibility category and specific learning disabilities like dyslexia inclusion and universal design for learning was really popular special education law and parent rights and then other topics of note were transitioning from elementary to middle school middle school to high school how to advocate for your child and
041how to get additional support for ell students specifically support in learning to speak english and school site reps we're hoping to get a parent rep from each school site and we currently have five to really help share meeting announcements with principals in the school community and help us as cdac leadership to know if there's any site-specific concerns issues or successes that should come to the larger group and district so if there's any parents out there who are interested um in becoming involved with cdac please reach out to either amy or me um we would love to get you involved and both of our email addresses are listed on the cdac website of the district site so you can find our information there if you would like to volunteer okay thank you jen and then moving
042on to our cdac priorities and some changes to our approach so one of our main priorities continues to be sharing resources with families we have this fall as part of the parent ed survey that went out also started putting together a mailing list so this is an opt-in mailing list there's a link to it in this presentation which is on the board agenda and it is also on the cdac website as well so i encourage you to join that to get more than just meeting announcements for the cdac we've sent out information about some community events and other parent education workshops that are happening from outside of our district we also are working to create partnerships for parent education presentations that can really serve as a resource for our families so two organizations that we
043are hoping to work with this year are the iep collaborative who will be presenting on special education law and parent rights and common grounds society which is based in the north bay and they would be presenting on inclusion so in addition to providing parent education there are also resources that families can come back to outside of that one presentation as we mentioned in the spring our areas of focus will be iep compliance and inclusion and we're targeting that in a few different ways one is through our parent education opportunities so upcoming we have one about ieps and eligibility areas again special ed law and parent rights and inclusion so we're we're working to hit those topics of interest as we can and then also we are hoping to create a protocol for cdac to request
044data from the district so that we can really dive into the work and looking at iep compliance and inclusive practices data that is currently happening and then finally and i think most importantly we are adjusting our approach a little bit to really become a forum for discussion with and feedback to the district so meetings will include opportunities for cdac members and the district to bring up areas of concern provide feedback and engage in discussions the hope is that it will serve as a vehicle for progress monitoring and following up on the discussions that are happening in meetings about these areas of concern and of course it's always always great to share positives in these kinds of forums as well but i think the most important piece is really creating a dialogue between the district and
045the cdac and our families and our next meeting is coming up on november 9th and it will be at 7 p.m held virtually there will be an announcement sent out closer to and parent education it will be a parent education session on iep eligibility areas and iep nuts and bolts the eligibility areas will be presented by the district's lead psychologist and slp so that they will talk about the different eligibility criteria a little bit about what those different eligibility areas might look like and what kind of services you could expect to see if your child qualifies under a certain area um and then the iep nuts and bolts part will be coming from karen breslow of the san mateo selfa she did a really wonderful iep presentation for us last year so we're hoping to
046continue getting more information from her in the selfa and really continuing that partnership so that is all we have for our presentation today also our upcoming future dates are listed but we are happy to stay on and answer any questions about cdac and the work that we'll be doing so thank you for having us tonight and for um the opportunity to give you an update on what we've been doing thank you amy thank you jennifer um i am going to ask you to stick around as panelists and when we're done with our presentation we'll open it up for the public and or for the school board to ask any clarifying questions or follow up with anything additional so you're not off the hook yet stick around thank you i'm gonna go ahead and share my
047screen again just give me a second here and there we go all right part of what i'll recommend to the board that we do moving forward is that at each of our presentations pertaining to special education we always include data reviews that we include outcome data related to services outcome data related to expenses and outcome data related to student achievement there are certain times of the year where that data makes more sense to present and discuss so not every presentation would look exactly the same but every presentation would be driven by that outcome related data analysis the updates being on a rotating basis would always focus on the programmatic cycles of when it makes sense within the timeline of the year to make a presentation on one given topic versus another this presentation being at
048the request of the board october it fits into a time frame where it's not really the right time to present on how we might staff next year because we need a few more months it's also not necessarily a great time to present on how we have staff for this year because we started three months ago so it's an example of sort of how wedging it into different months causes the presentation to have a different timeline alignment and then last again as i discussed earlier tonight the importance of always including implications for the work when we share the data with the board i'll take you now to what information was shared with the board in the june 2021 update this was an update that was provided to the board focusing first on child find it was
049a presentation that didn't include a an analysis of where the district may not have implemented child find it was more focused on the completion of assessments so it um it gave a portion of the picture but not the full picture the second component of that update was the numbers of students receiving services but it did not include an analysis of how that number correlated to the district's enrollment or change over time or any blips or changes in the types of services that were included in those 1255 ieps the third part of the presentation focused on special education brochures that was merely informational and the fourth was an update on the cceis or csa's process that this board has received specific and separate presentations related to the fifth was related to the special education audit status
050as the board is aware several years ago a special education audit was conducted in which 66 items were given to this district by the special ed audit and the focus was to essentially resolve a list of recommendations that pertain to staffing communication school leadership professional development so a bevy of different uh areas this part of the presentation caught my attention at the time i had not officially begun as a superintendent but it was very confusing in that it was a color coordinated chart of actions and steps um it resulted in myself and our executive cabinet our assistant superintendents as well as our special education director uh basically scoring ourselves we we essentially took those 66 recommendations and every week we brought about 10 of them into our executive cabinet meetings and we scored ourselves according
051to where we felt the district was because my concern was that the color coordinated chart that the board was presented did not accurately reflect where we were in terms of completing those audit recommendations um having been an educator for over 20 years i can tell you 66 recommendations is not something a district should undertake in one year having been a superintendent in multiple districts over seven years i can tell you you take that kind of plan and you figure out how to situate it into 12-month chunks so that you can report on progress complete your action steps and then move to the next group of steps that didn't take place with our special education audit recommendations and i think it shows and how many different areas we have gaps our goal is to now take
052the ratings that we made as a executive cabinet team and identify key next steps for each one of those areas that we determine the district is not meeting and i'll have that for the board at our next special education update and then as you know we had a cdac update um amy and jennifer were great then they were great tonight so um that was a repetition there i want to take the board to our program updates for tonight there are three areas that we'll be presenting to the board on this program update the first is inclusion at multiple meetings over the last four months the board has discussed inclusion and the importance of inclusion during our strategic plan committee meetings we've talked about inclusion currently the district is promoting and encouraging inclusion but we do
053not have a district-wide program to implement inclusion so the result is we have a lot of energy behind it but there's also a lot of frustration out at our school sites because our staff hasn't received the appropriate support or training to implement inclusion we have pulled the data on the percentages of students and how much time they're spending in special education settings versus in general education settings and the data is somewhat good to look at it's somewhat positive when you look at the big numbers of students in the district and how many of our students actually spend a huge percentage of their day in their general education classes as opposed to being separated from general ed for high percentages of the day the one missing piece pertaining to that number is that there's a responsibility
054when you implement inclusionary practices that if you take my child let's say my child is in fifth grade and my child has an iep and i as the parent want my child to be in a fifth grade class with the 25 other kids that they're in class with and on my child's iep it says that my child is in that class 95 of the day then i'm gonna think my child is basically with his peers 95 of the day but if my child is not doing well in the class let's say in english as an example and as a result my child is given second grade work to do or allowed to play a computer game or some agreement that my child can go to the rsp classroom during that time to get support then
055on paper it indicates 95 percent inclusion but in practice it is not happening the the circumstance in our district is that we need to put in place an inclusion process through the district where we check ourselves for those things and we don't currently have that in place so there's no indication that the example i just gave to the board is happening a lot but i also can't rule it out because we don't have a system in place to check for that kind of uh meaningful inclusion engagement having said that moving on to our rsp and special day classes we've got a whole lot folks we've got classes all over the district multiple sites 21 sites in the district having done this kind of work for many years one concern that i have is how we're
056developing pathways for children so if i happen to live in the bayside neighborhood and my child has special needs there are many instances currently in the district where we will recommend placement for a student at a campus across the district it might be some place like laurel as an example which is not close to bayside and my child will go there from kinder in first and second grade and then our district will request that my child transfer from laurel to brewer island as an example so there are some programmatic alignment issues that we need to straighten out um that's another example of an update i'll bring to the board at our next special education presentation to show what those pathways can look like right now in october it isn't the time to present that to
057the board because we need to do a deep analysis on how many students live in the particular complexes for our district and how many need specific services so that we can determine where the appropriate place is for any particular class if that makes sense and then the last part is our applied behavior programs the district behavioral program is operated almost entirely by staffing agencies so we as you have seen in other parts of our presentation we have a tremendously high expense related to hiring external behavior paraprofessionals and external behavioral support staff that help us in iep meetings and help us deliver the programs um the information that's online currently on our district website is not updated it's a brochure that's a couple of years old so we need to get that corrected but i wanted
058to show that to the school board as an example of how we need to align what information we provide families so that when a family registers to the san mateo foster city school district and goes on our district website it not include the information of staff that no longer works in the district that it be accurate and effective in helping them seek out resources i want to take the board to our program updates under program updates we have enrollment for students with special needs in the district being an increase over each of the last four years in 2021 the number from 1103 increased an additional one hundred and ten so we now sit at one thousand two hundred and twenty kids with ieps in our district at the same time enrollment in the district has
059declined significantly so what what that indicates is a percentage increase in the district each of the last four years from x percent and increasing each year in order to have something to compare that against i did make comparisons to our local high school districts who are not experiencing that growth so this is a circumstance that's affecting our district in terms of the analysis of how or why that's taking place an extremely high percentage of the new cases that are resulting in ieps are related to the plan i referenced just a few minutes ago the csa's plan which as you know is a requirement for us to complete because we over identify latinx students for having learning disabilities so they're these things are all aligned to one another when you have programs that do not identify
060academic needs early enough students fall further behind which causes them to need or likely qualify for special education and that's what you're seeing in this presentation regarding the numbers of kids increasing in special education taking you down to the next page this is at the request of the board wanting information about what companies we're paying and what we're paying for you can see on the left hand side i've indicated what month and in some cases what specific board meeting we approve these expenses at the request of a community member we were able to organize it so you can see what type of services so the new chart that's on the right hand side tells you for example a t is what uh it's an acronym for assistive technology we're currently paying for two employees who
061cost us twenty six thousand five hundred and ninety nine dollars a year at the same time when you go four rows down and see beh para that's an acronym for behavioral paraprofessional it's essentially a classified staff member who helps children in the classroom get through their day behaviorally we have 39 of those individuals working for the companies that are lifted listed on the left hand side and they currently cost the district 2.962 million dollars a year per employee that's about 75 000 per employee then you go further down the line you see a really high number for paraeducator 2 exc that's an acronym for exceptional children and that is 54 employees who work for other companies that we contract with for 4.29 million dollars and the overall per employee is 85 000 for per employee
062in that regard so it all adds up to 11.2 million dollars those are what we in in our board presentations and consent we often refer to as npa or non-public agency contracts that's separate from what you see on the right hand column where we list the names of the schools specifically arbor bay arise avalon pine hill weingarten wings the bridge school and chc srb clark each one of those is a different school it's a physical location where our children go and attend school every district in the state of california that has any number of of kids you know beyond a couple hundred has children attending a non-public school having been in this field for over 20 years i can tell you the ratio in our district is a bit high i wouldn't say that it's
063exaggerated or extremely high it is a bit high the cost as you can tell for each one of the schools where there's a number next to it that's telling you how many students are attending those schools and it's substantial so when the when you have three children attending avalon the cost is 378 000 for one child on average at that school it's about 125 um so those are the implications of of those fiscal numbers you're looking at in excess on the on the npa side of 11 million on the nps side you're looking approaching four million dollars so put together close to 15 million dollars we're spending for children to attend school outside the district or to pay for companies to provide services within our district the implication for me is how to create a
064culture in our district working with our hr department and our finance department to make some very strategic decisions about how to update our positions and our pay in a way that allows us to recruit interested employees to come and work for us and to reduce the amount of money we spend on non-public agency contracts as far as the mps work goes the implication there is that's a five-year process where we re-engage with every single family who has their child attending one of those schools and ask them if you could have your child back in our district what would that program look like what might work for your child if they came back and went to their school instead of getting on a bus or you taking them to a school outside the district so that's
065a longer process and that's a one-on-one process on the inside internally what we're doing this year is the board has been informed we did assign our principal for bowditch over the last seven years heather morgan to serve in a director of student support program that she has done an excellent job so far i've asked her to coordinate and connect with the families in the district that are currently really struggling with their children having a successful special ed experience and she's making inroads with those families to ensure that the number of students who have new non-public school placements decreases this year over last year and the year before i will say to the board this is going to happen on an annual basis we're going to have kids move to our district who already attend non-public
066school placements so we just sort of accept that for what it is and try to create a system where we reach out to those families and also do our best to keep all of our families with us with their children in our schools having said that i did receive a request to indicate the fiscal cost of legal settlements so i want to walk the board through this process in the 2017-2018 school year the district paid 260 thousand dollars to our lawyers to represent us in incidents that took a 519 000 payout to families in 2018 and 19 the district paid our legal counsel 248 000 and paid families six hundred and three thousand dollars in settlements in 2019 2020 the district paid 284 000 to our lawyers and 607 000 to families as a result
067of litigation and then in 2021 221 000 to legal fees and 880 000 in payouts to families so i wanted to make sure that the board was aware these are the fees that we would have paid the legal counsel that was representing the families is included in the total cost of payouts to families so i want to make sure that the board was clear on that having said that i think the message that i'd like to give the board is that our expenses and settlements are excessive and our expenses in npa contracts are equally excessive and ask for the board's support in putting a program together to reduce those costs by implementing effective and innovative strategies with the team that i have at the district level that will allow us over time to reduce both
068of those costs and then i want to take the board to fiscal updates regarding transportation i did get a question about transportation at a prior meeting this is an a requirement that every district has is to provide transportation as part of the educational program for children as you can see each year transportation costs increase this is sort of on par with what people are or what districts throughout the state of california are experiencing um every year just costs a little bit more every year it increases so 1.9 million is a expected cost that a district our size would have to be able to transport children in special education i think our finance department and our chief business official would love to see that go to 1.8 or 1.7 but you know that's just there that's
069where they come from that's their world is to try to be efficient and um right now i think the cost that we're incurring for special education transportation is pretty it's a pretty solid cost it's a pretty fair cost i want to move us into staffing applications and the board currently has a department organization in which we have a series of program specialists a coordinator and director duties but those duties are not clearly defined they're not aligned to services that kids receive or to pathways that we have within the district so when you live in a particular area when you attend school in a particular area there are complexes that we have in this district that dictate where children who attend elementary schools very likely attend certain middle schools and our current organization for the department
070doesn't take that into account so we have staff members who are serving children at 16 different schools and that's excessive and part of what change i'd like to make in the department is to organize staff efforts in a way that allows staff members to work at six schools so that they build strong and meaningful relationships with the staff and administration at those schools and so that the staff and administration at those schools know who they can contact when they need something from the special education department as was discussed in in the prior slide the number of contractors we have working for us through non-public agencies is excessive and one of the ways to address that is to provide competitive salaries that that really encourage our staff to take on positions with us in terms of
071our dis or designated services vacancies the district currently contracts with agencies that provide a variety of services such as behavior therapy speech and language or occupational therapy but what happens is we have a contract with the company and one of their employees will basically tell them we quit or we are moving or they'll take the employee and assign the employee elsewhere to address a need somewhere else and what happens is in our district we are left to try to explain to the families how we're going to rectify the fact that this employee no longer is providing the service at the school so what i'm giving to the board are three examples of how this happens in the first example in 2021 we had a school where we didn't have a resource specialist program or rsp
072teacher we just didn't have a teacher for students and that resulted in 25 days of rsp services not being provided to 17 students the way to address that is to reach out to each one of those families and to offer additional services to rectify and basically make up the time that we should have provided that service in example b this is an instance where 65 days or 13 weeks of service were not received by a total of 23 students so you can see how that's a much higher number of kids over a longer period of time again that was during last school year the third is an example that pertains to this year the 21 22 school year and occupational therapy again this is a service that's provided by an agency and that agency has
