001thank you thank you Miss Tyrus good evening welcome to the January 10th 2024 meeting of the Berkeley school board if you want to follow along on our online agenda the agenda is posted on the district website calling the meeting to order at 7:12 p.m. Miss chidas can you please call the role director Jennifer shinoski here student director Caitlyn Le here director Laura babbit here director Mike Chang here director Janai Bell is not with us this evening vice president kadia Brown present and president Anna vasev present thank you Miss ches um just wanted to one quick technology change U Miss ches do you know why our monitors are not working yeah is your just wanted to flag that we can continue the meeting but wanted to flag that technology issue thank you director babit for flagging
002um items 12.2 and 12.15 will be pulled from the agenda they'll come back at a future meeting are there any other requested changes before we approve the agenda yes to a point 14 approval of committee assignment sure I'd like to um have that moved to an action item sure that can be moved to an action item at the end of the meeting great was that your you plan to address that right yes I just said we'll move it to the action item because you said 12:15 did you mean 1214 we're going to come back to no on the script it says 12.12 and 12.15 will be pulled together okay all right I don't know superintendent if you want to clarify why they will will be pulled or they'll just come back for a future uh
00312.2 I think your mic is off yeah you got your mic and then 12.5 uh is an item that we sorry what was the other one the P 12.12 sorry is an item that we will see at the January 24th board meeting so that was an error great and with those three changes is there a motion in a second to approve the agenda as amended I'll move to approve the agenda is there a second a second I'm great so there was a motion made uh by by director babbett seconded by director shinoski um and can we call the vote director shinoski yes director Le I director babit yes director Chang I vice president Brown I president vas yes great and now we'll report out from close session vice president Brown please report out good evening
004everyone uh close session for this meeting January 10th 2024 began at 5:40 p.m. all directors were present for item 3.1 um all directors uh voted in favor and director Brown was in abstention for item 3.2 the board heard an update and provided direction for item 3.2.1 that item was taken from the agenda and will be reviewed at another time for item 3.2.2 was moved by director Chang seconded by director shinoski and all directors voted in favor and finally for item 3.2.3 the board uh heard a brief update and will resume the close session after following this Open Session this ends the uh reading of the Clos session notes for today's close session thank you thank you so much vice president Brown we'll now move on to public comments before we begin I'd like to remind
005you of our decorum expectations during and during all part of tonight's meetings no person shall disturb the order of this meeting such Behavior includes but is not limited to booing hissing creating or participating in a physical disturbance speaking out of turn in violation of applicable rules preventing or attempting to prevent others who have the floor from speaking preventing others from observing the meeting entering in or remaining in the area of the meeting room is that is not open to the public or approaching the dice without permission as Miss chrus already explained there are two opportunities for public comments at each meeting now and at the end of the meeting if you do not get to speak at the beginning of the meeting we encourage you to stay and speak at the end of the meeting
006you can also email us your comments at board ofed berkeley.net the board does not respond directly to comments or questions made during public comment board members the superintendent and staff do take notes during public comment and may follow up with the speaker after the meeting these are hybrid meetings so we have public commenters in the boardroom and online we have designated 20 minutes to in-person speakers there will be that will be followed by 10 minutes for any online speakers anyone online who wishes to make public comment should raise a virtual hand now so miss chus can organize U Miss ches I'm online so maybe you can promote me to panelists thank you and each public commenter will have up to two minutes to speak um please note the microphone will shut off I'm just going
007to accept my panelist thank you director chus great um please note the microphone will shut off at the end of each speaker's a lot of time as explained already by our board secretary and with that I'll call your name in the order of speakers per the agenda item so the first Speaker I'm going to call is the student speaker Emma who's here to speak about gender Equity yes two minutes Emma are you here oh great thank you hi my name's Emma I'm a transform student at BHS and I'm angry at the school board for failing to make me feel safe for failing to protect me and my peers I'm transfem to me that's synonymous with beautiful but at Berkeley schools it means it means aching to pee and burning inside and knowing that no one
008on this scoreboard board cares enough about me to ask act to act immediately as I need you and as my peers need you to act immediately to make me feel safe so prove me wrong give us a plan of exactly when each building at each B USD school will welcome kids like me with a bathroom of their own tell me when I'll be safe but I will never be safe nor will be B USD while you refuse to pass a ceasefire resolution for Palestine while you stand by as babies die and Palestinian students learn you don't care about them again prove me wrong pass a ceasefire resolution to prove that you care and at the very least take a moment of silence for Palestine as you took 10 minutes for Israel after hamas's brutal attack
009as far more murdered in the West Bank and Gaza so prove me wrong prove me wrong apologize and act prove me wrong prove to me also that you care about unhoused people and Berkeley that you stand with the people who lived in people's Park that you value their land and value their rights prove me wrong and pass a resolution that you stand with them too that you oppose violence in people's Park oppose all violence and truly stand with your students thank you thank you Emma now we will call some of the speakers that are here to speak about ethnic studies I'm going to call the first four speakers starting with the student who's here to speak on that topic Nia Santana followed by Sahar gazi Lisa hon and Margaret Olan if you could please approach
010the podium that'd be great so let's start with Nia Santana hi my name is Nia Santana I'm sad about what's happening in Palestine and Israel I want to learn about the history of Palestine and I want to stop the violence I want this violence to stop thank you thank you Nia next we have Zahara gazi hi my name is Sahar I'm a journalist the mother of a middle schooler in B USD I'm also a Muslim American who has spent most of her adult life covering American wars in Muslim countries and I've had to deal with the maddening reality that as a taxpayer I have funded these brutal Wars the year I was born James Baldwin wrote the children are always ours every single one of them all over the globe yet my whole life I
011have witnessed American bombs dispropor disproportionately killing Brown and Muslim children Iraq Afghanistan Yemen Syria and now Raza the USD serves 9,400 children since the school year started 12,000 children in Gazza have been killed in the US backed Israeli War more children have died in Gazza than children served by our school district according to save the children 10 children on average have lost one or both of their legs every day and Gazza since October 7th our school district is financed by us taxpayers those bombs that are killing and meing raza's children are financed by us taxpayers too USD can stop the bombs but we have a responsibility to protect and courageously defend teachers students and families who want to teach learn and speak about the bombs killing and Ming our children the ones in Gazza at
012B USD we take pride in our diversity we do not believe that our safety has to be at the expense of someone else's safety we believe there is enough love Liberation and community in this world for all of us so I'm asking the board to protect teachers who teach Palestine protect Arab and Muslim Students and staff and allies from organized attacks threats intimidation protect the liberated ethnic studies program which recently came under attack by the unfounded claims of the California legislative Jewish caucus we strongly condemn this attack please courageously protect and defend our right to teach and learn thank you so much and if if you have any additional comments please feel free to email the board next I will call up Lisa Waton followed by Margaret Olen hi good evening school board members my
013name is Lisa hon and I am a longtime parent here in Berkeley unified um I am also part of the ethnic studies advisory Council my daughter is currently at Berkeley hi and I have another child who graduated Berkeley High in 2022 first I want to thank you for supporting ethnic studies and many of you up here who champion this this important work I want to call to your attention a very concerning and problematic letter written by the Jewish caucus of the California state legislature that came out just last week on January 3rd although this isn't new we still need to pay attention to this as it attacks and misrepresents ethnic studies in public education as a member of the ethnic studies Advisory Board we've been able to hear from students about the value of ethnic
014studies and I wanted to share some of their voices to remind us all that it is necessary to continue to support resource and protect this work in particular Arab American studies and Arab teachers here are some student comments responding to the question why do you think ethnic studies is is important number one kids need to learn about racial and social constructs so they do not become ignorant to the problems of Society number two it can help with people who have a hard time personally connecting to the American narrative that is being taught and helps with correcting misinterpretations of others number three so we know our background number four I think that ethnic studies is important because we can learn about many other different cultures that we don't know about number five learning ethnic studies is
015important because it helps us expand our knowledge through the perspective of different people and helps POC feel less alienated let these voices remind us that Berkeley unified needs to continue to protect the right to teach our kids thank you very much for your comments and you you can wrap by emailing us please the rest of your comments but thank you next we have Margaret Olan my name is Margaret Olan I am a retired low okay I'm starting over yes now I here my name is Margaret Olan I'm a retired Jewish professor at Yale University in Jewish studies my family lost me members in the Holocaust I work with colleagues in Israel I write and I teach about the Holocaust and about modern Israel my daughter-in-law is a teacher in this school district I ask the
016school board to protect the liberated ethnic studies program in our schools students need to study diverse ethnicities including Palestinian ones like many Jews I do not believe that the study of Palestine threatens Jews on the contrary such studies are Central to Jewish ethics the great Jewish philosopher Martin bber introduced a philosophy of relationships inspiring people to relate to others as thou rather than as an it because he knew that people cannot live alone in the world thank you thank you very much we'll move on to our third discussion item um to our third public comment item which is on uh literacy and so I will call up our student speaker first Eva levenson followed by Lindsay no F then Eliza no you'll have two minutes each good evening board and superintendent my name is Eva
017levenson and I'm a sophomore at brookley high I'm speaking to you tonight as someone who has dyslexia someone who cannot read in kindergarten or first grade or second grade and was not able to read at grade level until third or fourth grade and this was only with an enormous amount of outside intervention I believe you when you say you care about your babies that you care about me but I know what it's like to not be able to read to be shamed by your classmates to feel stupid in a classroom and not want to go to school and feel constantly anxious tonight is personal to me because I've suffered I'm here tonight because I can't stand the idea of student suffering when there are solutions right in front of us in the fall I wrote
018a piece for the jacket about the about the literacy settlement and how the C and how our curriculum has been banned in several states that our own teachers in BSD found major gaps but that BD hasn't responded to Citizens asking for a switch to a new research-based curriculum since the time of the article's publication superintendent I saw you on a Statewide panel and um you participated in called districts on the Move in November of 2023 you said here in Berkeley unified this is not just another initiative this is truly an imperative we are tired our babies are tired our families are tired and we know we can do better and we know that our students are inherently brilliant and amazing here's what's so hard for me as I listen to you on the panel we
019are still waiting on a plan to address the failure of tcrwp or Lucy Culkin's unit of study and FastTrack I know we can do better I know you want to do better I don't understand what's in the way of making a shift when both in other states and locally districts are able to help kids now how is it possible we aren't doing it in Berkeley right now thank you thank you Eva our next public speaker will be Lindsay Noel followed by Eliza no good evening my name is Lindsay nelt and I'm speaking as a parent of two children in Berkeley schools and a member of reading for Berkeley we understand that highquality professional development alone or even a new Ela curriculum can't fix everything that's wrong with the educational system that results in poor reading
020abilities for too many but I want you to just ride with me a little bit it's as if we are all on a CrossCountry road trip in an old bus the check engine lights have been flashing for hundreds of miles miles something is broken for the first time because of a new rules that that's the literacy settlement we're running Diagnostics instead of adding some random fluid we have identified the problem but we have no choice but to drive the bus with the warning lights still flashing we know that the students riding along with us are precious and we don't have time to waste but we have to fix the engine before we fix the tires we have to repair this bus quickly because our students and our teachers are suffering everyone is trying their best
021but they're getting burnt out because one teachers are required to hold on to assessments that gobble up at least 65 hours a year per Elementary classroom and are worse than flipping a coin for identifying struggling readers staff spend evenings searching the internet for patches and experiments to replace what they Now understand to be harmful techniques in balanced literacy and we leave the intervention experience like the wild west losing time that our current struggling readers don't have because we have to keep moving in our broken old bus I believe every child in every classroom can learn let's have a conversation thank you very much our next speaker is Eliza no uh good evening my name is Eliza no and I'm a bosd parent I'm here to comment on the lip monitoring report the report advised that
022is nearly impossible to implement the an effective literacy program with coordinated tier 2 and tier 2 supports when the tier one instructional program is so clearly lacking in its ability to provide comprehensive liter literacy instruction for students in the district's latest progress report BD itself recognized that quote a well articulated literacy program will require vertical alignment through the secondary grades end quote this means an effective multi-tiered system of supports must have internally strong vertically aligned tiers together they are what it make work make it work as a system not as a patchwork of Band-Aid supports yet BD has announced that it does not plan to review the Middle School core reading curriculum inquiry by Design which is a balanced literacy program to be clear the Middle School tier one instructional program is not based in
023the science of reading what the monitoring report and the district's own progress report state in black and white is that bosd knows better but it chooses not to do do better when you declare that all students will learn how to read you don't mean middle school students not when your actions show that you're willing to cut Corners by leaving in place a balanced literacy program you're saying to students and to families that it is too late for sixth graders for seventh graders and for eighth graders but it is not too late for any of our students as a courta appointed third-party monitor Mr Ellis I believe is not prone to hyperbole he recommended to implement a read thank you thank you Miss no for your comments if you could email them to the board if
024you didn't get to finish them that would be great thank you very much at this point we will move on to public commenters online see how many hands I see two hands rais we'll give you two minutes each uh three hands raised two minutes each um great so I see Vlada uh M Israel Katie Reese and Evan Bissell so I think we'll those those are the four comments that I'll take those are the four that I see for two minutes each so we'll start with Vlada hi can you hear me hello can you hear me I'm not sure what happened I can't hear you can you hear me L can you hear us I can hear you now can you hear me hello can you hear me guys I'm not sure what happen yes yes
025can you hear me if she's not ready Miss chish can we move on to um Israel hi can you hear me thank you hello hello hello can anybody hear me on there you want to to the yeah we can't hear you I'm Israel so I don't know if can you hear me addressing that right now hello I think they just said they're working on it okay thank you let me know when it's fixed still cannot hear the online speakers okay I'm still talking anybody anybody now I think you you can start your public comment now and then um we'll move back to Vlada after after you okay so you can hear me now okay um hi my name is Alana and I am the parent of three buusd um students and I wanted to speak