073not provided the service for 35 days or for seven weeks affecting 38 students that's a bit different than the rsp service because it typically takes place about 30 to 90 minutes a week so it's not a daily service but our approach with this kind of instance this year is to get ahead of the problem with the families and to create a program for each child of how we'll make up those minutes in the other two instances there was a lag time in terms of the district having an approach with the families to say hey let's work through this problem so i wanted to share these three examples with the board to give the board an idea of how uh carefully and how closely we're monitoring services this year as a district we do have an
074expectation that our staff complete service logs for each of our students that allows us at the district office to take a weekly look at services throughout the district to identify any instances where services aren't being provided to our students to be able to reach out to families and to fix the problem which i think over time will develop a culture of accountability on our part and hopefully a relationship that's trusting with the families we serve then the last part of the presentation refers to a summary of a department roadmap this is a presentation that i would like the board to consider this evening specifically over the next sounds weird no over the next nine months a department reorganization along with stakeholder engagement there are changes that need to happen in terms of how we organize
075our department that i'd like to get started after tonight's meeting and in order to arrive at the right type of organization we need to involve our parents and our employees and get them to the table to discuss with us the right way to reorganize our department that will take many months it'll involve myself heather morgan alma alice and others convening meetings with people to gauge their input hoping that it takes place at the same time that our strategic plan is created and finalized so that by may of this upcoming school year of the 21 22 school year that we have a completed department reorganization that's aligned to our district strategic plan so that we can train staff in may june july and august in preparation for the 22-23 school year and then as you can
076tell starting next school year ongoing data review and program analysis so that's my presentation for the board i'll open to any questions from the public or any comments or requests for clarification from the board great thank you superintendent ochoa and um members of the cdac um great presentation i am going to open up to the board for clarifying questions any clarifying questions before i go to public comment i know that was a lot of information go for it i have a couple clarifying questions and i'll try to separate my questions from um i had a question around the special education leadership team i know that that was something that was in place and then not in place and in place again is that something that's currently in place the team is in place um trustee
077watkins we are holding our first meeting of the school year on monday october 25th and there was an attempt on director alice's part to reach out to members of the committee a doodle was sent out to identify what dates might work and there was an agreement on what date made the most sense for everybody a couple of weeks ago i essentially called the meeting for next monday and said hey let's sit down let's everybody get together and then we'll confirm our calendar for the remaining dates at that point in time all right thanks um i had a question around um so i know you talked about a little bit about the stakeholder engagement over the next um month or so and then i also heard amy and jen share about the upcoming cdac meeting is
078that are you going to be sharing i guess maybe you can share a little bit more about what stakeholders you're planning to connect with and i just thought of that in terms of alignment on timing but know that it wasn't a part of their presentation on the district's part our groups are already defined so we have our special education leadership team we have our school administrative team we have our employee groups smeda csca and smia as well as cdec so those are the groups that we'll be engaging with in a very direct way we'll also use district-wide measures to hold events such as youtube live streams to give all parents whether or not they're reflected or represented on those groups the opportunity to engage with us and and have their voices heard and one other
079question um do you have do you already know what's going to be in the next special education update like kind of a few topics or not yet well we'll always leave it open for requests from the board um because we want to be responsive and we want you know in that timing we want to know um and give information and updates to the board on what they're asking for but what in our next presentation the board can expect to receive is clarified data regarding student achievement for our special education subgroups as well as planned changes to the department's organization and plan changes to the pathways and the classrooms and programs that we expect to put in place for the 21 or 22-23 school year i know that you mentioned that you had insight into the
080percentage of students spending time in general education and how much time and so i was just instead of a part of what i was asking that is instead of asking you to share all that now is that something that will be shared at that presentation we can absolutely do that okay i think everything else is comments thank you um when we come to uh collecting the sita or the see the safe data excuse me um who's doing the data collection i mean obviously it makes sense to do some point of service data collection um i guess my question too is you know for for teachers that are teaching an sdc where it's a self-contained classroom providing um providing the services within that classroom are they being required to do double documentation in terms of collecting
081data from like documenting attendance through aries as well as attendance in class through the say system i'm not sure that i understand the question um trustee warren i think um yeah i'm not sure that i understand what you're asking let me try to rephrase that um basically i knowing that our teachers and our special education teachers put so much effort into you know teaching their class and making sure that their students are getting the services that they need within that self-contained classroom knowing that that documentation i'm assuming is going through the sace um program you know and that's where we're documenting those minutes and i understand that those minutes are also somewhat being documented through aries as well are we asking our teachers to do double documentation or yeah i just i guess i'm looking
082at the standpoint of is there are there ways we can streamline the data collection and offload some of that um on the people that are delivering the services directly what i'd need to do there trustee warren warns i'd need to actually pull in a group of teachers to ask that question i think if we take an example of a teacher who teaches let's say elementary rsp and that teacher has 25 students on their caseload all 25 students have a different number of minutes and a different regularity of service so student a might come to me for 60 minutes every morning four days a week student b might come to me for 45 minutes five days a week if i rely on attendance data that's been taken through aries it won't give me a clear indication
083of whether or not that child received a service from me so in an instance like that the attendance data being taken in aries does not reflect the service minutes being required to be provided to the students um so i'd have to dig into that a lot more um yeah bring that back to the board and also going back to your example using the rsp classroom and the rsp teacher i can that to me that makes perfect sense um because as you said rsp students are in that classroom for only a certain part of the day or so many minutes a day or a week same thing with ot or pt or skilled nursing or whatever service is required by the student i guess my thought is going more towards the self-contained classrooms if they're already
084documenting what's that the student is receiving the specialized academic instruction are we are we doing double documentation um so that's just something i would love to know a little bit more about and you know just thinking about in terms of for teachers trying to streamline their job duties as well um i think everything else i have is definitely comments okay i'll jump in next um so in terms of the fiscal updates i i just wanna okay i'm gonna make it a question not a comment i'd love to see like the number of positions also listed uh for the npa agency contracts um so um my question is can we include those in the future and then um i believe we got a written comment and so i was wondering if we could um integrate that
085a little bit so the comment was essentially elevating the issue that um some of these non-public agencies pay more than like a direct hire a directly hired classified staff would be paid and so i'm just wondering if we can also look into that in the future as well absolutely that's it actually i started one more question because i have more questions um in terms of we it's highlighted briefly about compensatory minutes or minutes owed students um what is the timeline that you see those students receiving those minutes is it realistic especially for some of these students where so many minutes are owed to them is it realistic to expect those minutes to be able to be given back or reimbursed however you want to put it to those students within this school year or is
086it something that would just continue to roll over if we're doing our job right trusty warren then we are offering as much compensatory minutes or old minutes as the family is interested in taking advantage of and as we're able to organize the service so when you take a look at the example i gave where it was the seven weeks of missed service some families will say no to the idea of their child getting a after-school service they'll say my child plays sports my child lives for sports i don't ever want my child staying after school to get more service but another parent might say staying after school for an hour makes total sense because my child is in the aces program so why don't we just have them spend the first hour after school getting
087that made up rsp service so it really is dependent on each family i think our responsibility is to be efficient in how we coordinate those made up minutes so that we give parents multiple options of how to access those minutes and if it takes more than one year so be it because we maintain the responsibility to fix that wonderful thank you i had a couple of questions um one was that i wrote down that you said i feel so loud sorry i'm sorry i wrote down that we you said we need an inclusion process where we check ourselves um and that sounds great it sounds like accountability and i was just wondering if you could talk more about how you plan to do that and what the process will be for that yes and and
088thank you for bringing that up and what i'm referring to there uh trustee proctor's app any special education teacher will tell you that the iep for each child is the road map for that child's education but the the effective districts that implementing things like inclusion make sure that there's a process to evaluate that what is written in the iep is taking place in the classroom so you'll have parents who say to you according to my child's iep my child is supposed to be in the math class every day for an hour but my child tells me that they don't go to the math class every day for an hour that they're doing math in their special education class so if we rely on parents telling us when inclusion isn't taking place then we run the
089risk of not knowing basically of basically putting it on the parent to say this isn't taking place when you create a system where you implement your own accountability you basically take staff members who are enrolled such as coordinators or program specialists and you assign them according to a calendar to go and evaluate the inclusionary practices happening at a school and basically what that looks like is you're visiting classrooms and you're saying i'm supposed to see kenneth chin he has an iep and it says it's this is his math class it's third period and he's supposed to be in math i'm going to physically walk into the room and check in on him it's just sort of an evaluative process that we use it's very non-invasive there's not a whole lot of um you know engagement
090that happens in the classroom at that time it's just simply um ongoing scheduled analysis of the inclusion practices that are taking place at a school and then you basically take that process and you extrapolate it out to the 21 schools to make sure that we have again we have a system to ensure that inclusion is taking place thank you um the next question was you mentioned um how i'm sorry how students um may start at one school and then they may switch to another school can you give an example of why that might happen for a student just for those of us that may not know yes there um there are many instances where we have children who live in one part of the school district and the district will have programs that exist in
091more than one situation and i'll give an example that i dealt with this summer we offer programs to children who are in the very lowest grades the kindergarten grades one is at brewer island one is at leed and one is at parkside so those schools if you think about the physical orientation of the district you sort of have to ask yourself that's sort of a an odd placement for where those programs are in the instance i worked with this summer a child who basically lived in one part of the district was enrolled in a program in another part of the district even though they were close to that same program in their neighborhood so it just didn't sort of make sense it didn't fit now when i looked further into it the school that they
092now attend for that program doesn't continue in third grade so unless we get in and create a program at that school in third grade that child is going to have to move somewhere else throughout the district to complete their program from kindergarten all the way through fifth grade so with that how i describe that is basically creating vertical pathways looking at groups of schools and saying okay we can't offer the same program at every single school that's not fiscally responsible but if i take beach park and brewer island and foster city and audubon and say i want to have a pathway for this program at one of those schools then children with special needs who live in foster city can attend programs at that school without having to then transfer to laurel or park or
093parkside or some other school that's across town one of the reasons to do that is it's very difficult for families to then have their fourth grader transfer to a school across town and not be able to attend school with their sibling anymore and families with special needs children will often make decisions about where their non their students who don't have those services attend based on where their siblings go so we kind of put them in that pickle where they have to decide who stays at the home school is it the child with special needs who stays at a school that doesn't have a program for them or is it the sibling who travels across town to a school outside our attendance area and i think if we spend some time on aligning those programs we'll
094come up with a better process that allows more kids to stay in their communities i think that sounds great i was just curious if that might also contribute to the high transportation costs if kids are just shifting all over the district it is probably a lesser aspect of it and the only reason is that many children have what we call door-to-door services meaning that even if they were to live let's say across the street from brewer island and attend school at foster city which is not necessarily really far away in our ieps will often offer service bus service if it is appropriate for the child's needs so even though it's only let's say 20 blocks away it almost costs the same as if we had that child attend park because if you've never met one
095of these bus transportation coordinators they're like the smartest people you've ever met in your life they can take 30 people and figure out how to pick them up at different times and move them all over the city and um and so they're very efficient in that way but i think it does stand to reason that if we vertically align our pathways more we might see some savings in terms of our transportation thank you very much i have one more oh sorry do you have a question okay i did have one more um question i know you mentioned um you know spending excessive amounts of money on our um npa contracts to talk a little bit more about and also settlements and i know some of that is a longer term kind of plan and strategy
096but i was wondering if you could share about anything that you the district may be doing right now to um specifically around settlements um any adjustments in the way that we're operating at the district level so that those don't continue to come in at the pace they happen thank you for that trustee watkins we're absolutely taking different actions the first and most critical step that we took was again to assign our principal from baldich middle school to serve in a role that we describe as a director of student support so her focus has been over the last four months to make personal connections with any family that our special education district leadership team meaning our coordinators program specialists and our director alice determined is maybe on the bubble or close to a situation where they
097might re result in some potential request to place a child in a different school or want to challenge the district's recommended academic approach for their child you might refer to that as a hot case or a very high impact case and her responsibility is to reach out to these families under the umbrella of reconciliation under the umbrella of talk to these families to find out what solutions we can put in place now that could potentially get in the way of a situation where we end up in a special education settlement that's the first the second is that we've implemented a process where every week the director of special education and i meet to evaluate on a weekly basis that the district is meeting its responsibilities for holding ieps on time for documenting that the notice
098of meeting was sent according to the requirements for documenting that all the information is uploaded into space so we are carving out time on a weekly basis to look at every single child's iep to identify any instance where we're not abiding by our legal requirement to hold meetings according to timelines and to hold ieps and and notice ieps in the proper manner it's quite a bit of work but it's the right kind of work for us to be doing now it's a very important intermediate step in order to straighten out the issues that we're having meeting our legal obligations thank you and i um live i have one more but it's for uh actually it's for amy and jen um i was curious and you shared a little bit about some of the different um
099or the c deck really operating as an advisory uh and more of an advisory role to the district and i was just curious if you all had ideas already about the ways in which um some of the changes that you all might make or in order to i guess better integrate or to better serve in that capacity um and i guess just like the steps that you're taking to do that and then kind of the second part of that is are there i guess things at the board level that you know we can support to make that um to make that happen i'm looking forward to seeing that trans transpire unfold thank you for the question um honestly i think the biggest piece is going to be our partnership with the special education leadership and
100making sure that we're creating a space where families feel like they can really come and tell us how things are really going um i think that we have worked really hard these last two years to make sure that our families have access to um people in the district to ask questions to and i think this is really sort of the next step in having it be more collaborative and interactive and actually creating engagement um as opposed to people coming to just ask their if they're one question about their one specific um child or issue or whatever um i don't know um superintendent ochoa do you want to add on to that based on the conversations we've had i always want to add on to what you say i think you know what we talked about
101was just how to create a space for families to to feel that when they when they have an update or a concern that it is heard by the district so that when we get together and see that meetings and when we bring cdac to the table it's done so in a way where there's a a respect level and an engagement level on the district's part to take action to say okay this is feedback we're getting from feedback let's move on let's bring bring back an update to this group at our next meeting i think if i were just to add one thing i think also um the ability for cdac to access data um to be able to really make solid recommendations um and you know i think some of the data that we'll get
102is what we've just been talking about is through engagement with parents but also sort of district level data um so that we can really kind of you know look at a number of different indicators and make solid recommendations that's really helpful and just to confirm is that something the district is committed to providing cdoc as his data great okay wait this is a really important topic so um we want to get all of our clarifying questions out of the way at the beginning so uh does anybody else have any other clarifying questions before we move on to public comment okay okay um let's move to public comment to the live audience first do you have any comments or would like to make comments on this item okay thank you uh peter would you mind um
103let's open up public comment online on this item yes anybody who would like to make public comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay first we have randy then after randy will be dawn randy go ahead hi good evening um first of all thank you so much to superintendent ochoa for this very very clear uh presentation of data and also for telling the story behind the data and doing it just with so much clarity um and so much conciseness and and just it was so much completeness really appreciated all of that and um appreciate the board for hiring the superintendent bravo um and also much appreciation to amy and jennifer for the work that you do um yeah awesome um i had and you know if you can
104answer these questions and if you care to i have um two questions on the fiscal updates and implications and then one other question that is swimming in the back of my mind so just throwing these out there on the fiscal updates and implications um trustee corzo asked a question that i just wanted to follow up on in terms of the the um the non-public agency contracts and then there's the the little table that has the number of employees i'm wondering if that table and then that list on the left hand side whether those two are mutually exclusive or whether they are just different representations of the same column of numbers so that's my first question second question is on the right hand side for the non-public school contracts the last two that are listed there
105the bridge school and esther b clarke there aren't numbers after those representing how many um contracts those are for so i wonder if you have numbers for those or each of those represent just one and then the last question um and i might be way off on this but i'm wondering about um the district's focus hopefully if i understand this correctly on both the identification and addressing students that have dyslexia and what impact that that's going to have on what um superintendent ochoa identified as you know the with the sis and what the um the increased identification of students with disabilities is that going to further increase the identity the numbers of students with disabilities what is the impact of that going to have and does that diagnosis or identification um result in those students
106getting a 504 or an iep does that qualify as a disability what impact will that have thank you very much for all the work that you're doing thank you randy next we have dawn then after dawn will be jessica don hi actually my name is brenda my um the the name on my computer is incorrect um i just wanted to clarify something that was presented about the information on the website being out of date um i maintain the special education web page for our district and the cdac webpage and that information is actually correct and accurate the brochures from all of our programs is currently on the special education website page and they are accurate so i'm not sure superintendent ochoa where that um aba basis brochure that was in your presentation i don't know
107where that came from i've never seen that before but i just encourage families if you want up-to-date information on special education and on cdac it is up to date on our website i know um amy fikinshir reaches out to me constantly to update the cdoc page and when i have the information i need to update it i usually do it within 24 hours um so i just want to make sure that that is that that has been clarified that the information on our programs on the special education page of our website is up to date and is accurate thank you brenda next we have jessica jessica go ahead hello good evening board of trustees president chin superintendent ochoa i just wanted to comment um and feel the need to voice that many agency and pa
108contractors in roles such as ots or slps speech language pathologists have been in the district for years and are extremely committed to the students families and communities of san mateo foster city school district a huge deterrent to being a direct hire in this district is the significantly low salary in comparison to nearby districts after completing years of rigorous and highly specialized programs on top of living in the bay area the compensation that agencies can offer is competitive and comparative to nearby districts i just felt the need and felt compelled to let the board and community know that there are agency workers in this district who are invested and committed to san mateo foster city school district thank you so much thank you jessica okay president chen we have no other hands for public comment great
109thank you everyone for providing your comments i'm officially closing public comment ah thank you live comment um do we want to usually you talking to them but uh people on it's okay but people in the audience or online wouldn't be able to hear you so um can we help her president chen i'll take care of it yeah okay here just stand right here and talk right that yes there you first i want to comment that what a great job you're all doing as usual it's uh always fun to be here uh i'm dr britta retired physician and i'm here tonight because i don't hear a lot of the health education for special ed i don't hear that a lot and i certainly would like to be able to hear that health education even for regular
110students is very important we've done that in the schools for the past eight years and uh with windy mcmichael and uh would like to really see more of that i have some solutions for later thank you who provided comments um i'm officially closing public comment on this item bringing it back for board comments uh this is an informational item so there's no vote um but i know that we all have comments and i've saved mine for this period so who would like to go first i can share i will be brief um i wanted to first thank amy and jennifer for their leadership in cdac and i really love the way that you you guys have surveyed families and are putting into action those priorities and providing parent education opportunities for families and i like
111the idea that you're looking for school site reps um for the group so i think that's great and thank you for the time and dedication that you are putting towards this committee so thank you um and i just wanted to also thank um superintendent ochoa for the presentation um i thought it was very thorough i really appreciate the accountability transparency that we've been asking for um although you know maybe the the information is not ideal you know the ideal situation that we're in now but it gives us a great baseline to kind of compare and see where we go from here um especially in terms of the um the fiscal piece of the non-public school contracts the non-public agency contracts and also the um settlements so thank you for that information i also appreciate the
112way that you've laid out what we can expect in these presentations going forward and so i am looking forward um to what's next to come i was just going to say in terms of the um the different contracts that we have i think the goal is that we're providing students with what they need and so i know we spend a lot of money on that and we have historically spent a lot of money but i think the first priority is to make sure that the students are getting what they need what they need and if we can somehow convert that to in-house employees um then that's great um but you know i think that the way you plan to be proactive and identifying where there may be gaps and where there may be holes or
113areas where we're not providing what students need i think that's um that's uh most important i think in terms of the settlements obviously we'd like to see that go down um but i think it'll it'll hopefully naturally happen as you kind of put these pieces into place where we can hold ourselves accountable um and make sure that we are doing everything that we're supposed to do so um those are my comments i really appreciate this update and i look forward to hearing more happy to have happen uh thank you to everyone for the presentation it's really awkward to talk and hear yourself so if we're all being weird that's why we're like hearing ourselves in echo mode um thank you everyone for presenting um amy and jen just appreciate your dedication to the seed act
114and continuing to work on that i really appreciated the response rate and that you all shared from the parent survey i think that's really you know 30 something percent um which is i think good in general for an online survey um and particularly i know you know a lot of parents and families with students with special needs there's just a lot on their plates it's the beginning of the year and so to have that response rate and to also have it be accessible to families um who uh who were responding in spanish you know just other kind of ensuring that it was presented in a way to get a positive response rate from a wide range of our community so thank you for everything and um it's it's great to see that kind of uh
115transpire and continue to move forward and just looking forward to continuing to receive updates from you all and if there are ways that we can support the work that you're doing please let us know uh superintendent thank you for the presentation um i mean i appreciate the candor i remember when we had the audit presentation a few years ago and at the time saying you know i feel like this is the first time that we've really said there's a problem right we're not doing what we need to be doing in a variety of areas which is not a great thing to have to say or to hear um to figure out how to move forward but you can't begin to move forward with fixing a problem if you don't say that it's a problem and
116so i just appreciate sharing um kind of you know the real live baseline of where we are and then and then thinking about how we move forward and my comments are really just around um i i mean i appreciate i appreciate knowing what the structure is in terms of presentations moving forward i think for me it would be really helpful to have i'm almost envisioning a special education strategic plan so i love that there's going to be alignment with our strategic plan but i'm seeing all of these different areas some that will take three years some that will take five years like what happens now what happens next year what happens in three years what happens in five years what can we expect to see what can the community expect so that everyone um can
117be really rowing in the same direction and knowing kind of where we're gonna get by a certain period of time um so that we can check for accountability on that so i would love in an upcoming presentation it might not be the next one maybe it follows you know when we have the strategic plan and then there's something that's kind of built up from that so that you know we're moving forward with kind of that alignment but for there to be something specific there so we kind of can wrap our minds around um you know we think about settlements here's how we're going to address that over the next x amount of time when we're thinking about agency contracts this is what this looks like when we're thinking about inclusion and expanding that you know
118um so that it's uh it becomes less kind of like pie in the sky philosophical conversations and much more tangible and i think that will provide clarity to our families as well um so that folks know that it's coming it might not be coming right now but it is coming there's a plan for it and how we're going to work towards that here's how it aligns with our finance finances and all of that so um that for me would be really helpful in in uh upcoming future presentation and you can let us know when it makes sense for that to happen based on where we are with the strategic planning um but appreciate the presentation and and the structure i'm looking forward to continuing to get regular updates and looking forward to digging in um
119to some more student specific data next time around all right um i don't know where to start uh first off thank you superintendent ochoa for the very in-depth uh presentation i really appreciate you know being able to put numbers and data to things that we have anecdotally seen and heard from various parents and various staff as the years have progressed you know just some things that i would love to be able to see going forward um you know at one of the you know or or maybe this is something that we just start tracking um you know i would love to know what sort of onboarding we're giving our special education teachers i would love to know you know not just brand new teachers you know new to the profession but also teachers that are
120making that jump from a gen ed setting to a special education setting um i liken it to you know my world is nursing and it would be the same thing as going from emergency room nursing to nicu nursing you know it's so vastly different that you know you cannot expect that person to be a teacher as a teacher as a teacher just as a nurse is not a nurse as a nurse um so i would love to see more mentorship um becoming part of the culture um i would also love to see and just make sure that we're not burning out our experienced special ed teachers and i would love to make sure that we are not um creating a a high turnover i know at for the last special ed update back in june
121you know i did do a tally and there were quite a few open spaces at the end of the year in terms of program specialist resource specialists um school psychologists just you know throughout both you know the outward facing with the students as well as the district level um staff you know there were quite a few holes that needed to be filled over the summer um and some of those had given note some of those people had given notice early in the school year and we were still seeming to fill those spots so i would love to see and i'm sure you've got this covered in upcoming uh presentations just in terms of ensuring the staffing um i would also love to know going forward too um you know a spread with our special education
122um numbers rising and the amount of students that we're seeing coming into our district for special education you know and with the idea that we are trying to look at real true inclusion and meaningful inclusion where we are looking at that core content that the student is learning um we need to make it in order to make it work i feel like we need to create the situation to happen so it so this inclusion can happen well um you know we can't or so what am i trying to say um you know something that we may want to look at is smaller class sizes in general ed what would it look like to have a push in special education teacher pushing into a general education classroom and that's that's topics for further discussion in the
123future um i also feel like you know we talk about k through eight we talk about you know realizing that there's issues you know come third grade when you know it's like okay we aren't covering children anymore in special or in general education and now we need a more specialized academic instruction a lot of the identification happens you know from you know like in that three to four year old age frame you know and i'm thinking about some of the diagnosis that you see covered in and by individuals with disabilities education act uh with this you know even prior to the 2004 update but especially in the 2004 update they do delineate exactly what are the covered diagnoses things such as developmental disabilities such as autism dyslexia you know things that do start showing at
124ages three and four you start to see the developmental disabilities popping up um you know you could even make a case for preschool being the ultimate inclusion um because that's when we're starting to do that child find that's when you start to see see the differences in development we need to be focusing more than what we're focusing now on our preschool programs and on our preschool child find and i would love to see um plans for the future um having that figure into the strategic plan going forward i also um i've got so many notes in so many different places i apologize i am looking forward to seeing as the um as the strategic plan goes forward more clearly defined roles of the director of special education of the coordinators of the program specialists um
125i would love you know i'm looking forward to seeing us educate more of our children here in the district as much as possible with the realization that yes there are some kids and some students where placement in a non-public school is the most appropriate um you know placement in a special education classroom is the most appropriate but you know i would love to be able to keep more of our money within the district as opposed to having it go out to legal fees and school settlements or to the funding of some of the specialized private schools um and then also going back to you know i i was a little um interested in the brochures that we've brought up and um you know and i did take a chance take a moment just to look
126at the special education section of our own website and there are things that have not been updated um i did see a brochure there that did have um last year's aba basis coordinator who is still listed and she's no longer with the district there's other either the school psychologist brochure that's there and it also has names of psychologists that i know for a fact i saw left the district at the end of last year as well um also on the special education portion of the website there's a parent um what is it a parent handbook which oh my gosh who wouldn't love a parent handbook as you are brand new to you know the idea of having to educate your child in special education i know i've brought this up before in previous board meetings
127but when you when you have a child with a diagnosis that will ultimately need special education you're juggling so much as a parent you are you know one grieving the fact that your child is developing differently than you ever imagined when that child was born you know you are trying to manage and and get in your mind's eye what is this going to look like for the rest of my life for the rest of the child's life um in addition to navigating like like health care related issues now you're going to be navigating school issues and you know that in itself is almost a full-time job there are parents that literally no longer work because their job now is to manage their children's services so when i saw this parent handbook i was like wow
128this is awesome you know it's great to see this kind of resource the resources dated 2006 and it is put out by the special education pta subcommittee so i would love to be able to see that updated um in the future um to reflect something that's more appropriate or just more more up with what's going on in 2021 um i also you know in terms of cdag and this is just something just to throw out jen and amy superintendent ochoa i would love to see a teacher liaison attend the cdac you know we have a board liaison we have a couple board liaisons we're trying to have school liaisons i would love to have a special education teacher representative or maybe a teacher for the preschool for elementary and for middle schools who can then
129take that information back to their group and disseminate it that way just so that we can make sure that we're closing that loop of communication between the cdag our staff and the families so those are just some of the comments that i have and you know i'm just going to echo previous statements made by my fellow trustees that yeah we all knew that this data wasn't going to be pretty um i think any any like we all knew um it doesn't come as a surprise and yet i still feel hopeful you know i you know have heard from superintendent ochoa that you know he has a very good strategic plan in place you know and i also understand that it's not something that's going to happen overnight you know and two years is a pretty
130fast timeline to incorporate some of these changes because we didn't get here overnight you know so it's going to take longer than overnight to fix it so i am looking forward to seeing and hearing more as these updates come out thank you i uh i'll keep my comments brief i just wanted to make a suggestion to both the cdac and i'm happy to support with this in any way that i can and to our district that the data that was already included in um this presentation i think is like a really good starting place but disaggregating it and uh like learning more about the stories that it can tell when it's broken down i think is a really good starting point so i would make that suggestion and um yeah happy to help it's something
131that uh we do um at the organization that i work for golden gate regional center we do look at like disparity data and that is essentially like essentially disaggregated data and um and then like create like uh like action plans after that so just a suggestion thank you okay um thank you thank you amy thank you jennifer for your presentation thank you superintendent chella and and your staff for for this presentation i feel like this has been one where we're sort of finally seeing the overall picture in some ways with a lot of data as well uh in the past we've received you know presentations on the audit and csace and just other presentations but this is kind of like so more of a global view of it and i i really appreciate the presentation
132and i am very optimistic in the direction we're going um i am happy to hear that maybe there's more inclusion that's happening i'd love to see if we can get some sort of data about that because one of the things i know when i first joined the board and and a couple others here um that was the art one of the main focus is special ed at the time um it was talking about inclusion and we talked about making sure that more kids were pushed into general education then i think the following year the thing the theme about general uh special education was about reorganizing where the classrooms were because i think you know we had heard all the kids being bussed from one grade to another to another to different school and the idea
133is how do you kind of build those sort of complexes where kids don't keep moving around from school school and then of course you know so the pandemic hits and everything falls apart in some ways we obviously have always had nps and mpa contracts um and there's always been obviously settlements um but the one thing with the pandemic and what the state and the people may or may not know is that the state and the feds give us a lot of leeway on a lot of things in terms of education you know there weren't a lot of assessments they allowed us to move around our calendars and you know the beginning that started the school year add more professional development days a number of other things but what they didn't do is really help us
134with uh special education and the hours that were sort of that are that are not deserved but are required for a number of our special needs and special education students and so i'm not surprised that the numbers have increased um quite a bit partly because of the situation that we were just in i'm also not surprised that you know when you look at the numbers you know you the superintendent cho you mentioned that they're sort of excessive and and i would agree and i and i think the thing is what i would love to see is is now that you provide the numbers just for this past year i wonder what those numbers were before like i think we could all go back and think about i know we've all received presentations about the mpa
135nps numbers but i'm pretty sure they weren't this hot and so i'd love to know like over the last three or four years like what were the actual numbers um speaking with friends who are not in this district but in special education special education field they've always called it sort of the dance um it's the dance like every school district goes to this for mta and mps contracts when you're talking about budgets and granted our budget is actually really good at the moment we're in the black but for other districts it's this combination of how do you it's what is the acceptable balance of npa and nps contracts right and there's always this push and pull of well wait we're spending too much on there so let's pull everybody back uh to try and sort
136of balance the budget and make sure we're not spending too much and that happens throughout california and a lot of other districts uh according to my friends who are in special education so i'm not surprised that you sort of said that they're excessive i just would kind of like to know what that baseline is and how much really is sort of acceptable i i don't think there's a hard and fast line on it because i think every child is different um but i i think as a district it'd be nice to know where the sort of ups and downs as we move through uh and try and move in that in a better direction regarding special education so i feel like you know overall when you think about the last few years it feels like
137it's sort of in a hodgepodge um in terms of special education again it was about inclusion then about which schools were there then we had the audit and now we have css and now we're having this um your presentation but i i feel like we're in a much better place like i'm very optimistic i'm really happy that you put out you know the number of years like when you look at the roadmap because the reality of this situation is it we can't solve this stuff overnight it takes time it takes time to get everybody aligned and in the right place and so i'm really happy to see that it's a methodical sort of plan as we move forward so i'm very optimistic i am very looking forward to the december update there's a couple things
138for the december update just um about the numbers i think would be good also i'd love to sort of whether it's the december update or the next update afterwards uh an update on the the audit obviously and uh c6 because you know those are either are currently happening like c says or the audit has happened and i'd love to see how it folds into sort of your plan overall in terms of special education uh let's see i know there are a number of other trustees who raised to pull issues that i was going to raise but i will highlight what trustee corzo mentioned about the public comment about salaries and i did hear about um i'd love to kind of understand what other districts are sort of paying in special education what are we paying