026a little bit about ethnic studies tonight and I wanted to say in particular that um I well on I pull up have a speech sorry I got a little bit lost um in one of the first school board meetings I spoke at I shared a really powerful story about my son using his identity as a black man to protect his Jewish identity and I think it was really powerful because there's a lie currently being promoted in much of America that all Jews are white colonizers and in the context of ethnic studies which I do believe in I think this could be a really incredible teaching moment to teach that no this is not accurate 30% of Jews are ashkanazi Jews from that who descend from Europe European territ iies um and what groups like liberated
027ethnic studies aim to do is completely erase Jewish Heritage completely erase Jewish indigeny to the land of modern day Israel which prior to that was Judea and Samaria and I'm tired of it I think that I do not believe in just teaching one side in just teaching Palestine I am here and support teaching both I believe in teaching Palestine I believe in teaching about Israel and I believe in teaching about the Jewish connection to that land as well as Palestinian connection to that land and I don't know how we've gotten so far away from those values of critical thinking of nuance and why it is just this side or just that side or binary ways of thinking and I think we owe it to our students to teach Stu students how to think critically and
028how to evaluate information and how not to thank you very much for your public comment and I know that you didn't get to finish if you could please email the Board of Education that would be great um now we'll move on to Vlada we were trying to hear beforehand hopefully we can get the sound working hi can you hear me now yes we can hear you yes thank you so much for your patience tonight so and thank you for having us today I wanted to mention that it is not unfounded that ethnic studies have been um it's it's not unfounded ethnic studies have been infil infiltrated by extremely dangerous propaganda which is going to affect all of us as an example please review the teach Palestine curricula that did enter ethnic studies they vilify Israel
029and Jews and Zionist asking children to draw pictures of what they think of Zionist Bullis are how do you think Jewish and Israeli students feel this is a violation of many government protections vilifying very diligently one group of people this curriculum does not belong in public schools and this was just one example ethnic studies had a very different goal at the beginning all I want is to ensure the exclusion of materials that are bigoted hateful discriminatory and anti-semitic from our classrooms I recommend enhanced administrative oversight of each teachers material to prevent the infiltration of politicized content into classrooms this oversight will Foster a cohesive and inclusive educational environment for all children including those of Jewish and Israeli background this measures will also Safeguard the rights of all children to AC access a safe secure non-political
030and exclusive learning environment please please listen to us we're begging you and thank you so much thank you very much for your public comment just wanted to remind people in the audience to um please keep our decorum rules into perspective and um please don't U make sounds while other speakers are are giving us their opinions so next I'll call up Katie Reese followed by Evan Bissell and that will conclude the online comments if you could please promote uh Kitty Reese that'd be great thank you hi can you hear me yes we can great okay um good evening my name is Katie I'm a parent of three Berkeley students and a teacher in a neighboring School District um thank you for continuing to allow these virtual comments so that meetings can be accessible to all um
031tonight you're going to hear the most recent monitoring report on the literacy action plan from Professor Ellis the report is hard-hitting on many topics and at its core is the dismaying lack of urgency regarding our core K through 5 literacy curriculum which continues to be as I'm sure you know the widely criticized Lucy ckins and teachers college program along with the quite mediocre FastTrack phonics program Ellis states it is nearly impossible to implement an effective literacy program with coordinated tier 2 and three supports when the tier one instructional program is so clearly lacking in its ability to provide comprehensive literacy instruction for students um there you have it we simply cannot intervene our way out of a tier one problem our curriculum is broken not only in terms of its lack of explicit instruction in
032phonics but in much larger ways we've Fallen prey to the assumption that we need to focus only on skills and are failing to expose students to engaging content tcrw P's curriculum is completely devoid of knowledge building my own first graders teacher called the program depressingly empty so like Eva levenson I am tired I am disappointed we should be shouting from the rooftops about this please board members make this your number one priority it's the most important thing we do as Educators and parents literacy is the Domino that impacts everything else mental health Equitable outcomes for all demographics student engagement this is the thing so please get curious get mad um this is the time to take the work from behind the scenes to the public we need to communicate clearly with families and with teachers
033about the next step thank you Miss Reese if you could uh email us the rest of your comments that would be great we'll move on to our last online speaker Evan Bissell hello uh thank you for taking my comment um can you hear me is that yes okay great so yeah um I'm writing to voice my support for the continuation of ethnic studies and really the expansion of ethnic studies programs in BD schools um I at uh 19 and 20 years old I uh started to realize uh kind of a broader understanding of US history and global politics through through uh engaging in an ethic studies program as an undergraduate um and that's really shaped the rest of my life and how I think about approaches to questions of equity inclusion um all of these
034topics that the USD really stands for um as shown just by the visuals in the room today and all these kinds of things and so in this kind of moment um where these things will come under attack by people talking about infiltration and outside interest all the types of topics um all the types of language that was used against do against Dr Martin Luther King as well um that we think about the context of ethnic studies within that longer um spectrum of work so you know in this moment I do support the intentional learning and critical thinking about persistent and prejudicial representations specifically right now of Palestinians and more broadly Arabs and Muslims in the news children's stories video games TVs and movies these representations shape how young people like my kids who are in
035B USD schools um and adults um you know uh combat dangerous in representations which have real world impacts this is also true of narrow representations of Jewish people as being inherently aligned with the Israeli State as many many Jews around the world stand against the military Siege of Gaza I'm writing I'm you know sharing today because I know that when some lives matter less it creates a more unsafe society and erods the possibility of a true democracy and I believe ethnic studies is a core part of um conveying that and sharing um why we all need to be creating this history together and in a way that's inclusive and protective of all of our students um especially Arab and Muslim Students and Palestinian students in BD thank you thank you very much Mr bristell thank
036you to everyone who came to speak both in person and online if you did not get to speak please remember that there is an extended comment period at the end of the meeting additionally as I've said before you can email us your comments at board ofed berkeley.net and you can also contact us individually uh now is an opportunity to hear here from our superintendent thank you president basde good evening and happy New Year to all I hope that you all had a restorative uh and restful winter break the new year for many symbolizes both an ending and a beginning and is also a time focused on reflection and evaluation and an opportunity to start a new and resolve to do be different or better consistent with these new year Traditions I'm excited to share something
037new in B USD January is now recognized as disability awareness and History Month in bu USD for the recently passed board resolution 24-17 this month is an opportunity to educate our community about the many historical contributions of those with disabilities and to Center the experiences and needs of our students and staff with disabilities our school Community has received family guides reading lists and teaching resources for celebrating disability awareness and history month and the awareness and History Month is a result of community collaboration and advocacy supported by our new president brass and approved by our Board of Education in December our staff moved very quickly likewise the resources provided in the disability awareness and History Month guides are a collaborative products of involving various Educators community members and staff as this is a new celebration month
038in B USD we appreciate all who brought it to be all who have helped uplift our dis our students and our staff with disabilities during the month of January and every day and Beyond and for all of you who have worked with us to enhance and will work with us to further build out our resources in the years to come there will be a virtual bu USD Community conversation on disability awareness and neurodivergence on Thursday January 25th at 5:30 as well as a screening of the film hopefield hosted by the North Region Sela CAC on Wednesday January 31st at 5:30 in the Oxford theater right next door hope Phil is being shown this month as it focuses on a student growing up with dyslexia and the numerous challenges they face and reiterates our Collective call
039to action around literacy we hope to see you at both of these events and details are posted on our disability awareness and Heritage Month sorry History Month page on our website keeping with the New Year tradition of evaluation reflection and planning for what's ahead B USD is beginning the process of creating a strategic plan and rewriting our local control and accountability plan also known as lcap you will hear a bit more about this process during our presentation this evening but I want to take this time to invite you all to one of three remaining engagement sessions for those for these plans we um will engage participants in reviewing of data from our district engaging in discussion and asking and getting input on four main questions those questions are what is working well to advance towards
040our mission and for EAS what does the district need to do to improve our advancement towards our Mission and for EAS what do we need to start doing and what do we need to stop doing we had our first engagement this morning which is a with a very thoughtful mix of Educators staff parents and community members some of whom are in the audience our next meeting is actually tomorrow at 6 pm and this one will be a virtual meeting so it'll be on Zoom information for tomorrow's meeting and all of our meetings um will be posted on our website and we also have another inperson meeting on January 23rd at Berkeley adults school both of these plans outline and set our course to advance towards our mission again and the four e they set our
041priorities they call out our goals how we're going to measure our progress towards those goals and our plans to implement them and continuously reflect on that implementation towards impact and so it's really critical that we have all of your voices in these plans if you're unable to make one of our engagement sessions please know that they are again are offered virtually and in person but we'll also be supplementing these with uh surveys and other ways to outreach and hear your voice to make sure that your experiences and your ideas are reflected in the plans again all members voices are important so I will be hassling hounding trying to find you all to say please tell us what you think and what you know so that together we can make this plan to make sure that
042we realize our District's mission of let's say it together enabling and inspiring our diverse student body to achieve academic excellence and make positive contributions to the world finally we're going to continue in 2024 with our result towards organizational Clarity including making sure that our policies are clear and up to dat and guide our practices so I want to highlight in this evening's agenda information items are four um board policies for first reading that I think will be of interest to you all non-discrimination and employment Professional Standards complaints concerning District employees and uncrewed aircraft systems are Dron so those are four policies that are up tonight for a first reading we also kickoff 2024 resolved in our commitment and our our promise of equity Excellence enrichment and engagement also known as our four EAS and we
043do hope that you notice and appreciate the visual declaration and reminder of our for EAS along the gates here of Oxford as you drive down University we have a very nice visual that has some beautiful babies faces as well as a reminder to ourselves and to the city of Berkeley our Collective commitment to those four EAS that's it for me this evening president Master de and again Happy New Year to you all well thank you superintendent for excellent comment uh now we'll move on to committee comments Miss chus do we have any committee comments tonight wonderful thank you and uh which committee is this P pack wonderful we will now hear from our pack and great hello my name is Lindsay nelt and I am one of the co-chairs for the 2023 24 parent advisory
044committee known as the pack on the local control accountability plan or lcap I am here to provide an update to the board on our meetings and the progress made on December 14th 2023 the pack met for two hours our overall agenda focused on education of our role as parent advisers on the l cap before we move toward the review cycle of our committee for the second year in a row we asked former pack member educational consultant and BD parent Sandy Park to present to us about the role of the pack bringing us through the highlights of the Education Code the makeup of the committee and what makes a good pack she helped us understand best practices best practices on how to address the lcap because we can't fix everything in one year and what leverage
045we have in our role as advisers next Kathy Fleming stepped in as the design for the district to readout slides prepared by our regular superintendent design Lisa stupin the deck reviewed the five BSD lcap goals and shared information about action within each goal and progress monitoring we collected questions via chat to be answered later questions were about Avid their budget and enrollment educ climber the use of data preschool funding the population served by RTI and the overlap with focal student groups how ofie success is measured and how all of the college readiness intervention programs overlap after that we received a presentation from UC Berkeley data science students who analyzed data and built a website that shared Trends in reading and math Broken Out by schools grades over time and socioeconomic status we hope that the
046website is shared and examined widely as it helps highlight bright spots in our system and challenges L held stereotypes about our schools it can be found at bitly calata 2023 that's bit. lyc l d a t a223 as a strategy to form connections and encourage discussion we broke out into groups to discuss what we had heard during the meeting our intent is to use these discussions to form the basis of our annual feedback on the lcap topics addressed were the urgency to address the achievement Gap Haack impact and opportunities for partnership appreciation of seeing how many people want to make the district better and the need to support preschools better at this meeting we did struggle to meet Quorum until the co-chairs emailed texted and created a personal calendar invite final attendance was at 70%
047we hope to see more people at pack next time um at our last committee comment we reported that 11 out of 22 spots were filled we now have 17 confirmed members and we also hope that the five remaining School representative spot which are the second members for all middle schools BTA bis and Washington Elementary will be filled as soon as possible maybe even by January 18th our next meeting thank you thank you very much Miss Noel now uh we will move on to any Union comments do we have any Union comments Mr no pre-recorded Union comments okay thank you very much um now we will we will move on to board member comments and so I just wanted before we go on to board member comments wanted to thank you all who came out to
048speak to us uh before we start board member comments tonight I'd like to remind our colleagues to review our governance team commitments which include appreciating each other's strengths experience and contributions and the positive work carried out in the district embracing disagreement when respectfully articulated this is a sign of a healthy governance team comprised of people with shared value vales but different perspectives committing to being a team player being respectful about the way we discuss our colleagues and their views even when we disagree to strive to support each other avoid disparaging each other publicly or privately and organizing against each other and our full list of governance team commitments can be found in our board meeting agendas let's be the best role models that we can for our students and with that I'll turn it over
049to my colleagues for their comments who would like to go first tonight I'll begin with my vice president Brown around thank you good evening everyone and happy New Year say it back happy New Year Happy New Year I'm happy to see all of you all uh and very grateful that we made it into the new year um hand inand together uh and thank you to all of you who spoke to us this evening uh those who spoke and have uh been speaking to the board for a long time in regards to gender neutral restrooms um the war that is still taking place unfortunately um in the Middle East and those who spoke uh in support of the continuation and the expansion of our ethnic studies programs I'd like to thank those who spoke tonight um