139what the contractors are paid through a private institution and then we're currently paid paying because i think that if there is a disconnect there then we should really look at it um let's see here oh just a side note it did appear that you updated the presentation with your additional chart on page was it seven so if you want please make sure they update their website so that uh for the record that that other chart is there and the presentation is is there um the student achievement data the rework and the pathways i think you mentioned and i'm really happy to hear that that's what the next um december update is going to be about talked about the inclusion oh and then the just the overall numbers again i'll just mention it's you know having
140those is really helpful and just to find out whether we're moving sort of up or down as sort of a measurement in terms of um measurement of success if that's an issue or something that we'd want to consider like that i understand and like what trustee warren said it's it's understandable that we are going to be paying um outside agencies if that is what happens um i don't think that will ever not pay outside agencies because it depends on the students but understanding like you know where those numbers are and how they flow um would be helpful for some additional uh information so just to sum up i'm absolutely optimistic again i want to thank you for your presentation everyone just provided comments and everyone's worked on this um i do feel like we are
141looking at this in a very different way um and not sort of like a hodgepodge way but a sort of a whole whole plan and strategic plan and really trying to figure out how we're going to move the needle um so thank you any last minute comments before we move on to the next item no okay okay um before i forget i we did get um we we got a public comment about health and uh that got my wheels turning uh my son is in fifth grade right now and so he is getting um like he'll be getting um like sex education right and so i was thinking about that aspect and our special needs students and how you know they need developmentally appropriate content around those topics and might need to spend more time
142with it you know in my role as social worker we sometimes see behaviors related to to students with special needs around you know those kinds of things and when i brought up earlier these design desegregating data i think health would be a good one to to do that by also right like how many of our students have um health needs that that require them to have skilled nursing like lisa said or other services so yeah i would love to to know more about that thank you okay thank you um superintendent cho do you have everything you need let's see i do i just sorry i wanted to respond to some comments that were made regarding the presentation itself the chart that was added to um the fiscal implications page is the same data that's listed
143on the left-hand column so there's a list of numerous contractors and what we did was we took all of that information and we organized it into the categories by service so it's really the same data on the right hand side there is a representation of each of the schools with the number of students that are attending that school for whatever reason the last two schools that didn't make it into the chart it should have been in there for the second to last school it's two students and then for esther b clark we weren't able to verify the exact number so i just didn't want to give the wrong information and i can bring that back to a follow-up meeting but it is not one student because that would be a very expensive non-public school yeah
144thank you for that clarification okay let's move on to item 7.2 which is the district-wide formative assessment data superintendent joe please take it away thank you president chen and again this is my presentation i'll share my screen with the board and begin with a conversation about how we have established the beginnings of a process to show the public and to show the school board how our students are achieving uh in our schools with an awareness that this takes time and that creating a data-driven district culture will not happen after four months and so what the board is going to be shown this evening and what the public will be shown this evening is what historically the board has been shown over the last several years and what work we're starting to do this year presentations
145to this board and to the public have been routinely preceded by requests from the board for data so there were very clear connections to board members saying we would like to see data and then the district responding a month later or two months later with a data presentation often the sources of that data were dashboard local data from the alcap and galileo data the board however had not been presented for several years formative or data that's provided through cde related to the caaspp so how i want to define formative data is it's data that is telling the board and telling the public how students are doing now in the subjects we're teaching now not six months ago or a year ago and definitely not something that happened over nine months but rather something that happened
146over five weeks or six weeks or seven weeks so a much more abbreviated time frame to be able to give updates to the community and to the board on how students are doing as we live and breathe as they say one of the ways that the board sees these representations of the data are summative assessment data related to the casp as well as galileo data the board and the public would be probably very familiar with what you're seeing now this is a chart that was presented numerous times to the board over the last couple of years in which there's sort of a a baseline that's indicated with the yellow markings that go down the middle and then percentages based on categories so in some cases these are races in other cases these are language proficiencies
147and then in other cases their socioeconomic groupings but it's shown in a way that makes it difficult to understand and to compare the total numbers of students and how those students compare across schools and really what information this is telling us about students so it sort of looks like in this presentation all students were at the 62.2 percent rate in the district and then starting to pull out subgroups of kids some did better than 62.2 and others did worse than 62.2 so if you just look at at the very bottom where it indicates 9.4 english learner students and then you'll see there's another percentage next to that which is negative 0.7 and then you'll see another number next to that which is n meaning i think number of english learners was 1100 so i'm sort
148of looking at three different pieces of numbers next to one group that it looks like it's compared to 13 other groups but now as a viewer of this data i'm having to try to interpret what it all means because there's so much data on one chart so i want to take you through the highly compacted data it's decontextualized from from very um significant data that we would want to see this is another chart that the board is is had typically received from the district um it's showing comparisons to other districts this is the i just sort of did a cut and paste out of this chart but again multiple grade levels multiple um subjects english and math being and then sort of the gray areas with the lines and the dots and and there's a
149lot of interpretation that's going to happen when you start to look at data in that way one of the recommendations i've made to our senior leadership team and to this board is to build internal capacity in the use of equity focused data analysis so basically what this refers to is looking at data that's taking place now and starting by evaluating how subgroups of students are doing at each grade level to be able to identify concerns happening now and tie those concerns to programs that we offer students an important aspect of that is to build internal capacity in the analysis of standards and how they're assessed so we need to know that our principals and our staff and our schools understands when we teach certain math standards how is that assessed in the tests that we
150give students and what can we interpret when students don't do well on the assessments we create and then obviously engage our educators in studying and thinking about the nexus between our student achievement results and our instructional practices basically creating the space for our staff principals district leaders classroom teachers to look at how our students are scoring on assessments and talk about what that means about how we teach students and what resources and supports we give our students in the classroom taking it from there what i'd like to start to show this board on a very regular basis is data that is very easy to understand and view that is visually represented in a manner that's understandable by parents this is a chart that has existed for several years it's updated on an annual basis the
151the data for the district if you remember that 62.2 that's what this data is referring to the way this is being represented it's showing you that in fact 62.28 of the students in this district were meeting or exceeding grade level standards in english language arts so if you can think about that it's reading writing and 62 out of 100 students in our district were meeting the standards so many many districts would be really happy with that percentage and in fact our percentage exceeds the state average so there's something positive to take from that what i want you to look at next is that yellow section where it indicates 16.81 of those students are nearly meeting the standards so that's also a very positive piece of information it's knowing that 16 or 17 out of every
152100 students in our district are not yet at grade level but they're getting close to that they're nearing the standard so that you take that as a district you say okay i'm going to work with that i know how to address the concern that's placed there and then finally the salmon or orange colored section indicates that 21 out of 100 students in our district that took this test are not meeting the standard in english language arts which is reading and writing so this is very easy to see it's very easy to interpret and it's showing you all the students in our district and what you can do through a regular analysis of this data is you can start to specifically identify groups of students using this format that's easy to understand and using a clear
153legend demonstrating the data of all the students easy to understand what i'm showing the board now on this new chart is the same year our district what i'm showing you is two different ways to disaggregate this data which you are looking at are students who are economically disadvantaged meaning when they register in school every year they indicate to the school district that their income as a household falls below the level that's federally designated for students to qualify for a free or reduced lunch through the national school lunch program depending on your family size that number changes so if you have one child and one adult the number will be a certain dollar amount the more students and the more adults in the household the number changes and what you're looking at secondarily is this program
154will allow you to choose a second subgroup to be able to look at their data even more closely so now what you're looking at is every child's data in the district who is economically disadvantaged and also black or african american and what that's doing is it's taking out all of the black and african american students who are not economically disadvantaged in other words their household income is above that federal level because this is an equity action this is us as a district checking to see how students who have limited financial resources who also happen to be black or african american are doing academically so if you recall the numbers on that first chart the number was 62.28 for this group of students that number becomes 9.68 that ladies and gentlemen is the achievement gap in
155the district and this data can be pulled for latinx students pacific islander students asian students white students who fall into any of these categories the interesting thing to look at from an equity perspective is how we react to knowing this information because the disadvantage of even though this is very easy to understand and clear is you do have to wait until the end of the year to see this data you can't see this data on an ongoing basis every six weeks or every 12 weeks which takes us to how we come to our formative data what the district is presenting to the board and to our public this evening is our math formative data for grade two and we have multiple grades that we'll review with the board tonight so what you're looking at is
156you'll see where it says zero to three four to eight nine to twelve and thirteen to sixteen we basically gave a math test to the second graders in our district and if the student got all the answers right with the highest score they would earn a 16. and if they didn't get any answers right if they got every answer wrong and got a zero on every answer they would have a zero so what we did was we calculated all the scores for every student in second grade and this is showing you that in the district in second grade we have 107 students who scored zero to three points on this first test we gave 114 students district-wide who scored four to eight so that's if you can think about like not meeting and then nearly
157meeting right sort of it's not an exact comparison but you can think of it that way 9 to 12 would be meeting the standard there's 242 students in that category and then 13 to 16 meeting meeting or exceeding 571 students so as a superintendent of the district i look at a distribution like this and i think i'd like to see it this way i would obviously love to see the gray bar be zero but in our profession we have to see where our starting point is and that's what we're looking at when i disaggregate the data and this time in the last chart we showed you we looked at low socioeconomic along with the ethnicity here what i'm showing the school board is english learner students in this district who also happen to be in
158second grade what you start to see is you see 171 english learner students in the district who scored high on this math test so that's excellent news it's wonderful another 95 who are doing pretty well on this first assessment the four to eight you see how that number pops up start to see that number grow and then the zero to three 61. so when you look at the two charts together you can see the distribution is not identical you see there's more students who are english learners percentage-wise in that four to eight and in that zero to three range but the charts somewhat actually have kind of a similar distribution to them not exactly but they do have somewhat of a similar distribution and then we go down to third grade and take a look
159at that data you see how that chart distribution looks 411 284 166 101 again that's all students in the district now i look at my english learner data you see fewer english learners in third grade scoring at that highest range more scoring in the second and third range and again comparatively this bottom range even more you see how the numbers change to 24 because different grade levels had different numbers of questions on their tests so we had to sort of play with the numbers just a little bit in fourth grade you see district wide that distribution still kind of looks like the second grade distribution and the third grade distribution disrequired and i want you to see what it looks like now for english learners in fourth grade do you see what's starting to happen
160okay and then we're going to look at fifth grade data again think back to that second grade data the distribution sort of looks pretty similar and then let's look at the english learner data you see what happens there so what we're showing the board and what argument we're making and what information we're giving to our our community as well as to the board is why it's so important to look at this data while it's happening because the data that i showed you the circles the real pretty circles that are sharp i think you can tell i created this one because it's not as snazzy as the other ones i showed you um that's for students who are in third grade and above third through eighth grade but remember the first chart i showed you that
161second grade data those kids have yet to take a formal test through the state and they're not going to for basically almost two years their entire second grade year they won't take one and then they don't take their first one until close to the end of their third grade year and our english learner students have not fallen far behind yet and in third grade again the distribution looks really different for those english learners than it does for them in fifth grade so think about how we can create a system where we give support and resources to children early on before they ever get to third or fourth or fifth grade where we put resources in the hands of families this board recently approved a purchase for a program called st math our plan over the
162next few months is to set up a system where we encourage families to have their children do 90 minutes a week of st math district-wide to be able to draw a relationship between students who we identify in september as falling behind academically and what happens if that family commits to having their child use stmap for 90 minutes a week every week in addition to the academic supports we provide in school to be able to show a nexus to families between their engagement at home using the resources we give them so if you think about it this way the second graders remember it was about a hundred who are falling behind academically if we can give them a hot spot which we have and a device which we have and a math program that's designed to
163meet them at their instructional level to give them academic support to strengthen their core mathematical reasoning skills and in the classroom continue to help them academically then what it creates is a system where we're having students make gains at home separate from their homework that's not that's in addition to the work that we're doing in class so that we can reclaim that time that children have outside of the school day to give them a fun academic experience that builds their confidence in math and then on the flip side find the same thing for our reading scores district-wide to address the numbers of students who fall behind academically and to start to intervene with those programs now multiple school board members have commented over the last few months about the importance of early education programs preschool
164programs i'll be bringing to the board a recommendation that we consider uh footsteps of brilliance program for this district in which students who have a san mateo or foster city address and their parents are able to access the footsteps of brilliance program at no charge as early as they sign up for the program so three-year-olds in this district who live in either city under the footsteps of brilliance program would be able to access the program which is designed to not require internet access so it takes away an economic barrier it is tied to the district providing the family a chromebook device when they download the program onto the device we provide the family they can do so at our schools once they get onto the program it's fully bilingual in english and spanish if the
165parent cannot read the program will read the books to the parent and child under the auspices of when your child uses this program we call it lap time not hap time we want children to be with their parents when they're reading these books and build their confidence and importantly both st math and footsteps of brilliance allow myself and our ed services team to monitor the usage of the programs so that we can engage and inspire and convince parents to help us get their children in these programs earlier on and move more quickly to adopt the programs in the district one of the outcomes of showing data like this to the board is that and this is our sixth grade data by the way one of the outcomes of showing this data to the board is
166they're sort of it's like an onion you peel back a layer and you just want to spill back the next layer and you want to look at well how did hispanic students do and how did our special education students do and how to and we can do all of that if i presented that to the school board in one meeting we would be here for five hours so one of the conversations that i think our board should engage in tonight is how we create and take advantage of either our school visitations or special board meetings to do deep dives into the data analysis because any attempt to squeeze our formative data um uh presentation into one of these school board meetings which as you know we have multiple items at these meetings it would not
167do it justice we just wouldn't have the amount of time we need to really delve deeply into the data so this is if you can think about this this is sort of an introduction to the idea of this formative data and i can go much much deeper because the charts that i'm showing the board are six of about 80 charts that we've created that show different groupings of kids according to where they live what school they attend what their income is what their language is what their ethnicity is and whether or not they have special needs i think the takeaway for the community and for the board is that i hope you see an awareness of the importance of isolating the data and digging into the data and being able to easily report the data
168in a manner that is understandable by the general public and by our stakeholders so with that i'll turn it back over to the public or to the board for any questions or comments and i'll be happy to answer those thank you superintendent ochoa bringing back to the board for clarifying questions does anybody have any clarifying questions they would like to ask i have a question [Music] my question is do we have a plan for school sites and teachers and how they will be reviewing this data on a regular basis absolutely um we're at the beginning of this process trustee corzo and and right now because the illuminate program which is where we're able to pull this data is so new and as the board knows we have very limited time to provide professional development under
169our current system we haven't had the opportunity to give that two to three hour training that's needed for staff to be able to access this data themselves the goal is to definitely set up time to show staff how to pull the data i think that at any given school there are groups of employees who would say diego you send me the data and others who would say can i please have a password because i can't wait to look up my own data so i think it's sort of on a continuum of you know some want to be handed the data and others want to really investigate the data themselves i do want to call out our our coordinator for data and research and evaluation cameron uh lewis he's he's excellent in his work he is
170very very skilled at pulling this data and and really leading the charge with the work that we're doing around data i think a reasonable expectation is that starting in the 22-23 school year every employee working with students in the classroom will have received the training that is needed and that our school principals will be highly versed in how to be able to access this data themselves any other clarifying questions from the board um i have one just curious if um in the english english learners um [Music] charts that you have are the reclassified english learners included or excluded from they are excluded from those numbers okay before we go to public comment to anybody else no okay uh opening up to members of the public live here please very good job you know data for
171us in our curriculum is very important we collect it all the time it's very easy because we're online so it's very easy to collect data when you're online and it is complete it is a across the board so you don't just collect it on how they're learning but exactly what they're learning on each module that you're teaching so it's very important you know again i'm going to concentrate a little bit more on health right now i want to know does anyone in this room know how much toothpaste to put on that toothbrush no probably not does anyone know what the most important parts to wash before you go to sleep at night probably not i'm not talking about delicate parts i'm talking about just regular facial parts anyone know probably not neither do our children
172our children need to know these things why because infectious diseases are on the rise and that's the truth of the matter and again thank you very much for letting us speak it's time for us to go thank you for those comments um and thank you for attending our meeting live uh peter would you mind opening up public comment for those who are still with us online please absolutely for those that are still with us please use the raise your hand functionality and zoom now if you'd like to make public comment on this item and we have randy then after randy will be sandy randy hello good evening again um so i i think before moving like gung-ho ahead on on this i think a little bit more data analysis needs to be done on these
173um these formative assessments um and i'm i appreciate the question that trustee proctor asked about the um about the el subgroup that was pulled out and i'm actually a little bit concerned about that i think that maybe a better just if you wanted to pull out one subgroup the subgroup to pull out would be like the sed subgroup with the el subgroup what i believe is probably going on is in second in second grade right you're going to have most of those a lot of those that started school being els with only a few reclassified every year you're going to get more and more and more reclassified so who are the students that are that are being retained in that el subgroup is the students that are facing more barriers whether it's learning differences whether
174it's um you know structural barriers whether it's lack of um support whatever kind of resources is students that are facing barriers to getting to that uh reclassification status and and so you're selecting out a group of students that are struggling more i think it would be more representative to look at the the sed subgroup because that's something to be more stable and you're going to have an apples to apples comparison uh grade over grade and so um yeah but otherwise yeah this is really helpful to see formative assessment data and something that i haven't seen a lot of um this detailed year over year and just another question about whether these data are available in first grade or is that just a grade that you're not able to assess thanks so much thank you randy
175okay next we have sandy sandy go ahead hi um i just wanted to say thank you for this data it was so easy to understand and i've been to many lcap meetings and the data that was presented in the past was always so hard to understand so this was such a huge improvement over that um the one thing that i would like to see on the the circle charts that you had first where you could kind of tease out different groups it's it'd be interesting if then you could have the n number how many kids were in that group to see the breakdown of i think that would be that would be meaningful but um thank you i mean this is so easy to understand i love the plan of the st math and that
176early learning thing and um how we can use the data to see how it's working it's great thank you so much thank you sandy okay president chin there are no other hands for public comment thank you everybody for providing your public comments i'm officially closing public comment on this item item 7.2 and bring it back for the board for discussion and comments this is an informational item so there's no vote but um please anyone would like to jump in and start i'm really excited to um to be starting to dig into formative assessments a little bit more um i know that we have looked at some of this data um when at the school site level and you know dabbled into correct you know at the board level a little bit but i'm excited to
177kind of really think about um i mean both from a board level but you know to trustee corzo's point what's even even more meaningful right is our educators and our site leaders digging into this to be able to really drive what's happening in the classroom and at school sites on a daily basis so i'm really looking forward to hearing what that plan kind of looks like and how we can support that work i agree um superintendent nocho with kind of this idea that there's a lot to dig into and so how do we do that in a way that's meaningful and we can't necessarily do that in the boardroom setting um in my mind i almost think that maybe there are kind of two different kinds of ways that we examine right because i do
178think that having data presentation in our board meaning um is important for a couple of reasons right i think you know people these meetings happen at predictable times it's accessible to our community and it shows that data is important a part of how we do business and looking at student achievement as a part of how we operate and so i think having it to some extent you know continue to be present at these meetings which i know that you know there's a plan for having data presentations in these meetings and then i wonder about having you know some study sessions built in to be able to dive into it deeper into thinking about how that happens again at our school site visits the challenge with that of course is just accessibility for the community and
179so how do you i guess kind of merge that for people that might be interested in participating in that deeper dive um yeah and i i um i feel like there was something [Music] i i do like kind of the the representation of the data i will say one thing that is helpful for me and i don't know how we do this like having the simple charts is nice and seeing the comparison is nice without having to like go back and forth between different charts and so i don't know how you um how you do both of those things is not making sense oh okay you're looking at me because what i was saying was not making sense okay um so i you know i'm just uh kind of thinking through that piece because you
180know i was finding myself kind of like scrolling and trying to figure out like how things change over time and kind of wanting to see that together as well as separate and so i know that this this makes it more simple but um but seeing that comparison and so yeah i mean i'm just looking forward at kind of the presentation the kind of next steps that are being taken and the follow-up to the strategies and whether or not they're working or not right like we have talked about that a lot and i know i have talked about that a lot in terms of just that accountability piece and how our progress monitoring and tracking and where we're spending money and is that the right place to spend money and is that making the impact that
181we wanted to make and so i look forward to kind of seeing that that um piece roll out so thank you i would like to um thank you superintendent ochoa for this presentation and also um just want to stress the importance of how important stress the importance of how important it is to have data that's easily too easily understood and so i um appreciate these um these charts both the circle graphs and the line graphs and um i think seeing more and more of the same format is going to help us just understand what they mean and when we see um you know sways and this kind of stuff we'll be able to easily identify what's going on um i was thinking i know that you said that going through all of this would take
182five hours i'm wondering if um maybe we do some sort of study session where we can dig deeper into something um superintendent ochoa you you've showed me data that like maybe either is interesting or concerns you or something like that so i think um maybe finding some some of those kind of data points where we could look drive a little bit deeper and understand what's going on that would be really helpful um but again i think this is this is really interesting i'm looking forward to seeing more and um and continuing on so thank you and president chen if i could respond to a couple of the public comments and also trustee watkins and trustee proctor i want to make it clear to the the community that the snippets that we're showing the school board
183tonight are merely examples the depth of the analysis that's already taking place is far exceeds what we're able to do in the constraints of this meeting and part of what trustee proctor just mentioned about how we establish maybe a special meeting to dig deeper into this type of data it aligns to a concern that i have about how we currently enact our governance as a district when the school board has two regularly scheduled board meetings every month i want to walk the board through what that means for me and for the executive cabinet tonight's board meeting is going to end hopefully at 10 pm on a thursday night as a school district we post the next school board meetings agenda the following friday so that means i have eight hours on friday and then loop
184back into monday tuesday wednesday and thursday a regularly scheduled board meeting gets items submitted by our director of special ed our chief business official our assistant superintendent of hr our assistant superintendent of of student services at the end of tonight's meeting the board is going to come up with two or three additional things that you would like for me to present on that add in new information we're also responsible for dealing with the daily ups and downs of covet and events and awards so what happens to the governance process is we are in a constant cycle of following up on a meeting and prepping for the next meeting and i'll make an argument over the next couple of months that we organize our regularly scheduled board meetings to take place once per month and to
185offer deeper study sessions uh aligned with topics that the board is very committed to that can also take place at the same time as a regularly scheduled board meeting but focus on a single or two issues now this is a head scratcher to a lot of executive cabinets and to a lot of boards because there's a concern that we won't be able to conduct our work if we only have one meeting per month but i want to assure the board there are many many school districts that operate with one regularly scheduled school board meeting now the flip side to it is if we were to retain the additional or the sec the two regularly scheduled meetings and add in more special board meetings that's simply a scheduling issue with a board that also wants to
186have monthly visitations to schools and engagement with the community through subcommittees and it creates a secondary expectation or tertiary expectation for members of the public who kind of want to follow along and figure out where we're headed so those are the things that i wanted to add into this conversation president chin also motioned to me a couple of minutes ago maybe i shouldn't use the word motion but signaled to me a couple of minutes ago that um i added an additional item for the board to look at and it it pertains to the comment that trustee watkins made about how we uh indicate a nexus between what we're doing in terms of evaluating our data and how that connects to how we respond to the data so our assistant superintendent of ed services dr chambliss
187and his team were given the charge to determine and create a fall math intervention program that we could coordinate district wide and give to school sites so that they can operate a math intervention program tied to the results of the tests we just gave now i want to give the board again a review this is new for us we don't typically operate in this manner district-wide so it's going a little bit slower than we would have wanted to do from the beginning but when you look at this presentation that dr chambliss has put together with his team and want to thank our math ptosis and our district administrators who worked on this this is a program that basically analyzes the results of our our exams in september and creates a program to boost the academics
188for these students the design is for kids to be able to have one hour of after school additional support three times per week over four weeks so it's 12 hours of academic support for students in a system where we don't have more than 15 kids in any one class and the reason is to make it so that these children can get extra attention if you put 35 kids in a room for tutoring after school they're not going to get anything out of it at the same time take advantage of both st math and math nation resources that we indicate and most importantly administer a pre and a post test to indicate the growth children are making with this tutoring program if we do that we'll be able to report to the board and to the
189public how well our tutoring program worked and if it worked really well we'll double down on that program and if we got results that we weren't happy with we'll change the program or modify it in some way but this establishes a system it's it's showing a relationship between how we intervene with students and the results that we're getting from these exams because what i want to make clear to the public and to the board is that these are not one-offs we're not giving a test and then leaving the data in some warehouse online we're connecting it to services we want to give kids to hopefully establish a culture where we give an assessment and the comment i made earlier today to the principals in our meeting with our assistant superintendent was that my goal is
190that in 2223 we give that test on september 15th and our tutoring program starts october 1st not november 29th that it's more immediate that it take place in a manner that's highly organized in addition to that doing things like giving these kids a positive feeling about being in these after school programs giving them some certificates ribbons awards stickers you would be surprised at what a seven-year-old will do for a sticker i have one who will just about do anything you ask if you show them a sticker and we really want to get these kids that feeling of success and that feeling of engagement the idea is to identify students who scored below the 20th percentile on that first assessment to have schools be provided lists of students that are easy to access to sign children
191up for the program for the central office to coordinate transportation for families who live in the north central san mateo area and need assistance at the schools that they attend and then to allow schools the latitude to coordinate the services in a manner that makes sense to their school and i'll just use beach park as an example it's a really small school so they might want to take first and second grade and do it together now foster city is a really big school they're not going to do that very likely so it just depends on each school and how they coordinate the provision of of those services again that was added to the agenda it's available online it's on our district web page so any family that wanted to look at it it will be
192coming to a program near you and i'll turn it back over to the board um thank you super tantra for that um maybe second presentation um i would just state uh i think the the governance conversation is an interesting conversation that that was not actually advertised or agenda so i would caution the board that we shouldn't really comment on what superintendent ochoa mentioned about the board meetings um and the changes there in terms of governance but in terms of the formative assessment and data and math i think that that is um very relevant and i have comments but i'm going to open it up to to you guys the rest of you guys if you have to finish off our comments on this agenda so um i heard some questions right about english learners and
193um i wanted to clarify so for for students that are english learners but are not reclassifying they do have a a name and it's it's l tells and they're long-term english learners and so in middle school there have our um del rodgers our english learner i always forget her title coordinator with with you know a team of teachers in middle school have they have developed both curriculum and a program specifically to to dig into the needs of those students and to really accelerate their their learning and give them the support that they need and there there is a english learner i can't remember the name it's not it's not a road it's not called a road map and i couldn't find it on it is a road map okay i couldn't find it on the
194website and i have it printed at home in a binder um but i don't have it here with me so i i think um that maybe would be something that we would like dig into in in a longer session right but i just wanted everyone to know that there is work being done in that space i do think that um i know it's like an example right but it does like the this for english learners is super alarming and and i think like the the need for support for that group of students is really high and um we have one english learner coordinator and uh a lot of work to do and so i just wanted to um elevate that and and kind of keep it on everyone's radar and then um my next comment
195is just about so i'm thinking about like the like the several years the many years that i've spent on the dlac um as a dlac liaison and um we have had sessions in the past um like families you know we didn't have the data in this like like this clear right but families like know what their what barriers they as families and their children are experiencing and they feel those things right and so we did have a session a few years ago um where we had see lack this was in person and it's like the before covert times i can't remember i'm pretty sure it was like 2018 or 2019 and um david might be able to help me to remember but we there was a session where um you know it was actually pretty
196well attended and families were given stickies and uh you know asked to provide feedback and ideas about what they needed and um there was i just want to say like there were a lot of really good ideas and a lot of very clear you know advocacy and commitment from families to support their kids to accelerate their learning and but they need tools right they need tools and they need support and um so i just want to say like i think continuing to do those types of engagements can be really powerful it gives empowerment back to the families who are you know who have the kids that that need more support and it and then also um i think it gives them again like empowerment and and like the i'm having trouble finding words right now
197to say this but i'm pretty much trying to what i'm saying is that like families know what they need and we need to like work collaborate with them and and help give them the tools and the commitment is is very clearly there and i've seen it right um some ideas were like you know families want like handbooks so that they can help their kids to do work at home but also like know some things like for example like for me i i'm doing math with my son and the way that they teach math is very different from the way that i learned math like it's it's a little bit challenging right like so so about all families all families need a little bit of orientation and if if we as a district like could provide
198that um those opportunities i think the the energy around doing that work is there um and i said all of that also to just make the point that the data that we saw was just a snapshot we will obviously dig into it um in a much deeper way but i also think that we need to give the most impacted students and their families the same opportunity to like grapple with that data and to take a hard look at it so that again we all are very clear about this is what we're all together looking at and and and now what are we going to do about it right um and i think it's also for me um like i was an english learner in this district a long time ago right not that long ago
199obviously i'm not that not that long ago but um but like this data doesn't like super surprise me right it's to me it's just more of like it's accurately reflecting what i have seen and experienced not just personally but um you know through other families that i'm connected to in the community and through uh you know like my own kids sometimes right like like it's it's validating in a way because it's like okay this is it's true it's like it's not like folks are not imagining it right like the this is true and so like validating that for families and then saying all right like we're you know here's the resources here's the data let's make moves right um yeah so that's just kind of like how i'm feeling after after looking at this but
200i want to just say right like having this information is is can and should be energizing for everybody for teachers for everybody on all points of the of the system and of our district um even the littles even the little kids right um they i'm sure they want to get to the green right they will give them a sticker we'll give them lots of things so i'll stop there but just some ideas going along with the sticker idea i know my seven-year-old would be all over a sticker especially if it had a cat on it but that's a different story for a different time this week has been one of those really eye opening weeks and i'm so glad actually that we are having the this formative data conversation right after our special education update
201because there's so many parallels it's almost the same story just with a different set of data one of the things i had an opportunity to do this week was attend the virtual california reading coalition summit that they had and it felt amazing to attend this um you know one of the things they kept driving home is you know the idea that social justice starts with reading you know that reading is property and you know are we redlining our students by not allowing them or not i shouldn't say not allowing but not ensuring that they are able to read by the third grade and then to see this formative data i mean it really feels like it speaks to that you know when we're starting to see you know the above great you know of you
202know that blue line in the data start to decrease after third grade i mean to me that's telling when we look at the zern curriculum that our elementary students use i i trusted corso i've helped my son out with zurin and i'm sure sounds like you have too and that's really word heavy you know you have to be able to read to understand that because not only do they present the data and like the questions in just number form but they you know in fourth grade they're writing out 100 100 845. so you need to be able to not only identify the numbers that make up that number but you have to identify what it looks like written out completely so to me that just goes to show that it even when it comes to
203math we have to come back to the building blocks of reading and as with special education as with the formative data that's been presented here we also can't be trying to look at data at third grade fourth grade fifth grade sixth grade and even eighth grade and going golly gee what are we going to do now we need to really really really put things in place for our special education teachers for our gendered teachers in the lower grades in our early elementary in our preschool we really need to to look at you know what can we do for you know we we get kids in our district starting at grade or at age three with our preschool you know and we have them up until age 12. we really need to see what we're going
204to do and what what where we can make the biggest impact when it comes to our three-year-olds up to age eight nine year olds um and then you know we can see the fruits of our labor and the fruits of what we're what we're putting into these kids you know when we get to casp data back starting in third grade you know and we can see those numbers starting to to um to grow in terms of exceeding expectations and exceeding grade level performance yeah i i think i'm going to echo everybody else and that you know it's not fun to see kids fail nobody gets into education to see kids perform below grade level but it's so good to see this information now and just to rip off that band-aid you know to expose what's
205there so that now we can form you know a plan and a strategic plan to go forward um and i really feel like where a lot of that strategy is going to have to come in is what are we doing for our preschool teachers what are we doing to support our preschoolers our preschool families and our early elementary families as well so i'm looking forward to seeing um seeing more along those lines um you know for all families in our district because you know it's just it's ultimately going to just affect everybody can you guys hear me okay sorry yeah did that happen with you i think you just cut out um okay um thank you for those comments i'll i'll finish up unless anybody else has any of that comments i want to so