050and have been speaking for years in regards to our literacy action plan and uh representing greeting for Berkeley um I always say this every week and I say it time and time again um your words do not fall on death ears although it is hard and difficult to see the work the Ever Ever Changing ever moving work that happens behind the scenes it is really happening because of your advocacy so thank you um tonight and for always speaking to us as a board um tonight you'll see a couple of items uh on our agenda one of which I'm really excited about which is the literacy action plan monitoring report I believe that that would be a great opportunity to do some factchecking to uh be able to address and maybe even demystify some things that
051are happening within um our community but more importantly and and above all to be able to address some of the things that are happening that are not happening and be able to provide we as a board be able to provide Direction about ways in which we need to move forward especially hearing from our community um earlier our superintendent uh recognize the work from the policy committee um and the uh policies that are brought forth on tonight's agenda and I'd like to take this moment of personal privilege to thank uh director babbit to thank superintendent Ford Morel um to thank uh Miss Liz Chavez and to thank uh yasmina who were present for that policy and are always present for those policy committee meetings the work that we do as a board is really important most
052of our work is around policy work and we wouldn't have been able to get through as many policies as we we were able to this Academic Year if it had not been for the commitment of these young young ladies so thank you young ladies for for all of your work um and when I said young I was mostly talking about myself um for all of your hard work no honestly thank you for your work uh finally I'd like to um draw our attention to a lot of events that will be happening and taking place um in this new year and would really like to see a lot of our uh community members show up and show out for those events and I'll leave it to my board colleagues to identify some of those finally on
053on a not so exciting or happy note I'd like to take another moment of personal privilege to send love and warm thoughts to a council member Riel Robinson who publicly um made the decision to not return uh to to first uh remove his name as a candidate for mayor and to not return to his council member seat um this isn't typical practice on our diet to say this however given the reasons why he has decided to resign I think it is important for our Community to take a pause and recognize the challenges that uh those of us who are elected officials fac in this community recognize the challenge that all of us um as individuals in this community are facing uh during a very contentious time in our city for many many reasons and I
054really want to call on us have been preaching and teaching love and respect and the importance of um having a community that supports each other and is there for each other even in times of Challenge and want to take this opportunity to continue to preach and continue to teach that we are in really difficult difficult times and we are not going to be able to get through these times if it isn't uh for the work and the love and mutual respect that we have for each other so as we continue today's meeting as we even leave here from today please take that with you please spread that message around our city the message of love the message of support the message of community so that we may all do the work that we as elected
055officials are uh voted in to do and we may do the work that we as human beings are here on this Earth to do thank you for the opportunity to share those comments with you all and thank you for accepting the charge of Love kindness and Community Building thank you so much vice president Brown do we have any other directors who would like to speak I see director shinoski yeah I made my list things to tell you you all about um so it's been a busy month um well it was a busy before the break and after the break and I hope all of you um took time like I did to just sort of be with my family and enjoy community and a little break from so much heaviness that I think we're all
056carrying with us um before the break I was really excited to go to the Berkeley Public Schools fund grante showcase um Berkeley Public Schools fund you know partners with the district on a number of different things um one of the things that they do is they offer small grants to teachers so that teachers are able to do Innovative things in the classroom um so it was really great to see some of that work in action and meet some of the Educators that were there um you know putting putting that those funds to good use I also was able to join um students at Berkeley High um where they served dinner the Berkeley High dinner uh my kids and I went and we were able to participate and it was just lovely again to see people
057serving young people serving um the less fortunate in our community and I was really honored to be part of that I've also been meeting pretty consistently with some folks from the gender inclusive schools group their uh subcommittee and I've really been um excited to partner with them and try to understand what the issues are within our district um for kids and how we can really solve those problems in a robust and Safe Way for everyone um I also um have been a member of the citizens Bond oversight committee and um in that capacity um we had two meetings since our last board meeting and one of the um primary topics of conversation has been the parking situation at brookley high so this has sort of Fallen onto the back burner from in many Minds in
058the community but um for our staff our teachers our administrators our classified employees um parking is a real problem at Berkeley High and many of our staff um have to move their cars every two hours as a result and so um trying to come up with solutions for that in partnership with the city that will be um good for the environment good for our um students and good for the staff has been a real top I of conversation so it comes before City Council next week um we hope that folks will um participate in that process and help us Advocate to get parking permits for our staff um so that they're able to park on city streets without having move their cars every two hours um the I want to highlight the virtual lcap presentations
059that are um rolling through the district I'll be at one next Tuesday evening um but the process for um allocating funds within the district is um starting now so um the governor's budget was just announced today I think it was today um and so we'll we'll start working on that so I encourage everyone to um see those announcements and participate um before the break I had a really busy office hour um it was packed um and I was talking to people from the beginning till past the end I have another office hour tomorrow um Thursday at Casa Latina from 3:00 to 5:00 pm so um I encourage you to come by and say hi and um we can talk in depth about any issues that are coming up I'm really excited for tonight's literacy um
060report and I'm uh looking forward to learning more about how we're progressing I also want to say I was really impressed reading through the report about how much progress um has been made and I know that there is a real sense of urgency we all feel that sense of urgency to make change I also as a teacher know how important it is for teachers um for educators to really feel that the decisions made in their classroom are you know owned by them and really felt by them and moved forward by them and so I take it very seriously when we're talking about curriculum and we're talking about curricular changes that we ensure that we have true buyin from the folks that are doing the work on the ground from the professionals that are doing the
061work every day and so um that extends from ethnic studies to literacy and so I'm I'm proud of our district for really putting that um professionalism of our Educators at the Forefront and making sure that they are really participating in these processes so thank you for that that's it thank you director shinoski any other directors would like to speak director Ching sure thank you so much um happy New Year everybody um I wish that your New Year's resolutions will come to pass you know hopefully for me at least 50% maybe 10% um but uh thank you public commenters uh for raising the important issues there's a range of them of bathroom safety literacy and ethnic studies um I we are hearing you I know this is a very difficult time um and that the complex
062and often divisive National politics can be confusing to our kids and to us I do sincerely hope and I will work to ensure myself that at least here at B USD that 2024 will be a constructive year that's focused on our students needs grounded in brookley values um Justice sod mayor wrote in a major Supreme Court case last summer that diversity is a fundamental American value this is an assertion that diversity having come across many decades of travel in terms of politics and discourse and legal construction and cultural uh construction has come to a point where it's very much part of our lexicon today and if you're old enough you know that 30 40 years ago this was not the case um is so much grounded that it's part of Fortune 500 uh training um
063as well as Government training um de eii or diversity equity and inclusion has been a fundamental Berkeley value for decades and therefore it's no surprise and no coincidence that BHS was the first High School in the country to have an ethnic studies curriculum in the 1990s I've raised this before um I do want to raise it again during these challenging politicized times um that ethnic studies is critical to a transparent education grounded in the the values of diversity equity and concl and inclusivity and in addition uh title six of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which I'm very familiar with as a enforcement attorney during the date which protects against islamophobia and anti-Semitism that is a legal manifestation of that shared principle of diversity equity and inclusion upon which I also think uh ethnic studies
064is very much grounded so this brings ethnic studies front and center as a critical pedagogical tool to teach the principles of anti-discrimination to our kids that is a core value you might disagree with some of the pedagogy that you're hearing here or there but the core value of ethnic studies is that pedagogical tool to teach the principles of anti-discrimination to our kids so that's something that I want and I hope and I wish in 2024 that this community here in brookley practicing brookley values even as we're being um swayed and um whipshaw by the national politics with the tragedy that has been occurring in the Middle East that we will focus on that for our kids and for ourselves here in Berkeley um in the past few weeks uh similarly with director shinoski who I
065am working with on a Citizens Bond oversight committee we've been working on important issues that are relevant to the programs and services here in particular uh teachers should be able to have parking and I also remind um everybody as director shasi has has noted please come to the city council meeting to support that um our teachers shouldn't and administrators shouldn't have to leave to put in money for parking um safe bathrooms is a big deal uh we've been working on that on citizen Bond oversight committee both sh director shasi and myself and Facilities um and the administrators are working hard on this um considering uh what bathrooms mean in terms of potential new build outs that's something that's kind of in early form um there's an opportunity here for those who are concerned about safe
066bathrooms to again you know exercising your right to Advocate on on that um with some of the potential new construction and um uh Renovations that could potentially be down the pike um and I've met some of you in scheduled office hours thank you for continuing to do so feel free to email me again uh and ask me and I will schedule a time sometimes I meet in coffee sometimes at a coffee house sometimes we'll have zoom meetings and again um reflecting on what's been stated by others um I'm looking forward to the literacy monitoring report and I do and I'm quite impressed by what I've seen of it so far do give kudos to the district administrators on their efforts on on putting this in place it's like uh turning around a gigantic ship and
067so um I appreciate their efforts and I also appreciate the efforts of yourselves as members of the community in terms of advocating uh on this basis which I think is why we've gotten to where we are at now uh thank you very much and I look forward to seeing you again soon and um have a good evening we have maybe three more hours together thanks hopefully not three hours but thank you director Chang and do we have oh student director um yes please go ahead um happy New Year everyone um I just want to say that with the New Year comes new goals and new relationships and this year I really want to continue to encourage Berkeley High students to reach out to me um although I have had a couple I really want more
068to reach out to me so we can build relationships and so I can collaborate with you on all the issues that you care about um issues that you come to the board about like the gender neutral bathrooms or our ethnic studies program and so tomorrow at lunch I'm hosting my office hours it's it's going to be in like the seating area of the a building so like right next to the glass doors and like the new area so I really hope you join me and I really want to help and just begin you know brainstorming Solutions and taking action so please don't hesitate to reach out to me also you can free feel feel free to email me if you can't make it tomorrow since it's a little bit of late notice but yeah thank
069you wonderful thank you very much director babit thank you and welcome to 20 24 everyone we know that we are all excited for a new year and a new opportunity to make our New Year's resolutions come alive I will hit the gym hopefully but I do want to um also uh start by acknowledging that uh we are entering Martin Luther King's birthday and his celebration and so thankful for that holiday it's also my birthday I was also born on January 15th you know was coming um and uh one thing that the city of Berkeley always does uh for Martin Luther King's birthday is to have a Martin Luther King's Day breakfast in which they celebrate and honor our students and this year um my daughter was actually nominated NAA babbit and um hopefully that you
070all will come it's going to be virtual and you'll hear more nominations of our bright students like this one Navea bit is an outstanding candidate for the Martin Luther King Jr award she embodies the spirit of Mary McLoud Baum's modotto enter to learn depart to serve n's dedication to academic excellence and community service combined with her advocacy for social justice makes her a shiny example of a future Community leader over the years I have witnessed nave's exceptional public speaking ability using her voice and intelligence to promote positive change what sets NAA apart is her active engagement in various community service initiatives she is a proud representative of several cultural and local community organizations including young gifted in black and the stepup program where she demonstrates a genuine passion for positively impacting her community NAA is
071an outspoken advocate for social justice utilizing her voice in service to the champion causes that promote equality and fairness inside and outside of the classroom her eloquence and ability to articulate complex issues reflect her intelligence and deep understanding of the transformative power of Education NAA is not merely a student she is truly an ambassador for positive change using her influence to to inspire others yay so I am very proud but I'm also acknowledging her because uh she is a product of Berkeley public schools and all of the work that we do collectively to ensure that all of our children um actually do Advocate um as social justice change leaders including you so the Martin Luther King Day breakfast the link is w ww. Berkley mlkjr day.org once again www Berkeley mlkjr day.org and I believe
072uh vice president Brown has been the board representative on that committee this year so thank you also for all of the hard work in keeping this part of our Dream alive thank you very much oh I'm not done oh I also want to uh make note I've heard a couple times the the mention of the moment of silence that we took and just want to uh reiterate that the moment of silence that we took was in honor of all of the lives lost in the Middle East um my specific comments were I know that we are all feeling more pain as we see the death toll of innocent Palestinian Israeli American and other nationalities climb as we watch with deep empathy for families whose loved ones have been kidnapped whose loved ones have been displaced
073deployed to war been without food water or electricity and on and on the impact of this war is being felt and experienced around the world and right here in our community for many in our community this is an intensely personal trauma that has altered the fabric of their lives and family unit forever now is the moment for the BD Community to come together to provide space for grieving and healing and as such in honor of the thousands of lives lost in the Middle East please join me in a moment of silence and we can take another thank you I also want to um further inate the sense of urgency around our reading curriculum and our literacy action plan I uh do believe that we need to um respond with a sense of urgency because it
074is urgent our needs continue to grow we continue to see students uh whose families are doing more of the supplementing to ensure their children can read than our first level instruction is providing and this has been happening for many many many years in Berkeley and so I understand that we are trying to go slow to go fast but now it's time to get there so I'm looking forward to uh the literacy Action Plan update I'm looking forward to continuing to Advocate I looking forward to seeing 2024 2025 bring about a change in our um literacy results by first acknowledging what uh our science and research is actually telling us by updating the curriculum lastly I want to um thank uh director Chang and director shinoski for your work with the um citizens Bond oversight committee
075to uh help us to push forward the parking passes please send an email to your city District's uh council person and just ask them to support the daily parking passes for Berkeley High School students uh we've worked on this over a year with the 2x two committee now is the time for January 16th um and we need them to to vote to move this forward it takes forever to get something done in our city so please let us not miss this opportunity it's coming before them let's get the advocacy emails going uh board colleagues I would like to put a a letter forward that I would ask you to sign on to that we could send to uh the city council on our behalf so that they also understand that we do support this ask