206um thank you superintendent for that presentation i think it's it's fantastic that we're looking at this data um it's really important um a couple of comments is one my initial thought when you look at starting at second grade and you look at the math uh in terms of the assessments it and you compare it to english language learners um it kind of reminds me that you know math is like the universal language and so um it doesn't surprise me that um some of our english language learners and everyone is are doing better in math um but it does surprise me a little bit in terms of the data and how it shakes out um one thing that i will go off of is i would love you know looking at second grade and third grade
207and seeing how our students are performing in math i would love to be able to point point it uh point the success to like our small group instruction or our accounting collections which we have implemented throughout the district or something you know regarding um math sorry okay it's all frozen your pros on my screen um so i but i but i don't know what to point you i just think it's it's really interesting data the other thing to think about is well what comes to my mind is what um building off of what trustee warren had talked about is all the reading that happens in math um common core is great i think common core is definitely different from how we learned tristi corzo it absolutely is um there's a lot more reading to it
208there's a lot more reading comprehension and so one thing that's interesting is when you compare the english learners to the math it's almost like you would see more of a a decrease or other students not performing as well because of the english language learner's data so i i i think that's interesting to see because that's what i've heard that our math is great but there's a lot of reading and if you don't know how to read you're going to start falling behind really quickly so i'm curious to see how that how common core has affected these um these numbers and our reading assessments there overall i think it's great um it's great that we're having this information i think it's it's a lot easier to read it is a snapshot and so i i think
209it's great that we're gonna have further updates i pulled up our agenda builder because um knowing that you know we're receiving this formative data in october the next one is in february and what i like about going back to the agenda builder is the idea is that just like there's a budget season or there's an hr season in some ways there's a test season and you know to actually have that sort of scheduled like we will get a cast update you know with the data and whenever it is actually i can tell you isn't it on the agenda builder um well it's under c oh yes july so you know the idea that we know when like casps data is going to come out or fmp or the chicks survey data that's all this all
210these things and the assessments that we do it's great as long as we have sort of a consistent sort of way for us to review it and then also a consistency and see how we see so we can compare over time um how we're doing so i really thank you for this information and um i'm really grateful that we are looking at it especially actually after the special education update um so okay uh with that i'm going to conclude this item item 7.2 and before we move on to 7.3 i've had a request for a five minute bio break so um if we can all come back at 9 9 53 we'll call it so please thank you uh all right um thank you guys for that brief break uh we are going to continue
211on our agenda item with agenda item 7.3 the equity impact action plan superintendent otto are you leading this all okay thank you very much president chin i want to begin by making a disclaimer on the presentation itself as well as to the members of the public that are present that uh participated in this process we do have one of our executive cabinet members sue weeser who did serve on the equity task force during the last year as well as trustee watkins serving on the equity task force um when i joined the district at the end of june beginning of july one of the items that was was currently being worked on was the equity impact task force recommendations to this board it was part of a long process that is going to be explained in
212tonight's presentation and the results of which are being presented to the board this evening but i want to make clear my involvement to this point has been to review the report and to solicit from members of the equity task force feedback and ideas and requests for corrections or clarifications on the report itself and so that's what the board is seeing this evening i'm going to share my screen in just a second here once i get it on board here we go all right and there we go all right so what we're presenting to the board this evening is the collective work of a very large group of individual stakeholders in our district um specifically the equity task force was given the charge by the board of trustees to address issues related to educational equity as
213well as academic success in the district the board through a process of passing a resolution and bringing on staff consultant support as well as identifying stakeholders that worked in the district and had a vested interest in the in the work that the district was doing was able to create a task force that over the course of multiple years created a public awareness about the importance of equity issues being addressed in our district as well as establishing a system to make clear recommendations to the board about how to address the equity issues in tonight's presentation what the board is going to review are equity recommendations that pertain to how we as a district can achieve high outcomes for all this all district students in our system in a manner that removes the predictability of success or
214failures for students in a manner that addresses inequitable policies and practices and leads to a system where we discover and notice and celebrate the talents and gifts that our students bring to the table the equity task force members who contributed to tonight's presentation are listed just below again dr joan rosas participated in this process our two school board liaisons trustee corzo and trustee watkins our staff liaisons actually we have two present tonight david chambliss and sue weeser as well as winnie mcmichael and alicia hennigan on the student side multiple students representing the district on the parent side multiple parents i i saw earlier tonight diana harlick was present uh logged into this meeting so and i believe she still is community members reverend dr mellenbussie and our education foundation president at the time colleen sullivan
215as well as certificated classified staff and administrative staff as you can tell a very well-rounded group a key and critical area that could not be ignored by the task force in this plan was to identify and accept and talk about the impact of institutional racism and how it is prevalent in organizations including the san mateo foster city school district and to talk about what it means to have a conversation about institutional racism and its impact in our in our systems those agreements as you can see here were to stay engaged in the work to be okay with experiencing discomfort because as we all know is difficult to talk about these topics to allow members of the group to speak their truth and to expect and accept non-closure to basically be okay with some of these
216items remaining on the table and not expect a resolution to things that we know have existed for a very long time and will take more than a series of meetings to eradicate from there the group worked in a process of identifying systems change there was quite a bit of of time devoted to and conversation about a framework regarding systems of change that is that is identified in the visual that the board is seeing tonight specifically designing a process where change is part of a framework of identifying the outcomes that we want to see by challenging the mental models understanding relationships and power dynamics and then thinking about the way to enact structural change specifically policy change practice change and then the ever important resource allocation change that needs to take place from there what the
217board is looking at is the first component of this equity impact act craft and that is the understanding first and foremost of the equity gap itself under the category of staffing those areas include the recruitment and retention of culturally proficient and diverse staff members special education and language immersion staff needs and the need to create a welcoming inclusive culture under the safety and specifically lgbtq plus populations the identification of chks is an acronym for california healthy kids survey the intersection of race gender and identity and sexual orientation and how it affects emotional distress academic motivation suicidal ideation and substance abuse and then on the right hand column academics and specifically achievement gaps that exist for english learners latinx students and socioeconomically disadvantaged students disproportionality of referral for latinx students into special education disproportionately punitive disciplinary
218practices affecting students of color and students with special needs as well as access gaps to gate compacted math and school-based enrichment for the above mentioned group the next section of this impact action plan is the goals themselves and we'll review those specifically according to staffing the first goal is to increase staff diversity reflecting the demographics spoken languages and desired culturally proficient mental models of students and families in the district to prevent attrition and encourage leadership building capacity secondarily creating a desirable supportive and inclusive work environment by providing professional development plans and opportunities that center on cultural competency anti-racist pedagogy healing-centered engagement to shift mental models from compliance to a commitment to equity and anti-racist education under the category of safety pertaining to lgbtq plus populations the first is to reduce the equity gap in key
219indicators of mental health more positive psychological outcomes between lgbtq students and non-marginalized students specifically looking at those california healthy kids survey outcomes number two to have inclusive schools where students feel more safe in their communities number three to take more comfort talking to teachers and staff whether older or younger about sexual orientation and gender identity to provide students and parents and staff more education about sexual orientation and gender identity number five to eradicate the stigma associated with four lgbtq plus students and to increase representation of the lgbtq plus experience in our curriculum under the category of academic needs pertaining to the equity gap number one adopt a multi-tiered system of support as a systems framework to reduce education achievement caps number two and here again we see preschool prioritize the preschool to third grade years
220for high quality research-based instruction to identify and address learning challenges as early as possible and to accelerate the closure of achievement gaps and number three to implement rigorous program evaluations including intervention tracking in order to identify which strategies at which sites are working to best improve student outcomes the section on root causes is thorough it's lengthy i won't go piece by piece over the root cause discussion the section pertaining to stakeholders is what you can see here is a clear identification of the need and the importance of having more well-rounded stakeholder engagement and the identification of staff of data that needs to be added to this process specifically staff listening sessions you can see here it's really about qualitative data that needs to be added to this process is where we take uh and then
221here again recommendations uh start to flow in by category so under the staffing recommendations pertaining to policy because again we wanted to address policy and we wanted to address practice and we wanted to address in this plan plan resource flows the first is to explicitly seek to diversify the perspectives of staff by actively recruiting and supporting administrators educators and staff from varied backgrounds focusing on underrepresented underrepresented perspectives under the safety component create and adopt policies regarding transgender and gender non-conforming students under the academics or mtss category explicit policies about expectations to support educators and students academically socially and emotionally and behaviorally through a tiered evidence-based approach under the practice components specifically intentionally diverse hiring panels pipelines to develop teachers from our current staff in the classified ranks supporting paraeducator capacity pertaining to increasing academic achievement
222and social development considering experienced current staff to provide equity focused training basically building within our own under the category of lgbtq safety establishing inclusive curriculum acknowledging this group in our school culture and parent workshops to support families on the journey for supporting these children under the category of multi-tiered systems of support or academics 75 of schools within five years adopting an mtss every school and district office having a functioning mtss leadership team conducting universal early literacy and math screening clearly identifying tier one through three interventions in literacy and math investing in professional development focused on preschool to third grade as well as professional development to support teachers in understanding warning signs for learning disabilities special needs and universal design for learning or udl then down at the bottom the process at the board level for
223vetting new initiatives projects and grants against district equity priorities and the intentional consideration of the impact of those initiatives on over burdened staff under resources examine current use of recruiting resources pertaining to hr consider partnerships to supplement and offset costs and support completion of certification pathways to help our employees become certified and to consider experienced staff to provide equity focused training opportunities under the category for our lgbtq safety further disaggregate data and identify indicators of safety and mental health and under the category of academics coordinate and structure support personnel currently funded to provide education within an mtss delivery model and provide time for site and district teams to analyze data have inquiry discuss the data and meet as teams under relationships again one of the core components of this plan establish mentorship programs for certificated
224and classified staff build affinity groups to support and affirm and gain perspective for under represented marginalized and underserved certificated classified and administrative staff under the lgbtq plus category engage these families and students and learn about their experiences and possibly reaching out to rainbow gay straight alliance groups for focus group support under the category of mtss or academics support teachers in building relationships with students to support growth support administrators in building those relationships and connect with bargaining groups to address to excuse me to assess implications on staff and faculty relative to power dynamics professional development to build leadership capacity in terms of staffing intentional diverse hiring panels to ensure multiple perspectives under the category of lgbtq safety eliminate the stigma surrounding lgbtq families and students through education and ensure that these groups feel safe and accepted
225in their school communities under the academics or mtss category adopting multi-tiered systems of supports at a district office model executive cabinet level position focusing on early childhood education grades executive cabinet level leadership to assess connections between departments to implement mtss and finding ways for underrepresented families to have voice exploring the use of family liaisons to decrease over-represented privileged families at board meetings and in official district work groups under mental models the professional development focusing on cultural competency anti-racist pedagogy and implicit cultural bias to focus on shifting mental models from compliance to commitment secondarily developing explicit common ideas of the meanings of human resource terms and expectations under the category of lgbtq safety examine and educating administration faculty staff and community about the needs and expectations for supporting our students physical and emotional safety under the
226category of academics or mtss creating safe spaces for teachers and staff to be vulnerable and buy in to a different way of doing things and establishing a flexible pedagogy to evolve instructional approaches that meet the needs of all students under data collection and consideration for process for the task force moving forward it's essential that the board and the community understand that this document is obviously the reflection and the summary of many many months of deep work for subcommittees that that spent the time on this process and that the group themselves left this next phase of development uh indicating the importance of an onboarding process for new members a mechanism for the task force to address urgent and real-time equity issues there was a real desire for the group to continue working on that and then
227to continue the operation of a small representative leadership work group to proactively plan and solve task force process and workflow issues and to assist in the prioritization and action focus of the work i know we had members of the committee online earlier tonight i'd be delighted to have them give public comment at the conclusion of my remarks and we also have dr chambliss and sue wieser who participated in the process i want to invite them after i give my remarks here and my remarks to join in the conversation and make any statements or clarifications and between the three of us be able to answer any questions that come up from the public or from members of the board and with that i will turn it over to the board for clarifying questions and to the
228public for any comments thank you superintendent ochoa i would also just like to offer up an opportunity for our two board liaisons to add anything if they wanted to um i know that you guys did a lot of work on this and it may be helpful to to share some insights from the board level if you if you want to before we move on to player prank questions about the comment no no okay one thing um i was just going to share that i guess part of it's a clarifying question and also a comment um about it but um you know i mean so the clarifying question is um or maybe i should wait on clarifying questions okay um now i forgot what i was gonna say it's late okay so it's just this is
229i'm just gonna um [Music] i think one of the things so one of the pieces that came up in the kind of the data or actually reflects kind of what we just talked about in the data so one of the pieces of feedback was just around not not like having access to data but not having access to which data or which um interventions are supporting students and so as the task force was like grappling with some of the pieces just feeling like and that is reflected in kind of there was like a data piece in this sort of final report um and so i just think that that's something to kind of take with and it's something we heard from seedaker i'm just like how do we allow our um committees tasks task forces etc
230to engage meaningfully and to provide us with really with with feedback and recommendations that are going to be really meaningful and how do we give them the best data to be able to do that i just think it's something that's important for us to kind of think about but um the other thing that often came up with the task force was um you know i think that this kind of goes to the system like the systemic nature and the work that um you know something that they're grappling with as well is just the how do we um how do they kind of engage in in this meaningful work in a way that's really strategic but then also address the things that are coming up on the from the board perspective and in a timely way
231um i'm sorry i there was another there was a clarifying question i had and i forgot so i'm gonna come back come back sorry i didn't i didn't mean to look at you i didn't i just looked at you i didn't mean to throw you out there um i don't have a clarifying question but i i the equity task force meant for nearly met for nearly two years and through that process we had um i would say like three different uh facilitator facilitating group like first it was a group it was three of us then we had a facilitator then we had another facilitator and um the there was a lot of work done a lot of discussion a lot of different um meeting styles and a lot of learning happening in the space as
232well um we did work on the action plans which i think which are reflected in this plan um but i will say i do feel like there are some things that are in this plan that we i think could have touched on deeper in the equity task force and so while i'm really happy that we have this and that it's our it's our starting point i do think that there is a need for and and that and my understanding is is that that's what's happening now like for the equity task force to kind of in a way like reset and have you know better have have a more hyper hyper focus on current data and um and a different i think process for how you know we ensure that requests that we that come from
233the board in terms of like oh we want the equity task force feedback on this that like they have either more frequent meetings or maybe longer meetings so that they have the time to go in depth into some of the longer term priorities but also the the very current priorities um yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna end my comment there for a second but and feel free to feel free to add anything shara yeah that that's just what kind of feels true for me i think um there was a lot of work that was done and also i think it's a really good opportunity now to reset and reflect and kind of refocus on on what the the goals will be going forward i agree and that actually leads perfectly into my clarifying question which is
234really around like how do we yes and how do we capture the questions how do we capture the work that has happened and embed it into strategic planning like what needs to happen at the board level right there's a recommendation around a policy so does the board need to add that into the agenda builder then there's more implementation pieces where do those live and so um i'm yeah i'm curious to know kind of what the thoughts are on like how do we capture this and take this into into into what's happening moving forward in a really strategic way because people did invest a lot of time a lot of energy into making really thoughtful recommendations in these three areas some of that's already happening some of that still needs to happen um so that's my
235clarifying question no thank you guys um thank you for serving on the equity task force um so i have um a bunch of questions that are really questions comments so before i'll save mine for later but i don't know if the other two have clarifying questions or you want that answer okay ochoa absolutely um i think what is is right in front of us to do because as we discussed earlier tonight we have a strategic plan meeting happening next week we agreed to a process where the strategic plan committee that is representative of 21 schools involving 40 members of of our community are basically digging into a process where they really look deeply into where we stand as a district with the ultimate goal of giving this board clear recommendations at the end of december