076of our U teachers and that concludes my comment well thank you for your very thorough comments director babit um thank you all for coming tonight my comments will be brief I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy start to the New Year and hope that you also had a restful break with your loved ones thank you to the staff for all your hard work to make disability awareness month a reality I'm grateful to all the parent Advocates that worked with me to make that happen and I see Eliza no in the audience and all of the other parents who came to all those meetings so thank you so much and and you know this is our first one and it will just get better and better this is our first regular school board meeting of
0772024 and during the new year as a lot of my colleagues have already referenced it's a time for us to set up our new resolutions intentions and make plans for how we want this new year to look um but in terms of our district I think we we took that really to heart and I'm glad to see that that with that same Spirit we're going to have some strategic planning and a nice uh engagement around our lcap uh know superintendent for Morel knows that I love that that's one of my favorite topics to talk about so I'm really excited as we embark on this collaborative process and I can't stress that enough this is really a collaborative process it's our district um to outline our priorities and set the direction for our Collective work in
078service to our students I'd like to thank the superintendent and staff for all the information that's gone out to our communities about the Strategic plan in elap I know that during the winter time a lot of people think you know staff is checked out and that's absolutely not true so much hard work has gone out to making those events happen so I just really want to thank all our staff so much and I know that we're at the beginning of this journey but there's a lot of leg work that's been done to make sure that the Outreach is strong and that we get the information that we need to from our community so that they know that we're moving forward in the right way and service to our students and I can't wait to hear
079I know the superintendent give us a little sneak peek of what happened at today's session but I can't wait to hear all the feedback from all the sessions once uh once they're completed I'm looking forward uh to our meeting today and getting the work done for our students so thank you for tuning in and for being here and with that um I know we made some changes to the agenda at the beginning but uh it is now time to approve the consent calendar can I have a motion and a second to approve the consent calendar I move to approve the consent calendar so was moved by director Ching is there a second I'll second second it by director shinoski and Miss chus can you call the vote director shinoski yes director Le yes director babit
080yes to confirm the motion didn't specify but it does have those items removed thank noted director Chang oh yeah vice president Brown yes president vas great thank you so great thank you so much Miss chus and I just wanted to record director Chang was a yes definely and then uh now we're going to move on to discussion item 14.1 which is the literacy action plan we'll give um folks couple minutes to set up e right all right thank you school board for holding this time and space for this presentation I'm excited to be back and share with you some of the progress that's happened in the past six months with the literacy Improvement uh program or the literacy action plan just a reminder the purpose of these reports uh you see my name on the
081screen George Ellis with UC Berkeley the California reading and literature project uh and the Berkeley teacher Ed program the purpose is to Monitor and report on the school district's compliance with the literacy Improvement program basing the reports on the four larger implementation goals that um hopefully you're all familiar with they're on page one of the report uh and underneath these larger goals there are 37 different actions so most of this report is based on looking at each one of those actions and monitoring the progress there so before we get into the specific progress in the past six months I did want to pause and zoom out and take a look at the big picture of how progress has been over the past 18 months over all of these action items so if you see on
082this graph I know it's a little hard to see here but um on the right hand side you have the actions that have demonstrated adequate or substantial progress and what we can see here is back in November of 2022 my first report there were 18 actions um with adequate or substantial progress and now we have 29 actions so that's uh 61% increase and when we look at the leftand side of this graph that's where we have actions with minimal or no progress evident that started with 21 actions back in November and now we're down to eight so there's a 62% decrease there in the big picture um so here now we're going to talk about what's happening the past six months and if you'll remember the reports organized around five cross cutting themes and the
083First theme is accountability in this theme there are 10 separate actions and you can see that four have substantial progress six have adequate progress and there's no actions with minimal or no progress evident here some areas of growth I wanted to to talk about when it comes to accountability um there's three in particular one is the process for creating reading IEP goals there's been a lot of work and I'll talk about that in uh detail number two um the implementation teams begun to separate actions around K5 instruction and intervention versus 6 through 8 because the progress has not been uh similar so it's important to be able to track those separately and then uh finally launching the communications plan through the Berkeley reads um initiative and the literacy of Berkeley website there's been a lot
084of um public information that's shared to keep everyone updated in what's happening with the plan here so one of the actions here where I've seen the most growth uh was in the rewriting of IEP goals those are individualized educational program goals for students with IEPs um and I wanted to highlight the work of the special ed team over the past actually since since August the start of the school year and the Brea team together and Brea's the data team you have here in the district they work together to improve the quality and consistency of IEP goals which is one of the actions here this started with a 45-day pdsa cycle which is plan due study and act that they participated in with Dr Gibbons who's your literacy consultant from the University of Minnesota and so
085they analyzed over 450 IEP goals that the district has for students and they whittel those down to the goals that were purely related to literacy and then um they engaged in a monthly rewriting of these literacy goals so that they are compliant now with the settlement agreement what I think is notable about this work um it should have started last year and it didn't happen uh but it started in August and when it started it took off and what was interesting about that it happened in the absence of the executive director of special ed which uh in some ways made other people step up to the plate so I really wanted to acknowledge the work of your special ed tsas who work tirelessly on this work uh Lena Sweeney Rosie Hopkins and Karen sukenic uh
086stepped up and really made this a priority and as they were doing this I also noticed they seem to be really enjoying uh the purposeful work in rewriting these IEP goals so they tackled IEP goals uh up for revieww in September October November December and they're going to continue doing that throughout the rest of the year until all annual IEP goals with literacy are updated uh as well as new IEPs that arise so here are some recommendations this theme tends to be going pretty well although I do want to provide some recommendations for next steps here um the first has to do with externalizing some of the work that's happening behind the scenes here particularly when it comes to the universal screening process so this is something that's already in the works uh but creating
087some type of parent friendly infographic or flowchart so it's clear to caregivers what the process is for identifying students at risk for reading difficulties this is already in place it just needs to be uh publicized a little bit better here so I'd like that to happen by Spring 2024 um the second um is really about communication with the uh teachers at Berkeley unified so creating a plan to communicate with the negotiables and non-negotiables are of the settlement agreement uh both to K5 teachers General and special ed and also uh 68 reading and language arts I'm at school sites a bit more now and I noticed that a lot of the planning that's happening at the district level may not be clearly communicated with teachers uh and that's normal at this stage of implementation but I
088think providing teachers with some guidance on here's what's non-negotiable that we have to do that we've agreed upon and then here's where we actually have some buyin could be really helpful for teachers in providing some clarity there the next area here is assessment um and this is a key theme of The Literacy Improvement program there's six actions listed here under assessment and uh assessment's key in this plan for first of all driving instruction also tracking student progress in reading and then finally identifying who those students are who may need some additional supports uh that may be at risk for reading difficulties so when it comes to assessments I wanted to highlight some growth here particularly around two areas from the report the first is the level of professional development that's been provided for site-based literacy
089teams on how to use dibles and star data for Universal screening and progress monitoring so Dibbles and star are the reading Data Systems that the district chose to implement uh for the settlement agreement and there's been a lot of training around how to use that in those two areas progress monitoring and Universal screening and then secondly uh the district's done a really wonderful job in documenting what's happening in these intervention groups once students get there and they've utilized the edge of climber system and having each interventionist set a goal for the group that they're seeing um a length of time for that goal and then revisiting that goal and that went up and running in August and it's um I think 70% of the groups now have a goal and that's pretty high considering this
090just started in August and it involves technology which uh can always be difficult and the goal they're looking for is 90% by the next trimester so that's some of the progress in assessments um what's interesting about this particular area is that many of the actions in the literacy Improvement program use the verbs train or provide training and so that's the actionable part um however the expectation of the literacy Improvement program isn't just that we train teachers or provide training what's implied is that they Implement as well so what you're going to see in the recommendations here is the implementation piece that's not explicitly said in these actions but I think we can all agree upon we'd want uh staff members to do here so the first recommendation um and the second as well has to
091do with which reading data system we're using for Universal screening and progress monitoring Dibbles and star are what you've agreed upon um however I'm noticing at most sites that is not the first point uh of contact when it comes with data so I think we need to discontinue the use of the fontas and panel Benchmark assessment system for Universal screening and also for Progress monitoring it's not in alignment with the plan that the district has and the teachers have not uh received training in that they've received training in using dibles and star uh secondly discontinuing the use of the teachers College reading and writing project Running Records very similar to the f&p Bas both for screening and progress monitoring I know this is in the works uh but I'd like to see that done by
092trimester two so going into the third trimester we really are using at the classroom level the data system the district agreed upon when it comes to screening and progress monitoring um and then finally just once again Clarity and communication with teachers providing guidance for teachers on how to use the district adopted mtss reading data system dibles and star uh for Universal screening and progress monitoring at grades K5 and 68 by the end of that trimester so if we expect them to discontinue use of the font sen panel and the teachers College we want to make sure they have solid understanding in of how Dibbles and star can replace and that's happening at the district level um but at the classroom level I don't see it happening yet so before we segue into the third theme
093I wanted to talk a little bit about the complexity of the actions in the actual plan here um so here is one of the actions this is literacy Improvement program action 23 take a few seconds just to read that um to yourselves it's pretty wordy so what can be difficult engaging progress with these tasks as many of these tasks like action 33 involve subt tasks as well so you'll see that isn't just one action action uh 23 so let's just deconstruct the action this is what the district implementation teams been doing really looking at what these actions are particularly the complex actions that require uh multiple subtasks so the first piece here Consulting with the outside consultant that's Dr Gibbons uh before even starting the second piece here is looking at policies procedures and practices
094for reading intervention there's a third piece in this action about policies procedures and practices for special ed those are two separate things the fourth is checking to make sure it's in alignment with the literacy Improvement program and then the fifth presenting to the school board for approval so this is one of those actions that's showing minimal progress partly because it's so complex um so in order for it to go into adequate or substantial progress I'd need to obviously see some type of presentation to the school board um so deciding whether an action is at minimal adequate substantial or no progress evident can be difficult with some of these actions so I want you to keep that in mind uh when you're reading through the plan some of these actions are more difficult to implement um
095than others and that's why some of them are still at the minimal uh band here another important detail regarding the structure of the actions um is how they are listed and where they were taken from so all of the 30 seven actions were taken from the appendix to the settlement agreement which is an a table that's been added on to the agreement and that's just a list of numbered actions what you see to the right of the title there um you have where it's taken from The Narrative of the settlement agreement which is really the meat of the settlement agreement and sometimes the actions are more General and in order to find out the specificity behind the action you have to go and read the narrative that's listed uh for example that 2 A1 B1
096um pretty complicated stuff it's the section subsection action goal and paragraph and it can be helpful not only reading the particular actions but also looking at the narrative text in the settlement agreement for clarity so I'm going to give you an example here um action 15 uh is around instruction which we're going to talk about next says to conduct a review and assessment of BD's K5 core reading program in conjunction with School site principles teachers School personnel and burgling units it never mentioned in the action to actually look at another curricular resource right but then if we go to The Narrative of the settlement which is what you all agreed to uh section two subsection B action 2 goal a and that first paragraph um what an actually reads is buusd Will conduct a review
097and assessment of its core reading program buusd will consult with outside Consultants during this process and will consider alternative core reading programs so if you're just reading through the actions you wouldn't have seen that piece about consider alternative core reading programs but it is in the actual settlement agreement so I encourage you when you're looking over the report not to just gloss over um that nomenclature to the right the 2 a 1b1 when you're looking for clarity it directs you right back in into the narrative which I find is a bit more helpful um when some of these actions seem a little bit vague hopefully that wasn't too technical there all right so let's continue where we left off I was at instruction um and as you can see there are seven actions um listed
098here and there's been one target area where I've seen the most growth uh when it comes to instruction uh this has to do with the professional learning teachers have gone through this year when it comes to to uh the Consortium on reading Excellence or core uh BD is in the process of implementing their halfway through comprehensive professional development program for both K through five general education teachers and 6 through eight reading and language arts teachers that was a huge task coordinating hundreds of teachers into different cohorts uh and they're going through the whole core reading resource book and the assessments as well so that was one of the big areas of growth and that's still continuing there's a few more sessions this school year another key shift um in the area of instruction is the
099restructuring of your curriculum and instruction Department you now have a director Chris albeck one of your former Middle School principles um and I think that's added more purpose to that team and I'm excited about some of the progress that's now able to happen both at the middle school and at the elementary school simultaneously whereas before it seemed like there were not enough resources to be able to Target both tracks uh at the same time and you'll notice here on the bottom there's two actions where it says minimal progress so I have some recommendations regarding those um the first has to do with implementing the professional learning teachers are receiving so what I would like to see um starting in the spring is classroom visits related and related coaching uh for teachers to implement what they've