236that say these are our biggest strengths and these are our biggest weaknesses what i believe the board is going to receive is a list of strengths and weaknesses that includes many of the recommendations that ties into many of the comments that are indicated in this equity impact action plan my ask to the board is to allow me the time to take both sets of recommendations in addition to the feedback we receive through cdac and coalesce those three sources of information in a manner that would allow the board when we sit here in january and at that february school board meeting to identify clear goal language that then the board puts on my plate to come up with a time-based resource allocated five-year strategic plan that results in the completion of the work that we're talking
237about here now having been an educator working with some very talented teachers and classified staff and some excellent administrators there are certain items that are mentioned in this equity impact action plan that are achievable in one year and there are others that will take years to accomplish and the charge you're giving me as the superintendent is to determine which fall into which category and to establish a timeline to accomplish those goals so what i would ask the school board is for time but the key consideration is not that much time just a few months to take the equity impact impact action plan recommendations and coalesce them with our strategic plan committee recommendations so that in the month of january and february in this meeting live with our stakeholders paying attention and commenting this board will
238come up with goal language that will then be handed to me to say superintendent ochoa re-engage with this committee and create specific time-bound outcome-oriented strategic plan goals and actions that are achievable over a five-year period thank you superintendent ochoa for that clarification um does anybody have any other clarifying questions before we go to the public okay um peter would you mind opening up public comment for those who are online and those who are actually still with us please i think peter's not with us uh i'll just start for those who want to participate he's on okay there you are peter sorry i had a little technical difficulty uh members of the public who would like to make public comment on this item please use the razor hand functionality within zoom now marcella go ahead hi
239thank you um i'm really happy to see the uh outcome or recommendations from the equity task force having been able to be a guest at some of the meetings um and participate in some of that process i find some commonalities and i heard it in superintendent ochoa's comment about linking the strategic plan with special education with the equity task force recommendations and one piece that i'd like to recommend that i see missing is connecting with the local preparation programs so we will be hiring new teachers hiring new special educators hopefully hiring speech language pathologists and ots and pts and some of our local universities are doing really innovative work and i think creating a strong network and connection with the people that are training our future educators would be key as part of this process
240i know that our assistant superintendent sue weeser is already starting to make those inroads but creating something that's more intentional and explicitly built into our process i think would be helpful as we're thinking about creating equitable outcomes for all students thank you marcella president chin we have no other hands for public uh thank you i'm going to officially close public comment on item 7.3 and bring this back to the board for uh discussion or further information and direction to the superintendent would anyone like to begin i'd like to begin um i'm gonna kind of reiterate some some points that i tried to elevate and did elevate two years ago when we first discussed the etf and hope that we can we can talk about it a bit more the something that always kind of struck
241me was that the process for for the etf um task task for the equity task force members to apply and be assigned to the task force i think kind of created barriers for families that have the students that are facing the biggest opportunity gaps and that is something that i think we can still um prioritize going forward there are there will be some um folks who whose i think like terms are are going to be coming up and there will be vacancies going forward of course and so again right like families who have students that are currently english learners families that are low-income families who identify as latinx or pacific islanders or african-american right like like those groups we see in the data are being impacted the most in terms of opportunity gaps and and
242and so having those voices at that table just like i mentioned earlier right like people know what they need and and i think um i i look at it also from the from the point of again empowering giving support and i and wait did i say this already but i think like we should consider giving stipends to those kinds of families right if we're talking about low-income families who are making decisions about you know going to work a second or third job to make ends meet and yet we're asking them for time and commitment and um i i think you know i would really want us to consider that because to me that is investing in in the leadership of those families and in helping them meet and overcome some of the barriers that prevent
243them from engaging in spaces like the equity task force also i think that the equity task force um i think you know i mentioned it a little earlier but the meetings um i don't i guess like i really wanted to think about like the so i think we already discussed and superintendent ochoa let us know that the recommendations will be integrated into the strategic planning and so that's what i'm kind of focusing on like the the future of the equity task force um i don't think that we have like a schedule of future meeting dates but i think we have to really make sure that if we are asking for uh many for a lot of work from the equity task force we have to make sure they're meeting frequently enough to have the time
244to engage in that work i also think that there is a lot of intersection between the work that the equity task force um would and should and probably wants to engage in and what the sanctuary task force has been engaging in and so that to me and i think we've i've heard it in several different spaces like we want to like integrate the work being done there i think that's possible um i know sanctuary task force now is meeting bi-weekly and so um yeah i think that's just something that we need to consider um it is really difficult to you know have large large groups of people find like the perfect time that's gonna work for everyone but um again like if we offer family stipends and um i think we can overcome those obstacles
245and and it's possible um what else was it yeah i would love to see like the yeah i i also think you know our next i think we need to have definitely a next meeting with that ugly task force and and really talk about like have that group engage in a conversation about what the future of the equity task force looks like and um i also just want to say that the topics and the the subcommittees and so the topics that the equity task force worked on over the past two years i think were and are still very important and there was um you know some of the topics that weren't really delved into i think enough were like uh economic status and race and those are things that um i think do need to
246be looked at as well so i'll stop there but just my my two cents um well first i wanted to thank everyone that's on the that's been a part of the equity task force um for the past two years um especially trustee watkins and trustee corzo um thank you for your leadership in this and thank you to everyone um from the district and everyone that's been involved um just looking and hearing tonight's report it shows what an over overwhelming amount of work has been done and so um just i'm really appreciative of that i think um one thing so trustee corzo has mentioned multiple times the stipend issue and so i just wondered like where do we go from here on that and how does that what does that look like what would be reasonable
247what would be um not reasonable but also meaningful for um for people that might want to join um either this task force or something else so that we can get representation from from people that are not already included and may have some barriers there so i don't know if superintendent ochoa where how do we go from here to there can i just add real quick something that i think has like is like an easy line to like have would be like if you qualify for free and reduced lunch then you qualify for a stipend so just a thought yeah that makes sense so i i guess my my point was just that you've brought it up multiple times i don't think it's gone anywhere so like i'm supportive in looking into that um and then
248you know i haven't been part of the equity task force so just as a board member that's here and supportive just wondering how i can um help and be more supportive and also um give this group the space that they need to do the work that needs to be done so um just wanted to show my support and thank you guys uh i'll go ahead um sorry trustee procter we're looking at each other because i think you knew that and i was about ready to and so i'm glad um glad you went first which is fine um so thank you thank you again for everything you guys have done um i i really appreciate the report and um it's great to see sort of a work product that has come out of the equity task
249force i know that we've had updates in the past where we've gone down the line about the mtss attract and i i was very supportive of that and i think we all are in to see that it's in the implementation plan is great or the actual plan uh superintendent ochoa i think you sort of summed up my questions or answered my questions before i asked but it was sort of like what's the next steps because this is really great there are more information and the ability to go ahead and add this into the strategic plan or give you some time and space to figure out how we go ahead and implement it i think it is really great uh trustee corzo i do have like in some ways the same thoughts or questions that you
250have when i look at sort of the next phase of the task force and the three different bullets um the second bullet which is develop a mechanism for the task force to address urgent and real-time equity issues coming from or before the the school board i do think about the sanctuary task force i know we've had these conversations before where in some ways the sanctuary task force has been absolutely fantastic and and failed pivot especially during the pandemic year about how to serve those in need and they've been able to pivot very quickly and make a real impact like immediate impact um and so i you know i'm really happy that we have that task force and i've always seen the equity task force as looking diving deep into the policy issues and everything else
251that we have but understanding now that they they also want to reach into those urgent matters i also think that that's a that's an interesting i wouldn't say it's not a dilemma it's it's a great thing to to dive into it's just how do we do that with the sanctuary task force as well and so whether or not they're merged or whether or not there's a process there um i think it'd be great because i think the more people who are there to help out um the more urgent issues we can probably address uh right away so i'd be curious to figure out how we're going to do that or what steps or what thoughts we might have in terms of how to balance both equity task force and the sanctuary task force i think
252they're both still very both very valid but i definitely could see that uh you know i wouldn't be surprised if the folks on the equity task force would be like wait but i really want to go ahead and fix this one issue and let's go ahead and do this um because they might be looking at the sanctuary task force doing all these different things um the the first and third point are actually you know my initial thought when i read this um was understanding that there are terms i guess on the equity task force and the membership and you know it's one thing when you educate everybody and also there's turnover so how do you deal with you know the next steps and how do you re-educate everybody and so i'm glad that there's that
253first bullet point because that ongoing process is is really important um but then the third point i i almost felt like is and and maybe this is just the way i initially read this is like is the equity task force in some ways going away like is there going to be now a smaller group that's just a leadership group that's just going to really dive into these things and so my thought about what you said about you know what's the next step and what's the sort of maybe reset for that we task force i'd be curious to see where this goes and i i i don't know and i like your idea trustee corzo about bringing back to that task force and asking them like all right what what's the next thing you know right
254because i think the the the implementation plan the action plan is great um and we're leaving up to superintendent ochoa to go ahead and figure out how we're going to implement it so i would love to know what the equity task force wants to focus on next and so um i'm curious i i think everybody's done fantastic job it's super thorough there's a ton of information and i and i would agree there's some information that could be done right away but stuff that's going to take years um and so we have to sort of recognize that but um but i'm very grateful for everything that everybody has done and worked on this um and so um those are my comments thank you yeah um it's been great watching all the work that's been done um
255you know as everybody knows i'm new to the board and so much of this work has started way before i even thought of joining the board um you know so i just want to give my thanks and appreciation to those who come before me and have done so much of the work so thank you okay super tantro do you have everything you need all right fantastic all right thank you guys again for that we are moving on to item 7.4 which is our um uh adjust the perpetual uh perpetuation of the school-to-prison pipeline superintendent ochella thank you president chin tonight's presentation is a review of resolution number two dash 20 this is an item that i am bringing to the board um partially after consultation um with district staff and then definitely um re resulting
256from requests from trustee watkins in wanting to know where we stand with the many actions that are indicated in this resolution that was passed by the board in the 2021 school year so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen again and take the board through this process so what the board is looking at now is the board and community can see the resolution that specifically identifies uh a desire to interfere and interrupt with the perpetuation of the school-to-prison pipeline under this resolution three critical steps that i'm highlighting now were indicated as part of this resolution the first is to conduct deep listening sessions with administrators teachers and staff that will be transitioning out to identify and prioritize needs in supporting school and student safety secondarily conducting deep listening sessions with community members and
257grassroots community groups consisting of systems impacted by individuals and their needs in ensuring their safety in school and third deeply examining the interaction between school community members and the san mateo police department now one of the issues that we can't ignore is this was passed during a pandemic so as you know the pandemic had a tempo and an energy all of its own and as a as a result of the many many challenges we faced educationally throughout the state this resolution is one of many that did not result in the completion of these actions so i want to take you to the next section which indicates the importance of revising our plans and ensuring that we don't take a program and replace it with a by proxy program in other words you don't take a
258school resource officer program and replace it with a armed security guard program and under the final resolution the goal is drafting a new response to discipline policy prioritizing restorative practices modifying board policy 5145.11 drafting a memorandum of understanding clarifying the ongoing but more limited role of the police department in supporting our personnel and ensuring that the board approved policies are aligned with the resolution in fact and in spirit this was again approved at the regular meeting of the board on august 6 2020. as the board is aware we have a new assistant superintendent of student services in place he is slowly but surely building his team and his work back there he and i have gone through this resolution we have the preliminary steps that we're ready to take to enact this resolution the reason
259to place this on the agenda tonight is to simply raise awareness at the board level and in the community that with your blessing i plan to move forward in enacting the many steps that are included in this resolution i expect this to be a 120 day process so the board would receive a presentation from assistant superintendent hills on where we stand after that point in time which is likely in february of 2022 with completion of this process shortly thereafter so with that i'll turn it over for the board or for the public to ask any clarifying questions or make comments thank you superintendent any clarifying questions from the board i do number one um which is just around the board policy now that we have students back in schools that's something that we can bring
260back sooner so that we are not continuing to move forward with students being questioned on campus without notifying parents otherwise yeah that's so that's my question absolutely we can agendize that for our november 18th board meeting in order to give us the time to pull the language take it through a legal process and bring it back to the board on november 18th um i had a question just on um kind of the steps that you're gonna take after we leave this meeting um are we are we redoing the deep listening sessions or do we feel like we got what we needed out of those and i don't think that we heard that much from um directly from the middle school principals and maybe teachers but i was just curious what the plan is the plan
261is to definitely hold them this year to go through the entire process in our district any other clarifying questions no no okay all right um peter would you mind opening up public comment for those who are online yes any members of the public that would like to make comment on this agenda item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now randy go ahead hi good evening i just wanted to thank you for your continued commitment to this issue for your continued commitment to the community engagement about the resource officer issue and particularly to trustee watkins for the um bringing up the issue specifically about um students being questioned without a notification of the parents that's very important and thank you for your responsiveness to this thank you randy president chen we have no
262other hands for public comment wait thank you i'm going to officially close public comment on item 7.4 bring it back to the board this is not for an official vote but superintendent cho has requested for us to give him his blessing to proceed i see one two three four nodding heads maybe yes not up for a vote head yeah sorry i won't be long i promise um i think we no you know it's fine i don't it's fine yeah okay i'll just say okay so i was invited earlier this week to participate in a real talk san mateo live event and so um dennis hills participated in that with me so i just wanted to kind of highlight that to say that you know i i as a board member i was invited to participate
263i did participate and um learned and heard a lot about like programs that the femto police department is um you know providing to the community and something that i said in that space and that i also wanted to say here is that um many of the programs that like pal for example offers are positive programs and yet there are people that are kind of left out because they haven't had good experiences with police and while they would love to engage in that have their kids engage in you know soccer through pal or or whatever sport or event that they're doing they don't they they won't walk through that door because of their fear or like their valid concerns about experiences that have impacted them or their family members because of policing our county still collaborates
264with ice and so for folks that are undocumented or have people in their families that are undocumented um you know that's kind of like uh you know police officers even when they're engaging in pal can't like just take off their police hats right so um i just wanted to lift that up here in this space too as uh as a just just to also right share some of the the feedback that i provided in the real talk live session earlier this week i also just wanted to say that yeah i'm excited to actually have this brought back to us and that it's going to be a quick turnaround and that will be going into the into the policies and making those updates because we we definitely need to and um yeah my understanding also is
265that there is still kind of like an sro assigned to our schools i mean um not through our district but like the pd still has an sro that like if there's a call from a school it's like the one officer not just like any officer that's nearby um so i just wanted to share that that's that's right right right dennis we talked about that yeah okay all right i'm done okay um thank you justin corzine for those final comments uh we are moving on to item 7.5 um summertime ochoa thank you president chen item 7.5 pull up here this is a very straightforward item it pertains actually what we're doing this evening which is we're holding a meeting online we are noticing it in a manner that's consistent with the brown act but we're actually
266offering as a district two options to our community as the board saw we had two members of the public join us in person they came in they could hear everything that was happening at the meeting they could participate and when they were ready to go they walked out the same can happen online we have multiple community members logged in i think when we started president chen you said 40 some odd we're joining the meeting we're down to 16 just a few minutes ago so over time people make their decisions about how long they want to attend and what portions they're here to attend for what resolution number 10-21-22 does is it continues to give this board the authority to hold virtual meetings as is allowed and pursuant to assembly bill 361 which is designed to
267give flexibility to school boards during this pandemic or a subsequent pandemic if that were to take place to allow you folks to hold meetings online in a manner that's consistent with that law which requires you have to give full access for those members to participate which we currently do as you see all night long we're constantly inviting the public to give public comment we don't limit them to doing it before the meeting we don't put any steps to curtail their involvement we don't uh put a maximum number of comments we basically say come join us and let your voice be heard so that's what this resolution is all about it's about the board giving yourself the flexibility to hold meetings um online if needed as as we've stated before a couple of months ago we
268decided to come back and us physically be here in person our schools are open we felt at the time that was a positive step to take to give members of the public who do want to show up in person that option and if the pandemic circumstances were to worsen then maybe we would go back and be all online again and this resolution authorizes the board to do that now the interesting thing is currently there's a requirement that every 30 days we bring back a version of the resolution or certify that the resolution remains viable so that might seem a little funny to members of the public that we keep bringing it back as an item because we don't normally do that with resolutions but there is some talk in the state about maybe changing that