100been learning in this Core Series this course Series has been hugely important the district's invested a lot of money uh it's comprehensive um it's important that we understand particularly administrators how it's being implemented in the classroom so I would definitely like to see that and then this should come as no surprise many people have talked about this already begin the pilot process for the K through 5 language arts curriculum for tier one and I'd like to see that um as soon as possible that's the one piece I have been a little bit concerned about in the past uh six months so let's talk a little bit about why hopefully this won't come as a surprise to you all but um the concerns really have to do with the review that was done internally that ended
101in June of last year and that was published um in August and The Logical next step of exploring or piloting new curricular materials so I don't think the board ever received um a proper presentation on the curricular review so I'm just going to briefly go over some key components that you should all be aware of that might explain some of the public um outcry over why this hasn't started yet so first of all what happened was uh admin teachers specialist uh District staff came together and they reviewed your Core Curriculum in nine areas and you see those on the screen pheic awareness phonics and morphology cultural responsiveness fluency vocab ulary comprehension writing assessment and accessibility and usability and that team got together I was part of that had a bunch of teachers additions with them
102and went through a tool created by the University of Minnesota uh your literacy consultant and looked at in these nine areas how your current Core Curriculum which is Teachers College reading and writing project sometimes called Lucy ckins um either meets expectations partially or does not meet and the results um were as follows kindergarten we see it did not meet expectations in 67% of the literacy components first grade it did not meet expectations in 53% similar in second grade and also third through fifth so this was a finding that was across the board um and you've heard a few people quote their report the part about the huge importance of a sound comprehensive tier one reading curriculum that's the center of everything we do if that is not in place and it clearly does not meet
103the expectations in these nine areas it doesn't matter what interventions we're really providing because we're just filling up holes all over the place and we're never going to get caught up here so when this came out in June I personally was surprised that quickly in August there wasn't some type of rush to put together a team to be able to start looking at other materials so that's one of the concerns I've had and that's why you see that recommendation to start that as soon as possible I know one thing uh the district's been waiting on is that Dr Gibbons and her team at University of Minnesota has been waiting to produce a list of approved curricula according to uh the Minnesota reads act California is way behind we haven't done much with tier one curriculum
104since about 2014 or so they were going to wait on that list it just came out today the list of approved curricula um however what could have happened in the past four months a team could have been assembled meeting dates could have been posted there could have been a lot that's happened and I have not seen that happen in this area here so hopefully this explains a little bit the urgency behind why I keep on talking about piloting or looking at additional tier one materials all right the next theme is intervention uh so switching from tier one instruction to what we're doing in tier 2 and tier three uh there's been some growth here when it comes to intervention particularly around uh the use of the Orton Gillingham program that your reading interventionists are using
105so I'm just going to read a little bit about what shifted here from last year so the majority of the literacy coaches and uh response to intervention teachers are now providing tier 2 interven itions based on the Orton Gilling Hammer OG method um this represents a huge shift for the school district which is previously been using the fontas and panel leveled literacy intervention system and reading recovery as its primary means of delivery for tier 2 interventions particularly at kindergarten through second grade and those two programs were called out in the settlement agreement to stop using and one thing that had happened y year was teachers had commented they didn't have anything to replace it with so uh I've seen I've been in many of the classrooms and I see a lot of the OG materials
106out there I hear reading uh intervention teachers talking about supporting each other and there's a level of excitement about implementing the OG uh for tier two another piece here is that the district's created some consistent and regular data monitoring routines to keep track of which students are receiving these T2 interventions what's the intensity of these interventions when do we exit them out uh and that this is happening regularly and it's being collected at the site and at the district level uh when it comes to interventions at 6th through 8th grade the story looks a little bit different that's partly the nature of Middle School uh you don't pull children out of their core classroom they actually have a separate classroom that they go to so some of the logistics around that are different what's happened
107so far this year for six through eight interventions is that the districts launched a review of its Middle School reading intervention programs first just by looking at what's happening in each of those classrooms and um the good news is and for tier three the majority are using the Wilson system which is what was approved and what your sped teachers were trained on um when it came to tier 2 intervention there were over a dozen different programs being used so that's where they're focusing their attention on now is working with Dr Gibbons to find the uh most appropriate program for tier 2 intervention and making sure that that happens across the middle schools this is partly due to a lack of adoption so you know teachers are using what they can find because there has not
108been yet one solid tier 2 intervention material for grades six through eight um so teachers are just getting by there but we want to provide them with something more than just getting by so that leads to these interventions uh I'm sorry recommendations in this area um One Piece here is there's been growth as I said and how we monitor which students are receiving intervention currently that's been at eight weeks I'd like to see that get closer to three weeks um that way we are monitoring more closely Dr Gibbons has recommended it goes all the way down to one week uh we know that's not meeting teachers where they are if they're currently doing it at eight weeks but I would like to see that go down to three weeks um there's pretty sound research on
109the more frequently we monitor progress uh the more sound our interventions are and respond to that secondly um there are some new tier two support staff and making sure that those who have not yet been trained in the imse Orton Gillingham receive that training there are a few teachers that never received that training partly because um there was only space for 30 so I know the district's getting a second round of training coming up and that should happen sometime this spring final area here is in systems of support which is theme five you see here there are seven actions where there's been the most growth here and systems of support um really happened the past year I haven't seen as much growth here in the past six months um and I'm going to read straight
110from the report here much of the initial progress in this area took place around the development of the mtss process guide at the district level however I've seen minimal evidence that these changes in systems and Protocols are actually taking place at the schools so the farther we go along in implementation the more I expect to see actions being implemented so there was more progress earlier here it's gone down a little bit and I think part of this has to do with that the elementary school sites in particular rely on a structure called the cost team coordination of services uh for both the universal screening process and the progress monitoring these teams seem to be a crucial piece of the buusd triage process for deciding which students receive what interventions um and I think there's a
111lot of expertise there that can be leveraged uh to be able to find a particular protocol that all schools follow right now it seems to be each school is doing something different here and that's not in alignment with the spirit of the settlement agreement so these three recommendations you see here all have to do with the cost teams and there's been a large focus on the cost teams from the district as well over the past couple months uh director of schools Debbie Dean and I have been visiting each of the cost teams at each of the school sites observing seeing uh what are some best practices what are some commonalities uh and where might there be some areas of growth as well so the first recommendation um has already started really just Gathering data on
112what's happening at the cost teams second creating some guidelines for cost teams um so that they're all really following a problemsolving process each schools attacking um the coordination of services in a different way when cost teams are at their best they're problem solving teams so uh one thing that would be really helpful is providing some guidelines on what is the process for problem solving here Berkeley and then this third recommendation is kind of specific now seeing it here in front of you um each cost team has a lead or leads and uh some professional learning for those leads in whatever protocols chosen by the district is going to be imperative to make sure that the same process is being followed across um all of the elementary schools good news is most of this is already
113in progress um Dr gim has started some of this work uh with the implementation team but I think if we really want the changes in the plan to take place at the school sites uh particularly when it comes to Universal screening and progress monitoring these cost teams are key and it's a structure you all already have which is great uh it's about refining that structure so the final piece here I just want to remind you that uh this report and the progress monitor monitoring I've been doing is all based on the logic model of implementation science from the California English language arts and English language development framework uh that states that typically in any large term change initiative you're going to see three phases the first phase just kind of figuring out what's going on
114that's called exploration to installation second phase is when we actually start implementing um and then the third phase is when those implementations hit the actual classrooms um and affect students directly and teachers are able to innovate those practices to be able to more quickly integrate into their teaching style and it becomes a sustainable part of your culture Berkeley unified is more or less at the tail end of phase two right now um implementation and so what this means is much of my work is now going to be focused uh at the school sites as opposed to at the district level because that's already fallen into place the hard piece is now making making sure that this is happening in all of those classes that deal with literacy in our students as well a reminder I
115will see you again here at progress monitoring report 4 sometimes toward the end of the school year and you're going to receive some internal reports uh between them and that is it I that was a lot of time sorry it took so long 30 minutes was I was shooting for oh thank you thank you Mr Alice we really appreciate your presentation and um just a reminder this is a presentation from my board colleagues so there won't be any questions um it's a presentation item but uh we really thank you for coming and we know that we're going to see you again shortly well great um superintendent I think we're going to take a f minute break just to allow our student directors to go if they need to go um and also just to take
116a Logistics break for five minutes and then we'll see you colleagues back on the die shortly thank you that not honest what y okay do than you was I'm what if I don't want it well bre all right thank you so much uh so now we will move on to agenda item 15.1 superintendent Ford Morel associate superintendent Hogan would you like to introduce this item good evening board directors and community members who are still here uh this item is just an introduction uh and a preview of things to come specifically our District's move into creating collaboratively with our community with our Educators and staff and our students a strategic plan and our Collective work to uh rewrite and revise our lcap our local control accountability plan um tonight's presentation is intended to be a brief
117presentation just to cover uh the various components of these plans to uh share with you all and our community the process that we're going going to engage in and to make announcements around actually I made them already in my comments but to reiterate the announcements around um the initial engagement sessions that have started um that started this morning actually um so with that we're going to go ahead and start always um grounding ourselves in our shared mission to enable and Inspire diverse student body to achieve academic excellence and make positive contributions to the world and our promise uh for the for EAS for all of our students of Excellence Equity enrichment and engagement we started this morning's convening um with about 30 or so participants inclusive of um parents and caregivers community members and um
118Educators and staff of BU USD and we started with that mission statement of course um naming as we have in many settings that we are far from realizing that very ambitious Mission um being really transparent about the fact that there are many of our students who yet who are yet to experience Excellence um in their education and their experiences on a daily basis but there are many ways that our district continues to struggle with equity and um there are many examples of inequities throughout our system that we have not yet realized um our definition and our goals to make sure that we engage each and every baby but also that we engage our Educators as well as our families and caregivers and that there are many more ways that we can make um the experiences
119of our students and those who are in our community more enriching um we understand that in order for to make that real and true that is going to require Collective effort and a lot of collaboration um we all come with various education and skill sets expertise and perspectives and we think that when all of those perspectives and viewpoints and ideas come together um we can make some beautiful things happen for our students and actually make a plan that makes sense that is responsive and that can be implemented by those who are closest to the work those that are doing the work and those that are impacted by the work and so with that we are excited to kick off uh the lcap and strategic plan um development stage next section please or next slide um
120typically uh many districts and many boards and many communities um talk about the lcap as if it is a strategic plan and there are many ways in which an lcap is similar to a strap plan and that both of these plans um are intended to outline a District's processes for meeting set goals both of these plans are intended to help a district focus and to set priorities both of these plans require District to not only about their goals but also the actions and strategies towards those goals and identify very CLE clear metrics of progress the lcap or local controlled accountability plan is a plan that is required by the state and so not only does it have those components that I spoke of but it has a very tight alignment to State funding or lcff
121funding and it was created with the intention of helping districts close and identify opportunity and achievement gaps um there are many ways that the lcap is helpful in doing that and then there are also many shortcomings of the lcap that I think I've heard some of you on the day I speak of here or there the lcap has eight priority areas and so it is not exclusively focused on academic so it is comprehensive in that way it talks about um school safety and sense of belonging and a number of other areas the lcap also requires engagement from stakeholders so that's another strength and the elcap calls out and requires districts to focus on and Target resources um on some priority focal groups and those groups are English Learners though it does not specifically distinguish for
122example newcomers from other English Learners it just kind of groups them all English Learners it also requires that we focus on our students who qualify for free and reduced lunch and so in that way it does capture social economic status to some degree it requires us to focus on our students who are in um Foster programs as well as our students who are unhoused or otherwise known as identify themselves as homeless students or housing insecure students we do know that even here in BD those student groups need attention we also know that there are other student groups in our district that also need attention um that the LC cap does not necessarily require a focus on what's beautiful about Berkeley is that Berkeley still focus on those students and call them out in the lcap
123what strategic plan allows us to do is to not just focus on those eight priority areas or those groups the lcap required but to think about our district as a whole to think about um not just what's required in lcap but really to think about what our plan is to realize our mission to think about academics think about culture and climate but to also think about things like facilities to think about our policies and think about who we want to be and so I want to call out for you the ways that these plans are similar but also how the plans are different next slide please so our lcap like I said before is um something that's required by CDE or the state of California and very much coupled with resource um fiscal resources it
124does again have those eight priority areas it looks at student achievement School climate and student engagement it also identifies that we have to focus the dollars on those different demographics that I named a few minutes ago it is a three-year plan that must be approved not only by you the board of education but also must be approved by the county um the Strategic plan is that and more and so as we think about and create a strategic plan we're going to think about the LC cap as a part of a strategic plan the strap plan is much broader it actually sets the vision for our district it outlines our District's theory of action to realize our mission vision and goals and it again identifies priorities and goals for our work um some of the feedback