269to where the administration just verifies that the pandemic is still in place but for the time being my recommendation is that the board approve this resolution and give yourselves the flexibility to hold those meetings as i just described and with that open for any questions or comments from the public or the board any clarifying questions no okay thank you uh peter would you mind opening up public comment for the few members who are still with us yes any members of the public that would like to make comment on this item please use the raise your hand functionality within gym now okay marcela go ahead i just want to express appreciation for the ability to attend the board meetings um virtually so i just wanted to just put that note out there that i really appreciate
270the opportunity to be able to be engaged with the board meetings when i can't physically be at the district office thank you thank you marcel okay president chen we have no other hands for public comment great thank you for those public comments i am officially putting public comment on this item open up to board discussion and or motion of nokia's comments i will make a motion to approve resolution 10 21 22. one second thank you trust to you warren for the most i mean walking through the ocean sorry you guys both right there i look stressed you walk into the motion trustee procter for the um for the second um before we actually make the or before i actually call for the vote i will make one comment um for those uh i do attend
271the santo county uh csba meetings and um what this has done uh this resolution has actually forced a number of school districts back to the boardroom um i'd like to basically say that you know i am i'm very grateful and very happy to have shared with the rest of the county uh superintendents and school board districts that we have essentially had a live version option for people to attend live since march or april and so i think we are probably only one of two in the county that has done that otherwise everybody else has remained virtual and so i know that this gives us the option to still have virtual meetings but i do uh love the fact that we have had the option for people to come back in person because there are a
272number of districts who are ending their virtual um sessions just to go back live to the boardroom so just want to point that out um give ourselves a little pat on the back and call for the vote trustee corzo before i vote yes i just want to say i'd love one day for us to do our meetings in different parts of our district so maybe more folks can come in person when it's when they feel comfortable and safe okay yes i like better here too just to proctor trusty watkins yes trustee warren yes and i have i guess as well and that has passed um and one final comment if we are allowed if we have to keep um bringing this up superintendent i would assume this is probably a consent item rather than a
273full agenda right okay thank you uh all right moving on to the next item 8.1 approval of the sr3 expenditure plan all right good evening uh board of trustees i appreciate the opportunity to share with you our uh proposed sr3 expenditure plan for your review and consideration and uh with our recommendation for approval um i'm going to take a moment and share my screen [Music] with you just as gives me an opportunity to talk through the elements of the plan with it visually represent represented for you so just to provide a little bit of background in context we have had several waves of either federal or state funding during these pandemic times the first sr1 which occurred almost a year and a half ago which was followed by the ab-86 that was the state uh
274wave of funding which was a plan that we approved last may you may recall and then there were other successor sr2 which occurred right at the end of the trump administration and sr-3 which was right at the beginning of the biden administration so according to federal guidelines uh we are required to um capture our planning uh our plan to spend the s or three funds in this uh this plan or this template that you see before you um so i'm going to talk through some of the elements of it really i want to begin by saying that um one of the first pieces of feedback that we got when we engaged with our stakeholders in last spring or around the ab-86 funding which you recall was very time limited it was meant to be spent
275and completed in that expense by um this coming august so a little about you know nine months from now and our feedback was you know that's a lot of money um and we know we have other funds could we be thinking about a plan that's not just a one-year plan but deciding on a set of strategies that we could pursue over time where it would have the opportunity to uh you know certainly have greater impact and so much of what i'm going to be sharing with you tonight in this sr3 expenditure plan is really that original ab-86 plan just extended across two more years so we have the ab-86 funding which continues essentially 21-22 and the sr-3 funding in this plan would be four years 22 23 and 23 24. and so that gives us
276an opportunity to uh you know to invest in and to determine impact and of course adjust if we need a set of strategies over an extended period of time so as i scroll forward just to be clear that the funding the sr3 funds are a little over 6.5 million dollars there are according to the requirements of the legislation there are three buckets of strategies in the esser funds you may recall ab-86 had seven buckets what we essentially did was we took the strategies as they were described across those seven ab-86 buckets and we sort of collapsed them into the three buckets that you'll see in this sr3 plan the first one is uh is a set of strategies for continuous and safe in-person learning and you'll note actually we don't have any allocation in that
277bucket because it was uh it was our view and certainly the feedback we were getting from our uh our community over the last many months is we have invested in a lot of the um immediate um continuous and and safe strategies the mitigation strategies and things like that using other funds and so uh it didn't seem necessary to use these funds to continue uh now there's a certain kind of optimism built into that of course but the the thinking that um in the uh 22-23 school year and 23-24 uh that we we actually will be sort of beyond some of the most the most significant expenditures related to this so you'll see the investments fall most heavily in buckets two and three uh addressing lost instructional time and this kind of catch-all category of the
278use of any remaining funds so much like the ab-86 plan we uh we describe here the um the engagements that we had and you'll note that this this is you know uh very uh very similar to what we we described in the ab-86 plan because we were talking about these same strategies we simply built this this expenditure plan on the ab-86 plan so we went back to those same engagements as as important parts of the steps that we took for the planning of sr3 funds and then there's some notes here about how did that community input influence our planning i mentioned one of course which was please come up with a plan that actually isn't a one-year plan and extends uh longer than that but also coming back to the the uh feedback we got
279about the importance of um investing more heavily in our summer programming and extended learning opportunities much of much for example which was described earlier by superintendent ochoa that math boost program there was a lot of interest in addressing learning loss by just doing the work that uh that we could do to strengthen what we call tier one first instruction and tier two intervention strategies i mean you may recall that the ab-86 plan landed more heavily in its in its investment on mathematics partly because we already knew we had a greater investment in our lcap so this was meant to complement um the the investment that we had made in the lcap plan and then of course there was a lot of concern about the inequitable uh impacts of of the pandemic on on our various
280stakeholder groups and so implementing strategies that could address uh those uh those uh inequities for example on our families that are struggling economically or english learner families or students with ieps and then finally uh continuing to address which is really what fell into that sort of third sort of catch-all bucket which is what we see is the continuing needs for uh for mental social emotional supports for our students and we you may recall made some pretty heavy investments in that over the last couple years with additional counselors and uh investments in our our second step and other sel strategies and so we want to be able to continue and support that work through this sr3 expenditure plan so getting to the actual expenditures themselves as noted the first bucket there is not actually a direct
281allocation i kind of previewed for you uh you'll see the allocation in the um the area for you know addressing the impact of lost instructional time the continued investment in an expanded summer learning program uh the investments in programs as i've mentioned like we were describing earlier for extending learning time either after school or on saturdays or uh at sort of advantaging the so-called at-home time that again superintendent ochoa was referring to earlier uh you'll see here both and that the continued investment and the mathematics instruction and targeted support uh that's that math particularly the some of the math six priorities that we set this year that we could see continuing as we are working through uh the math pathway uh work in in grades seven and eight and then also in language and literacy
282i would note one um one addition uh in effect in these two both math and language and literacy strategies is additional investment in significant pd staff pd time so we've identified the fact that it costs the districts of a district approximately half a million dollars to have it's in our entire staff uh go through a day of pd and so we want to make sure that we as as the superintendent noted earlier that we expand those opportunities particularly thinking sort of end of year after school gets out or in august before school comes back where we have whole day opportunities where we can pay our staff at a per diem wage and and invite them into kind of the fundamental professional learning that we think is going to move move instruction so embedded in the
283both the math and the language and literacy sections are these additional days the costs of these additional days of professional learning and then you'll note last item in in this area of of instruction is this item around culturally responsive instruction and targeted support and i would like to note that um the investment there actually looks rather small it's actually targeted at what we would expect to be you know the consultant and materials and sort of the advantaging expertise expenses but we would expect that this work around culturally responsive universal destruction and targeted supports is actually also occurring in those full days of pd so so that expense which is now located in the math and language and literacy sections really is also an investment in uh the culturally responsive emphasis there so just wanted to
284clarify that that overlap of expenditures and then finally in this third bucket of use of any remaining funds you'll see the strategies to continue trauma-informed instruction and restorative practices and second steps and then finally one of the things that we've identified obviously through the pandemic is the increasing importance of having strong systems for supporting our instructional technology i mean we've literally quadrupled the number of chromebooks that are out with students we have you know many more instructional applications that are now you know at the core of our instruction and we've got to make sure that we have some base systems in place to support those as well as to do the data work that again we we were referring to earlier in the meeting so there's some investment there in the staffing that would allow
285and support um support that work and so and then of course the final indirect cost so that that is the overview of of the actual expenditures and then you'll just see here the manner in which we're you know proposing to monitor our progress on these strategies i won't go into all the details there but you can see both what we're proposing to do to monitor as well as the frequency of that monitoring and again this is organized by the specific strands of summer learning extended learning math instruction language and literacy uh the culturally responsive piece student health and wellness and the instructional technology and data work so i'll stop there as by way of giving you an overview and i'm happy to take any questions that you may have great thank you david um i
286do have a clarifying question so i'm just gonna jump right in um i i always assume like uh ab-86 and the funds maybe six are separate from esther but is is ab-86 a subset of the escrow funds no the ab-86 funds are actually state funds yeah so they are separate from esser and that esser is federal funding so uh so two separate uh set of funds uh but what we what we took the approach was but we wanna we want these to serve a common set of uh strategies that we think are important in these next three years sort of post pandemic so we're taking the 5.5 to sr3 money and applying it to objectives that were outlined in eb-86 that's correct we're not used actually using ab-86 money we're just using the money for
287actions that were identified in eb-86 that's correct because the ab-86 funds have to be expended by august 2022 so it was very time-bound and then this allows us to continue many of those strategies beyond august 2022. great thank you for that clarification i just i i just wanted to make the connection there because i did think that they were two separate things and and it looked like they were co-mingled in some way so i have a comment but um does anybody else have any clarifying questions yeah thank you for your presentation um just just some clarifications um in your presentation i noticed that you listed students with ieps um [Music] can we just knowing that you can have an iep and still be considered a gen ed student or you can be a student with
288an iep and be in a special day class is like are you meaning the broader umbrella term of a student with an iep or are you meaning more specifically students who require special day classes well so for example in our when we think about let's let's take one of the strategies which is like the work in mathematics for example we know that um students with ieps who are resource students for example of course spend their day in general ed classes and they are part of and so the impact of these dollars on those teachers will be felt through the professional learning and supports they receive at the same time actually we're working quite diligently to make sure for example that our mild to moderate sdc teachers and and witness our our first pd day this
289year we had our mild to moderate sdc teachers and para educators sitting with all of our general ed mathematics teachers working on the same curriculum and thinking about the ways that we they can implement it effectively and and move students toward you know grade level rigor so we are thinking of those uh together in in that respect okay um i just know in the past it's sometimes it it's been said students with ieps and then the clarification was actually oh wait a second it's actually students with um students in the stc so that's why i wanted to clarify that um when we're talking about extended learning and you know i love the creativity you know let's do stuff after school let's you know figure out ways to send it home or you know come in
290on the weekends or whatnot my concern is you know like we talked about with compensatory minutes in terms of special ed during the update earlier do you anticipate there being a potential for parents not wanting their children to participate even though they might be identified as students who could benefit um i i don't anticipate that we would include you know when we're looking at the data we identify students who are struggling performers both special education and not and so it's meant to it's meant to include them in the supports as we develop them so um am i if i don't i i don't think i made myself quite clear enough what i'm saying is you know the the example during the special education update was you know you can present the option to the family
291and yet they may be like you know like superintendent ochoa said in his example that the student is way into sports and an after-school program is not going to work for that child um you know if if we identify a child who will need the high-dose tutoring which i know has been mentioned in the past or some sort of extended learning and you know there's other things that might potentially get in the way do you anticipate that becoming an issue if you're to extend the school day for the child i i can't say that i do at this point because i think there's multiple strategies there there is extending learning by extending the day to the after school there's also the option of saturday school there's also the option of inter sessions there's also the
292option of you know the kind of providing resources at home for the family that we were describing early earlier with st math and a coming literacy program so um i don't anticipate that that being okay and then i do like the idea of trauma-informed instruction i mean i think one thing that i mean i don't think any of us will forget or or strafe too far from but going through a year and a half of a pandemic has been traumatizing for everybody parents as well as the students um you know adults obviously have more words that they can use to you know manage their trauma uh hopefully you hope um and students and children you know especially our population haven't learned that you know and and you know they're they're young and you know developmentally
293appropriate for the most part and i think we also have to remember that the last normal year of school that they had was two years ago so when we look at fourth graders their last normal year of school was first grade you know when we look at second graders or um i'm sorry third graders kindergarten you know kindergartners have never had a normal year of school so i really hope that when we're coming up with this trauma-informed instruction that we do take that into account that um you know there's some kids that you know especially in when you look at kindergartners and first graders who may not have had socialization outside of their immediate family and now we're asking them to share crayons and share blocks with kids that they've never seen or i mean
294it might not be quite that that new now given that we're you know almost three months into school but you know it's still you know just skills that you would normally anticipate um kids in kindergarten first second and third grade having may not have and so i hope that we take that into consideration and then also coming back to the special education piece um i know this past summer we extended um the invitation uh for extended school year or esi to many more students than we have in the past um and i know that we if i remember correctly we used some ab-86 money to do so correct yes um and i know that that was a great way to look at using up some of these compensatory minutes that we're finding that we owe
295some of our students is that something that you foresee us doing in the future using some of these user funds i think yes okay and then how many more students i mean i'm sure it's probably hard to to ballpark at this point because it's still pretty early in the year but it would be yes but clearly the intention is is yes okay wonderful that's all i have thank you i had just one brief question and it was um so the way that the funds are broken down are we like married to this if there's like for example if we don't spend all of it in one category can we just kind of roll it over to something else or how does the reporting um happen on this yes you can there is there is regular
296updating that will follow on this and you can adjust you know the the plan as you go along based on for that exact reason for example that maybe you you plan to invest in staffing that you couldn't you couldn't ultimately act on so you have to make an adjustment of that kind of thing yeah or if you saw like a need that maybe this wasn't addressing or something okay great thank you any other clarifying questions just go for it go for it i just randomly thought of it um i know that i've been on the cde website and there have been news reports in various news outlets regarding the fact that the cde or the california department of education um is noticing that their school districts that are aren't actually spending enough on these sr
297funds and these ab-86 funds which it's kind of like hard to believe because i would think that if you're given money it's like spend it right um are we in that situation um or are we spending appropriately um as the law is directing us to um i believe yes uh you know we could come back to you with uh and patrick perhaps that's what would be an update that we could provide in our budget updates yeah wonderful thank you okay any other clarifying questions no okay peter would you mind opening a public comment please on our last item almost last night yes if there are any members of the public that would like to make comment on this particular item please use the raise your hand functionality within zoom now okay president chin we have
298no hands for public comment great thank you i'm going to close public comment on item seven point i'm sorry 8.1 open up for final comments and also emotion i'm just going to start with my one comment it's very related to what trustee warren just talked about there's lots of conversations right now that we hear up and down the state about the use of funds and the funds that basically were falling from the sky from the state and the feds during the pandemic and questioning sort of the accountability of them at some point maybe it's when we look at the first interim or maybe next february whatever it is it would be great to have sort of an layman's chart of sr1 sr2 esther three ab-86 all the money that came in directly related to pandemic
299and what we spent on them so therefore when we ask or when there is an accountability because we know it's coming because we've seen it and i think we all get the csba emails and stuff you know that that's something that's a topic that's on our minds that people's minds and did did the school district spend the money appropriate so at some point it'd be great to have that information i'm not saying now but just at some point it'd be great to have a simple here's all the money this is where it went so thank you those are my comments anyone else or anyone want to make a motion i'll make a motion to approve the expenditure plan a second thank you trustee proctor promotion trustee welcome to the second roll called what trustee corzo
300christopher yes trustee watkins yes trusty warren yes and i will vote yes as well thank you very much for that item uh we are moving on to item nine which is board member statements and requests for future agenda items anybody want to say anything or have any comments on anything okay i will just state um that we will not have another meeting before halloween so i hope that everybody has a happy and safe halloween i know all of our little kids are probably all looking forward to it um but just all everyone please be careful wear your masks and also cross your fingers for the 26th on tuesday when the fda meets hopefully they will vote for an emergency authorization for the vaccine so those are my comments um or announcements or board member statements
301if nobody else says anything we're going to move right back on to item number 10 future meeting dates they're listed so i'll just see superintendent joe and i said that's okay so we're up for adjournment i guess the other just one other comment is we are we are advertising the board community workshop for um the 28th that's right thursday and then also we have school site visits on tuesday um so just want to bring those up because that is happening next week okay adjournment anyone want to make a motion promotion to a journal second second well i heard that thank you trustee watkins for the motion trustee warren for the second welcome trustee forza trustee trustee warren yes and i have a guest as well we are adjourned at 11 25 p.m thank you everyone
302for joining our meeting you