125today and a number of other SE sections that sessions that we've had with our community members is that folks are excited about our mission statement folks are excited about the four e but everybody's on a different page around how we're going to make that Real and True people are also on a different page about the timeline to do that and so again what the strap plan allows us to do is not only identify our goals and priorities and measures and metrics but also helps us Benchmark what we want to accomplish by when um a strap plan also um really requires us to think about who we want our graduates to be and so um that is a part that's not in the lcap where we actually do a graduate profile and we think about what
126are the skill sets the dispositions the behaviors the perspectives that we want our students to leave our system in uh with when they graduate the strap plan will require us to not just think about elementary or middle school or high school but think about our system as a Early Education all the way through adult school program we have an adult school here in Berkeley Unified School District we have Early Childhood programs and so the LC cap doesn't always hit on all those different demographics all those different um grade spans the Strategic plan will allow us to do so um it will ultimately focus our energy and our resources it will strengthen our operation ations it will ensure that our employees our board members and our stakeholders are all working towards a common goal and actually
127can document reflect on and see where we are in our progress and what we said we're going to do and by whenn it will also help us not do everything in the kitchen sink um again one of the feedbacks that we heard in listening and learning and even this morning in our engagement session with that 30 or 40 uh group of folks that I talked to you about was that we are doing a lot in Berkeley and in our doing a lot we are doing nothing um because we're moving in a lot of different directions and there's ways in which those directions are we're pulling from each other and we're cancelling things out and so there's a there's a very clear cry for us to prioritize and for us to um allocate resources that are
128aligned to those priorities so that we could actually monitor um what we're doing and where we need to improve and what we need to continue to do in scale so that was just a quick preview of the lcap in the strap plan you're going to see us a lot more smile um um talking to you and giving you updates about these two different plans thinking about the intersections and how they are similar but also being very clear about how they're different I'm going to now pivot to Lisa to tell you a little bit more about the lcap in particular now it's on so good evening again everybody so what is the lcap so the lcap is a portion a component of the local control wait I'm sorry the lcff funding that districts receive and so
129it's an important component because um uh one of the requirements of receiving lcff funding is that districts are required to create a three-year cycle of an lcap um and with the funding the lcf funding we receive base funding which is a um a per student based allocation in addition to that we also receive supplemental funds um that are provided to improve or increase services for low-income students English Learners and fost youth so like I said earlier the uh requirement is to um for to receive the lcf F funding is to um create right engage our families to create an lcap plan for our district um so on this slide you can see an overview of the process and what it is is that data is analyzed um supports are identified the next year elcap process
130begins and once the plan is approved by the Board of Education in the county the plan is then implemented so on this slide um we're going to go a little bit deeper into the 2024 to 2027 lcap which is what we're working on right now so each lcap runs in a three-year cycle and um an example of that is this lcap that we're in now um began in 2021 and it's going to conclude at the end of this Academic Year so through this three-year cycle we were able to share our story in our district about what and why the programs and services were selected to meet our state and local priorities so basically our lcap plan demonstrates how the actions and the budget help will help have helped and will help support our district to
131achieve our five lcap goals um so here you can see that the first thing is that we determine our student needs we establish goals that support the needs of our students we develop and Implement our budget and then we implement the actions that help us to achieve the district goals um I know we've all seen this slide numerous times so just to highlight these are our Berkeley unified um five lcap goals um and these goals basically represent the significant effort that Berkeley unified's entire Community Focus um committed to to focus on the work to improve student outcomes in our community so just to reiterate goal one is to provide high quality classroom instruction and curriculum goal two is provide necessary and timely academic interventions goal three is to ensure all School sites have safe welcoming
132and inclusive climates goal four is use local and State measures to um assess student progress and goal five is to increase access to school for our students experiencing homelessness by decreasing chronic absenteeism and suspension rates hand it over to Joe which way am I gonna go good good evening I'm actually gonna make sure we're all awake and I'm gonna go a little bit backwards on these slides um so uh while there are similarities and differences in the Strategic plan and the lcap um both of those plans require similar components that you see outlined here um we need to uh review progress and identify needs we conduct engagement with our educational Partners we set goals and actions and identify measures and then allocate resources in order to implement and monitor um because both a strategic plan
133because a key component for strategic planning and lcap development is uh educational partner engagement um we have elected to do those two things simultaneously so that we weren't doing them in in separate places number one for efficiency and number two because what we've seen over time with a lot of our engagement efforts is there have been some shared themes coming up and continue to be repeated that engagement happens in a number of different ways and in a number of different forms um so I'm just going to now go backwards a little bit um in October we host uh annually we host and convene a uh uh committee orientation meeting this is for our site based School site councils and our district advisory groups um and as part of the orientation this year I mean we
134we always have a feedback form form but on this year's feedback form we included this question just to sort of kick off the planning process which was to what extent are our current lcap goals still relevant so with regard to the five lcap goals that Mrs Stupen just shared you can see here out of the 102 respondents overwhelmingly um the the feedback from that session was that these five lcap goals are still relevant another important um component of our feedback is and I do want to recognize um that we the the meaningful engagement of our educational Partners formerly known as stakeholders this includes students our Educators staff parents and other community members um for the lcap purposes again focus on those specific groups um we are required to the elcap to receive formal feedback from
135the district English learner advisory committee which represents our English language learner students and families and our parent advisory committee um or pack um which is comprised of parent representatives from our schools you can see here just some highlights from the daac and the pack reports so a I want to acknowledge the effort and the work that these two groups um contribute to this process um and to let them know that we don't just read those reports one time we continue to Circle back to them particularly when we're looking at plans um and checking on our own actions and definitely want to encourage members of the public who are interested um to reach out to um the the the meeting notices are posted on the website but if they have questions about participation we're happy to
136provide that information because these meetings are public both for the pack and the delac um and just to highlight um what our superintendent shared um in her comments earlier today we did launch the Strategic plan and lcap engagement sessions this morning you can see the three dat remaining dates for January here I want to make sure that the public is aware that we do have Spanish interpretation available um and for the in-person session um then the the last session there on January 23rd Child Care will also be available so we want to make sure that folks are aware of that and with that I think I'm turn it back over to you um yes so on this slide um as you can see this is something that we submitted to the board in November and
137this is basically um an lcap task timeline um one thing that I want to highlight here is these um Milestones provided on this timeline are provided by the state and counties to school districts so these are timelines that are provided to us um and I just wanted to add this in here with that being said on this next slide um this is a kind of a closer view of the um 2024 lcap timeline for our district so you can see in June um the board approved the elcap for the 2023 2024 Academic Year we began implementing services in July and then um obviously for the whole Academic Year we'll continue to implement the actions and service within the plan um the Green Arrow is depicting where we are at right now and as um they
138stated we did start our engagement today um and then moving forward in February we're going to have our midyear um progress and update here at the board and then we're also then in the spring this is something I really wanted to touch upon um this is where we prepare the budget we engage our partners again we write the lcap and we provide the um lcap draft to the board into the community and to our advisory committees what I want to highlight here is in the timeline provided to us by the county and by the um State um it's it says in that guidance that the draft could be basically come forth you could see the date it says in May our goal goal is to shoot to provide this draft at a sooner time so
139that we can engage our partners and you know have that document available to everybody and then in June we present the board we present the um draft elcap to the board um and seek approval from from from the board and then along with that this is a similar slide but this um closer look timeline is about the strategic planning timeline looks a little bit different um so in the fall we reviewed and analyzed data the Green Arrow again depicts that we're at the place we're engaging our educational Partners moving forward as you can see in the February and March timeline um identifying priorities goals and metrics then in April again looking at budget engaging Partners um that's when we begin to write the Strategic plan and provide the draft of the Strategic plan that in
140May engage Partners again on the draft and to review and then um The Hope is that to finalize a strategic plan somewhere in the summer and fall timeline and then fall of 2024 launch the B USD strategic plan and that's it before we wrap and um release it to you all for questions one thing to clarify is if we go back to that slide with the big fat arrow that one no the big fat Arrow oh I gotta really big with the graduation the big that one um that one um one of the things that came out of today's engagement session is um in some ways this visual as well as the the last two that Lisa just showed you are a little bit misleading and that it makes it seem like the engagement happens
141in one period in time or it happens in the beginning and then it's done or it happens in the beginning and then it happens later on when it's time to review the final product but actually the engagement is an ongoing part of it when we get to the part around thinking about and confirming our goals actions and metrics again we will engage our community we will have them play back to us and give us feedback are these the right goals does it make sense are these the right actions similarly when it's time for resource allocation as you know we have our our budget season as we call it and so we'll definitely be getting feedback from our community members and our educational partners around where we're allocating funds and what those funds are going for
142and how we're going to kind of um Monitor and assess if we're actually doing what we want to do or getting the outcomes we want with those funds and then finally throughout the year once these plans are created we're going to be coming regularly to you all and to our stakeholders just to show data to see if those things are actually um if we're actually doing what we say we're going to do and that was a very important piece of feedback um from Pac from pno from daac and a number of other advisory committees is how will they be engaged not just in the drafting the creation of these plans but in the ongoing reflection so we're going to make a new visual that actually tells that story a little bit better um but wanted
143to clarify that for you all as well thank you superintendent um so now colleagues at this stage we're going to take any questions or comments that you might have so you know see vice president Brown see director shinoski director babit all right so we'll start with you vice president thank you all so much uh for the presentation and always for all of the work that you do on behalf of our students um before I get to my question I just want to thank the superintendent um for calling out our lcap plan for those of you watching and the millions of you here in the audience tonight um our lcap plan uh has been recognized both locally and nationally for specifically what the superintendent called out which is calling out students that are historically uh not
144recognized in elcap plans those sometimes of our our students who happen to be um some of our lowest performing students and some of our students who are at the highest of our suspensions and expulsions um and so it makes a lot of sense that we in B USD would call those students out would develop a plan to support those students and implement the plan um as well and so I'm happy to be a part of a school district that does that that keeps that at our core values and excited about opening this up and an engagement that's going happen within our community and really really call on our community to continue uh in those steps of supporting all of our students in Berkeley but really in our lcap plan calling out those students who our
145school systems have historically underserved um I do have a question around the Strategic plan thank you for the information that you shared um so before prior to uh you all being here and prior to us having a new superintendent the board alongside staff went through um a strategic planning process and beginning um our strategic plan we spent a lot of money a lot of hours and there is a lot of hard work that went towards those efforts and so I'd like to know how the essence of that work will be considered or how it is already considered um in uh this iteration of our strategic plan thank you for that question so we we heard about that um and so we actually spoke with uh the consultant that was supporting that work um and been
146able to get some of the artifacts and some of the feedback that was gathered from that um I I think the the short answer to your question is that we are um definitely using that as those artifacts as a piece of information to help us as we move into the next phase of drafting fully drafting a strategic plan similarly with our community members we said we're not starting from scratch and so even with their feedback we said here are the themes that we heard are these the right themes are we on the right track is that what you said and add more and so we're going to do the same thing with the some of the artifacts that were created from the initial iteration of strategic planning that happened I believe two years ago with
147Miss Pam and using that to um inform what we put together um we know that the feedback has been and I feel like I I hear you kind of saying it too like folks don't want to start all over don't ask us all over again we've done this and so um in in some ways the engagement the the gathering information piece is going to be a little bit more accelerated because we are playing back those artifacts and we do intend to show you all as board director the artifacts that were shared with us to that end to give you a chance to respond all five of you were not war members at that time but again our goal is to to use everything that's already been created towards the end of the strap plan to
148inform the strap plan and actually get some consultation from those of you and also the consultant who was here supporting that work prior we've already started that to make sure that those things are reflected in the strap plan that answer your question yes it does answer my question and I really um am happy to hear that you will use that because the you know it took as I mentioned it took so many hours to come up with those strategic goals that will really help to and and the ideas and the plan around that iteration of the Strategic plan uh was a focus to help minimize a lot of folks doing a lot of things in a whole bunch of places but to help bring us together in the spirit of alignment for our school district
149and so I don't want to lose um the essence I don't want to lose the work and I don't want to lose the vision that ultimately helps us to gain that um that um organizational Clarity that you all talk about all the time so thank you great thank you and then we have director shinoski next followed by director babit yeah I have a a few sort of comments and then just kind of questions but really I just hopes that I have for both the development of the Strategic plan and the lcap um first I'm really excited about this um as I've talked to many of you you know I think it's my science brain but I've been a little frustrated by like a lack of clarity from my end on what's happening in specific places
150especially when we talk about different School sites or different uh people or right different classrooms you know there's a lot of variation and I think it's part of what makes Berkeley really beautiful our school is really beautiful is that we have really unique School sites and they all have their own personalities but at the same time just like we were Hearing in the literacy report right the monitoring report sometimes that leads to problems and real problems for kids so I'm really excited to see how we can make a functional document that's really living and really guides us I and that's my sort of question that's a hope is I've seen too often that people put together strategic plans or or right whatever kind of plan and it's a document that lives for us here totally
151outside the operations of the district or of the school and so I really hope that we're building something that's really a living document that we're actually going to be able to use that it'll be one of those like the literacy report binder with lots of tabs in it and reminders and you know sticky notes when highlighting where we're saying like oh this is something that has to be adjusted or something that we need to remember um similarly I really hope that as we're devel veloping the lcap and the budget and going through this whole process we're looking at what I've started to call our Boutique programs so we have so many programs at so many different sites and while I love them all and I we have students that come and speak to how important
152they are to them all the time whenever you know and myself I get wrapped up in how important they are I don't fully understand how they operate independently together um overlap in right what the actual outcomes are what the efficacy is and especially you know as we are entering a year with not necessarily budget cuts that we know of yet but still tightening the belt as expenses increase and you know colas are very small so I think we all know that we're dealing with limited resources so yeah so that's my other hope is that we can do the budget planning in concert with some of that analysis and assessment of these of these programs that we know um and love in our district but also we have to consider how effective they are for our
153kids thanks director babit thank you um in regards to artifacts before I forget I want to make sure that we call out um the artifacts from the listening circles that we had to start the African-American success framework I want to call out um the listening circles that we had for our Latin exp parents uh Berkeley Public Schools fund has funded both of those listening circles so we definitely want to make sure that we um use that information in this process as well also um thank you director uh Brown for for your comments around uh the elcat plan being nationally recognized um Berkeley values but I don't want us to assume not just Happ happened because it did happen as a result of advocacy and um the advocacy came from pecat parents of children of African
154descent it came from Latinos unitos day Berkeley it came from United in action and uh director Lea Cutler as well well as former director um Karen henfield really did support and make sure that we um listened and responded to those community actions and we literally named those groups as targeted groups so I definitely don't want to lose that and also want to just make sure that Berkeley Community understands that the community now is still the community then and we still need to come forward and make sure that um we as a district don't lose those values because that can happen very easily as well also when we talk about um the lcap plan accountability the A and account ability lcap um that's where we really need to uh look for our organizational Clarity um we
155were in a meeting earlier this week and a very good question was what does support look like um because a lot of people have different ideas of I did give you support I sent an email or I did give you support so what does support look like in making sure that that's clarified making sure that our mtss structure is also extremely clarified IED and because this is literally where most of these lcap supplemental funds are are going to it's what it's supposed to address but as um our literacy action plan Court monitor just told us the structure around our costumes is not even defined so um as we Embark upon this process how do we finetune what we've been doing so that we actually can get to the sustainability part because I can tell you
156years one years two years three the elcat plan was a living document and then it just died like it never the sustainability like Pac members had to fight for it right it became oh well it's our time in February to report on it so we got a report but there was no real umph behind making the the vision and the actions alive and so as we think about going into this process looking back as to where where we fell short in creating life to what was supposed to have been the Strategic plan is also important so that we can move forward and not repeat those same mistakes um goal five in the elcap plan a couple times I've asked now that we revise that uh for the homeless students so that it's not uh so
157deficit around their needs so I just want to make sure that that's still on the radar because I understand now is the time where we can do that and then my question is how are you all expecting the board to engage in both of these processes because I really didn't see from here Beyond approving it what our level of um implementation and process is thank you for that question and sorry that it wasn't clear we we expect you to engage so those five Community engagement sessions we would love for board directors to come um to look at the data with community members to make suggestions to hear the feedback I mean it was a lot of good feedback and ideas that came from that very powerful group of 30 or 40 this afternoon there were
158so many ahas and lightbook moments there were so many they were looking at they like I didn't know this and right and so so many conversations I think that is probably one of the most essential ways at least in the beginning stages that you can engage as board directors of course we anticipate engaging you through throughout the process by giving these types of little snippet updates and hearing your feedback it's nice to hear you already say uh director babbit around go five um and that being a reminder is also good to hear even the commentary because um I have a response to those things but just it allows us to understand and and know your perspectives and the things that you want to make sure happens even hearing yours as well director shinoski um so
159I would say your your role is not just approval Your Role is to be engaged and be a part of those processes actively you also many of you not all of you are actually um caregivers and parents in B USD former students in bu I got you former students in B USD so you just like the folks that we engage uh this morning have a lot of perspective experience um ideas that we think are going to be necessary to make this plan um actually a living document but also make this plan responsive to who we want to be as bu USD and work we need to do really quickly um director I'm I'm still getting my titles right again d director babbit um I just want to say that it is not our goal to
160um you know reinvent the reinvent the wheel or start from scratch like I just said to vice president uh brown but we really do want to leverage what's already existing and that's in part why we ask the folks at the joint committee meeting about those five goals because we know there was a lot of energy and a lot of advocacy that went into creating those five goals we wanted to get that pulse and the response was even though it's only 10 and something folks um yeah we think those are still the goals and so as we engage in these processes it is not our thinking that we would necessarily change all the goals or even make big changes we do want to check the pulse and say are we still on the right track we
161also want to use this opportunity as a as a way to to kind of get some shared language and some vocabulary that's the same identify those measures and make sure that people are engaged really um thoughtfully along the way so that when the plan is done or when those terms are used folks are like yeah we we know what you're talking about and we did we know we're not doing X this year cuz we're doing X in year three so it also allows us a a really clear timeline to Benchmark but our goal is really to fine-tune I also want to shout out the different and uh feedback groups that you just mentioned for the African-American framework for Lu um before we started the engagement we actually met together as a district team and pulled
162all that feedback um the engagement that Dr fiser did the very recent uh engagement that just happened just last year my listening the C engagement over the last couple years and so we were really intentional to to there's a lot to look at all of that and that is again what we're showing the community and saying is this is this what you said did we get that right so um I just want to double down on that we are not trying to to leave behind ignore or forget a lot of the feedback that was already given over the last three years thank you um I appreciate that response one more quick comment um also I did say uh Berkeley Public Schools fund it was actually the city of Berkeley who helped with the uh black
163parent listening circles so I don't want to like take away yep's credit appreciate them and also throw out that um yep who is the former 2020 Vision we definitely need to make sure that we um have special engagement for our com Community Partners um through the city because there's over 20 organizations that uh yep actually funds and their goal is to actually streamline their work so that they're not doing something as an offshoot but as a supplement integrated within Berkeley Public Schools so thank you now I'm done great and then I'm going to ask some questions but I see you director shinoski and so call on you afterwards and then I don't know director Chang if you have questions so we'll do that follow up to okay sure you can go ahead yeah just in
164the vein of Engagement also our Educators so I didn't see listed on there the engagement with Educators can you explain how that's going going to happen and how we can be sure that that's also part of the conversation so we actually did have Educators with us today so the the invite is is Broad and wide when we say educational Partners or stakeholders or Community we mean everybody including students to the point that uh director um babbit just made we know that we are going to have to do some um intentional and targeted engagement that's beyond these five that we're doing now and so our students are an example of that we're going to need to go to our schools and you know go to those Club s or we're actually going to work with you
165miss klin so there you go uh to to think about where are some good spaces and structures to use to leverage to get the feedback not just from our high schoolers but also our middle schoolers and our elementary students we also are going to go directly to some of those groups uh that director uh babbit said and we're working really closely with bft to think about what are some other ways beyond the five engagement sessions that we have that we can uh Target our Educators in particular the engagement just to be clear um we talked about the road show that we're doing now I love to be with people so I find a reason to be with people and we understand that everyone can't come out and so they're going to be complemented with um
166surveys as well so we're going to have multiple means to get feedback and input from um all of our Community Partners including our Educators and students thank you superintendent I have um just a couple of questions and comments uh first on the topic of Engagement I'd love to know how we're going to do multilingual engagement so you know and in terms of like combining and making sure we're reaching a broad range of families I think something that might be good to consider would be a deac session and then invite Partners like lub just our different um you know the multilingual program their their families the students in that program so to make sure that our engagement is also multilingual particularly um for our English language Learners and then I just wanted to make a comment
167on The Graduate profile I'm really excited to see that as part of the Strategic plan and I um I think it's really important to educate people on like on the public why that's so important districts that have successful strategic plans have very clear graduate profiles and that's a question that I get very often in my office hours like what are we doing to serve all students Onna right like that's a very common question like what should my eighth grader know what should my 12th grader know what should my third grader know and so um doing a little bit of Education I think for the public on why that's important and why other districts do it and how that impacts their work I think would be great and then um my other question is it's more
168of a Comon I know that there are existing artifacts and we went through a strategic planning process with Pam H the process was wasn't really finalized that what we got was a report out from all the different departments with a laundry list right like a huge it wasn't a prioritization and so what I hope Right comes out of this is a clear prioritization I mean that what what I see that being as the essence of a strong strategic plan and then tied to our agendas moving forward so that we have our priorities clear and our agendas are reporting out on those priorities right and I think that um csba explains that you know much more eloquently much more beautifully than I am explaining but why that's so clear and important is that we're you know
169we articulate the plans and we have that follow-through that accountability that director babot mentioned and why that's so important so um you know I hope that that's where we're going and we don't end up with the laundry list that we did last it's a it's an artifact that's there I would say it's an imperfect artifact um and I know director Chang I think you had some comments too um yeah want to say really quickly thank you for all the the effort that's gone into this I know that's a big pull as we prepare and pull this in with your um your strategic plan um and I I reflecting what's already been said here you know I appreciate the focus on intent the intentionality behind it and the community engagement which includes teachers as well as
170our our public members um but again you know I also appreciate the the recognition that I heard at the front end of the reality of having to prioritize so that there is a constructive outcome and I I will certainly attend some of these engagement meetings but the I hope that that continuing focus is there like that focus on that constructive outcome with the prioritization and that will certainly help folks like myself who are new wish to the board um but are also looking for um what pieces of the action planning are falling in place um aligned with the lcap thank you oh one last thing superintendent before I forget that's really important we forgot that the board will will be engaged through a workshop and so that's a very intentional engagement around the Strategic plans
171um vice president Brown yes um thank you again I wanted to um talk a little bit about uh things that I know a lot of school districts use to help inform their elcap planning or to help educate their community and that is the California dashboard so recently um we just got our scores for the California dashboard um and if you have board members colleagues Community haven't had the opportunity to look I do encourage you to please uh go to the California school's dashboard and look at how B USD is showing up the reason why I'm bringing up the dashboard is because as I look through it as I scroll through it um my point I made earlier about really making sure that we advocate for um our students who our school district has underserved our
172California dashboard you know callused that out and so in your engagement sessions in your planning um how will you use the California dashboard and other um data places to advocate for what we need because in in hindsight the lcap is very different than other plans that we come up with for schools other plans that we come up with for schools can sometimes be built off of filling or they can be built off of uh history or what we've done in Tradition but the lcap is really rooted in outcomes changes in in shifts and changes in educational outcomes for students who have been underserved and so uh how will we use this dashboard how will we ensure that the information and that the feedback that we receive from our community is really rooted in data knowing
173that we are a datadriven district thank you did uh so again we had our first engagement this morning and um one of the things that I share with the group is that we we definitely value their input and and their ideas um and that we wanted to make sure that the plans are um The District's plans right um and so what that meant was that we didn't want it to just be informed their input of their ideas to just be informed by their own experiences or anecdotes though we did say those are super valuable and have a place in the plan as well we wanted it to be um informed by by data and so we started the session this morning looking at data luckily for me we had a lot of data Geeks and
174we had a great time looking at data we had to call time but but um some of the data that we showed them was the dashboard data you set the word hindsight and as soon as we sat here we're like we should have brought the posters we have these big huge there's nothing that that's that size big huge expensive posters uh that actually uh show a number of different data sets one of which is the California dashboard data um we know that when creating an lcap or strategic plan just to be data informed we both want to use the summative data or the esack data that reflected on the California dashboard so we definitely show that but we also show some local data measures some interim assessments um we've shown them some student groups over
175time and so for example we have our current fifth graders and they're able to see how those students performed on the fall and winter assessment this year as fifth graders how they perform on the fall winter and spring last year is fourth graders and the same thing as third graders so they're they're getting to see different data tell different stories to inform what they're going to say that we need to do or to inform what they say we are doing well we need to keep keep doing so that's just one way we're doing it we did acknowledge and if you come tomorrow tomorrow's going be the first virtual one you guys I'm a little nervous in person was super cool there was great conversations people were moving I don't know how I'm replicate that virtually
176but what we did um say to the to the folks who were there um and I was definitely felt was that there is so much data to look at that they won't be able to digest it all in one session so there was a lot of folks who literally work walked out of the district office with packets of data and we said to them when you have that aha moment or that observation even after the engagement feel free to shoot us an email so we're we're going to flood folks with data um vice president Brown and we're going to support folks in understanding and reading that data to inform their input uh thank you and so I think um do you have another comment Vice before I move to director babot for the last word
177I was just gonna say thank you and I really appreciate that because that'll help us or help all of us Community included um determine what it is that we're going to do right so as we look through the data we see places where we're read president babbit mentioned about our homeless um students our students experiencing homelessness if we see in places that they're read for chronic absenteeism or for graduation rates that tells us what resources we need to allocate to those um to those specific subgroups or African-American students who are struggling uh with Ela are struggling with math that gives us a specific um note that we need to think about t we need to think about you know those things and so I don't want us to just kind of always be set to
178these same goals that we do year or every three years after every three years after three years but really be intentional about the goals based off of the data so I'm glad to hear that you have the posters glad to hear that you're having the conversations and look forward to uh providing more feedback when uh the time is allowed for the board thank you great thank you director babit thank you also want to um highlight us making sure that um as we look at the Berkeley adult school that we also um do a special focus on Berkeley Technology Academy and that we also do a special focus on um how we can leverage um all of the resources even uh bcce available to us as we set up um these strategic plans and I'm saying
179that specifically because BTA it feels like an afterthought right and when we mention every program we rarely oh yeah and BTA oh yeah I didn't I didn't say it but I mean BTA so we need to to make sure that we um do that and as we talk about data um uh during the initial elcat plan development we were very cognizant about how we do that without reinforcing stereotypes um so want to throw that out there that we need to really be intentional about um when the glasses half full um because very quickly it turns into all black students all latinx students right when we know we have many U bright and shining stars as well thank you well great thank you so much for this wonderful presentation we look forward to the engagement sessions
180moving forward and getting more information including information at our workshops great and with that uh now we'll move to discuss item 15 15.2 which was originally listed as item 12.14 on the consent calendar approval of committee assignments it's uh 152 or we moved it as an action item to the end of the meeting no I think my question my confusion was around um the way that we number it so 15 is for our discussion so it needs to have his own number but we can ask Miss chus do you want to clarify is it 16 or 15.2 okay it is and so 16 becomes 17 then thank you I've been here a little while you're not all right item 16 all right directors are you expecting me to start because I emailed you about this
181well yeah and I responded to your email but I'm happy to answer any questions so I think because you pulled the item yes you can start with your any questions you might have okay so um you said you would talk to the superintendent and tell me how to how we would address it in your response if I if I can just interject for the public can we um provide a little bit of context about what this item is what we're talking about we're happy to provide that cont U context so traditionally um as you know when we change presidency we uh reshuffle our board subcommittees and our board advisory committees and so board members filled out a survey they listed their top three priorities for board subcommittees four of the five directors listed three priorities
182and then directors were also asked um to list their priorities for board advisory committees and then we were um then the assignments were made based on the feedback that we got from the board members but do you have a specific question director babit I was just going to move to approve the committee assignments oh well you I don't want to have my name on committees that I've asked to be removed for so I sent the president an email and I told her that I'm declining those assignments but I definitely want to keep the um Pac the audit committee and the um my other one the africanamerican advisory committee so I'm I'm trying to get clarity on we're going to do okay yes uh president B so oh sorry director B it if you um upad
183if you open up the committee assignments on the new agenda you'll see that your requests were made and so we changed your request to only um assign you to the Committees that you identified as your preferences okay and when was this post updated um it was updated I don't miss chus updated it after following your request okay so it was updated today all right how do we find this it's in the if you open up the online agenda and you you download the attachments and you can also do it through your internal board login it'll show up the new committee assignments to reflect director babbett's preferences for subcomittees can we um take some time I I know that there may potentially be a motion on the floor soon but can we take some time to
184talk about um the impact of that or what we as a board will need to do to address this shift yes um so I'll have I know that the superintendent checked in with our facilities director in more detail so I'll turn it over to the superintendent so you could give that very thorough explanation um but I think uh my understanding is that there's no impact and I you know I did check in with another director director shinoski um listed her as an alternate for the cboc and listed myself as an alternate for the um other committee that that was declined um but it's my understanding that we actually don't need two directors at those committees so I don't know superintendent maybe you can explain the um the guidance that you received today from facilities about
185that so both the cboc the sorry the two committee two subcommittees that are in question are the construction Bond oversight committee also known as cboc as well as the facilities safety and maintenance oversight committies known as fmok um different from the the other of the five uh board subcommittee um subcommittees those uh two committees the role of the board design is that of a participant and a liaison uh they are not um facilitating meetings nor are they voting members as such in our um in our document that goes over the guidelines for each committee it um requests a single board member attend cbok and a single board member attends FM we have typically assigned to board members and what is I say typical being this my second year but what last year as well is
186that there were two assigned but folks would alternate um there were not often times a time where both were there and when I checked in with the facilitator the staff facilitator uh John kis of these committees um he said that was fine that the the single board member played a sufficient role just to kind of again be the liaison and Report out to the group it did not impact the committee from um voting making recommendations Etc um I think my question was more so around um quorums um so I'm glad glad to know that it will be fine if we have a single board member but I'm interested to know around Corum spe specifically around the facilities committee um just in looking at the information on the web page and reading out the minutes there
187have been a number of minute number of meetings that had to be cancelled due to the lack of a quorum so I'm more so asking around that for FM or facilities for facilities so facilities still has two board uh directors assigned the the two that were impacted again um by this change was F SM yes those two okay a lot of facilities committees okay thank you well thank you and I understand there's a motion on the floor so um director shinoski made a motion to approve is there a second I'll second the motion to approve the committee recommendations great miss chus can you call the vote director shinoski yes director Leo yes director babbit no director Chang yes vice president Brown yes and president vasudev yes motion carries on a five to one great thank
188you very much Miss chyz and then um colleagues just a friendly reminder to please read our information items items 17.1 to 17.6 and uh wanted to also note that we were going to recess and to close session to discuss item 3.2.3 um but is unavailable to attend tonight so we will discuss that as a first item at the January 24th meeting as our first close session item and with that um are there any extended public comments I know there was one in person let me look online to see how many online comments and we have two online comments so I will give um each commentary two minutes each so why don't we start with our in-person comment from Miss Eliza no hi um yeah I'm Eliza no I am your B buusd representative to the
189special education local plan Area Community advisory committee so I'm here to make a comment um about um the need to find a public place where the CAC May um update the community and the board Bo um on matters um of the CAC um according to the local plan governance and administration document section B it actually states that um you should be receiving reports from me it specifically states receive recommendations from the CAC representative that's me and that's also two other um Representatives that we have fortunately um so I it also says including but not limited to which means you have some leeway in trying to figure out a way to Center the voices of students with disabilities um in this forum in this public manner um so I really want to encourage you to think
190creatively to be um you know anti-abl um to do that um and also want to acknowledge um and to accept the superintendent's invitation to me to have uh more discussion about ways that I can provide input on behalf of the CAC so um in the spirit of that I just want to report a little bit about what we're doing what's coming up um first of all January 22nd is our first um 2024 CAC meeting I encourage you to attend that um I and thank you superintendent for announcing the hope Bill screening which is organized by the CAC and hosted by buusd um which is on you know the literacy the um issue and I also want to give you oh oh the February I miss miss note is it expired yeah I think that's the
191end of of your comment but if you could please I wanted to just quickly oh I can't say the February 22nd just want to let you one more date that CAC event is organizing um and CAC is organizing another event which is the interdistrict literacy Roundtable on February 22nd thank you Miss no if you can please email the board with information on those two events that would be great absolutely thank you so much and now we will move on to our online comments so I see two hands raised have one more oh we have one more in person comment thank you I'm so sorry I didn't see you do we have a comment card um yeah oh okay so I'd have to pull out of the list if you could please state your name and
192you have two minutes thank you um my name is Aaron catler um and I'm the parent of an eighth grader from king and a graduate of Berkeley High who's now a freshman at UC Santa Cruz and I just wanted to make a comment about the conversation around ethnic studies um for with a kid who is seeing the impact of ethnic studies in eth grade and another kid who has graduated this the Berkeley public schools and is seeing how uh what the impact is on her now out in the world not just here in Berkeley um ethnic studies is not is not the enemy I don't believe that most people I associate with don't believe that the liberated ethnic studies curriculum presents a problem presents a challenge or presents challenges um DOR Brown you mentioned delivering
193a me messages of love throughout the community um the liberated ethnic studies curriculum at its chord delivers a message of division um director Chang you mentioned Dei and Berkeley values and legal aspects of title six the Libera liberated ethnic studies curriculum challenges Dei values and without appropriate oversight violates those laws um the the conversation around ethnic studies has been presented as an All or Nothing proposition that make and that makes sense since the ethnic studies curricul ulum is an All or Nothing curriculum it's oppressor and oppressed it's good and bad um and so the the the nature of those conversations are taking a binary approach as well um and the reality is there are alternative ethnic studies curricula that a lot of schools have adopted a lot of districts have adopted and buusd almost alone
194has adopted the the liberated ethnic studies model that's a conversation that needs to continue to happen before it does further damage and Division in our community um I I know as you all know that the California Department of Justice issued a legal alert yesterday kind of warning of the the dangers of this curriculum the dangers that lie ahead as this gets more politicized and I would just urge you to do as much as you can before it gets worse um I know that this is on the radar of national National organizations the Department of Justice nationally media Outlets that are covering what's happening in Berkeley differently than what's happening in other thank you so much thank you thank you so much for staying late and for your comments um we have two online public commenters
195so we will start with Miss Christina harb and then with Camille Santana hi can y'all hear me yes all right thank you um so first I wanted to say thank you all for staying late um it was really amazing to hear the reports on literacy and lcap and I'm looking forward to joining one of the um elcap sessions um I'm um here to talk about a couple things U mostly around liberated ethnic studies and also the mental health of our um of our students in light of the war um essential an email about it but I just wanted to kind of highlight um a couple points so um the the I'm really grateful that the district the superintendent send out some resources um to the families about how to talk about it um I just
196want to point out like in my experience with u multilingual Learners newcomer families e families um things that are only communicated by email are um inaccessible uh for these families and so um in order to really you know get them the support that they need a lot of it needs to be like really personal connections in-person events and so I just wanted to suggest um like in-person listening sessions or workshops uh things that can support parents um who may be like uh struggling with um dealing with mental health and also with um social media dealing with social media um I also want to bring up the that the liberated ethnic studies like just to kind of point out the some of the hypocrisies around people saying it's divisive I mean it's really only under attack
197because of its inclusion of Palestine um we can see like the suppression of of Palestine and many different facets of our you know community and and there's nothing divisive about teaching you know the history um and so um liberated ethnic studies is about liberating people and so Li ethnic studies is not just about teaching anti-discrimination that's not the point the point is to liberate colonized communities um and to help them process like generational trauma of colonial racism Colonial oppression it's empowering and it helps you fight dehumanization so um for the district to really serve our Arab and Muslim communities we really have to see them as um what they what a lot of us are think thank you thank you Miss har for your comments and if you could email us if you didn't get
198to finish your comments that would be great now we're moving on to the last um speaker online Camille Santana cam please unmute yourself if you can oh dear sorry about that my name is Camille I'm a mother of two kids and I'm tene College faculty my oldest kid attends Thousand Oaks Elementary I'm here to ask you to protect liberated ethnic studies protect teachers who teach Palestine and protect Arab and Muslim Students I am proud and feel supported as a parent that my daughter's teacher talks about Palestine in her classroom it matters to her and our family it models for my daughter that her teacher is brave and speaking up for justice I want her to see Brave teachers students employees and brave leadership in her school and the district that can talk about Palestine truth
199is always on the side of the oppressed it is critical that K12 includes Palestine history students already learn about Jewish and Israeli history in school and also through exposure in mainstream media I graduated from UC Berkeley with a 3.86 GPA SF state with a graduate degree with a 4.0 and the first time I really learned about Palestine and understood the history was when I was 42 years old none of my classes or teachers or professors ever talked about Palestine that is intentional and systemic the education system is complicit in the silencing and censoring of Palestinian life humanity and existence us K12 Educators and leaders committed to equity have the power and responsibility to protect liberated ethnic studies that includes Palestine B USD is in one of the most progressively claiming cities in the nation and
200world does our reflect that ignorance breeds hate we know this talking about and putting light on the Palestinian struggle is about allowing truth in our classrooms it is uncomfortable to speak about truth when it demands those responsible for harm to be exposed and take accountability for harm those who are perpetuating harm and violence in Israel and here in the US are advocating to silence the Palestinian voice and experience and they are protecting their status of privilege and power that the current power structure of white supremacy affords them centering the comfort of the privilege maintains white supremacy and oppression of communities of color let the truth be spoken in our classrooms it's the only way to achieve Justice and Liberation for all people starting with Palestinians thank you for your time thank you um Santana and
201um I think those were the two hands that I saw first and with that are there any extended board comments seeing no extended board comments um I want to thank you all for coming this meeting we have uh adjourned the meeting of the brookley unified school board thank you