001you thank you Miss Barrios at this time I would like to officially call this meeting to order at 7 10 pm Inspire us can you call the role yes I can president Babbitt student director Tiara Brown student director Ian Siegel here director Mike Chang here director Jennifer schanowski here um vice president Anna vasudev placenta director Khadija Brown director Khadijah Brown are you here Mr President okay and president Laura Babbitt here okay now and then to ask for a motion to approve the agenda someone second second okay it's been moved by director vasudev seconded by director shanowsky um will you call the role uh student director Brown yes student director Siegel yes director Chang yes director shanowski yes director Brown vice president vasudev yes president Babbitt yes all right thank you so much now we will
002have our report out on closed session vice president vasudev yes the closed session meeting was called to order at 5 45 PM the board discussed agenda item 3.1 existing litigation the board discuss and provided Direction and that concludes the report from closed session thank you and thank you so much now we will start with our um public comment section and we are excited today that we have a number of students here to address us um one two three four okay and we have 30 minutes for this public comment section which means we have enough to give each speaker two minutes each and hopefully we can get through everyone and so we will begin now with um student Sage and Charlie good evening board members and superintendent Ford marthal my name is Sage bindard good good
003evening everyone my name is Charlie Morrell we are fourth grade students at Thousand Oaks Elementary we are here to talk with you tonight about our about our district and our future we would like to respectfully ask you to consider two things tonight number one we ask you to consider giving our climate literacy group more of your consideration we know you may have you have many issues to consider when running such a big District first give all of the students a great opportunity for Learning and also it's important to keep us safe however we would like you to think about our need and right to learn about climate change and the many things that we can do about stopping it we are scared we are frustrated and we want things to change number two the second
004thing we would like you to think about is giving more money next year to our climate literacy group so that they can help our teachers and staff to give us the knowledge that we need and want we know that money doesn't grow on trees but this topic is so very important to our futures please consider giving them a bit more money to this committee so so that more and more teachers will consider teaching their students about this important subject on Earth Day our school put on a skit called cool the Earth the goal of this skit was to teach our students about the effects of carbon dioxide on our atmosphere which causes global warming by doing this skit we were able to teach to students about climate change and what is happening to our Earth
005these are some of the signs we used in our skit this skit and other activities would not would not would not have happened if our teachers were not part of the climate literacy group we are happy that they are part of this group thank you for listening to us we want you to we want to leave you with this final thought we are the future the decisions you make affect us and our future please consider our request thank you thank you thank you for coming next we will hear from Fraser Matthew followed by Sarah willin um and please if I call your name line up over there so you can just go run right after the other it's an important members pull your mic up just a little oh yeah sure there you go good
006evening board members and superintendent Ford morsel my name is Fraser Matthew and I am and I attend Thousand Oaks Elementary School I'm here to talk to you about the Berkeley students needs and rights to learn about what is happening to our planet our Earth and our home in ink my class and I love our planet and we regularly talk about how much we love being in nature in fact today we're just talking about how much we love animals someone in our class said it would be so sad to go to the ocean and not see any wildlife we want and need to learn about being good citizens of the world we know that to be good citizens of the world we must protect our beautiful planet and we don't and we don't think we're doing
007such a great job of it we're not yet voters but we have we have eight years to wait but we know that we have a voice I hope you hear our voices tonight and think about supporting our teacher climate literacy group fully we want our teachers to teach us about this stuff so we can figure out a way to change things and make things better my teacher told me that our Berkeley unified logo underneath where it says Berkeley Public Schools has four important e words the words are Excellence Equity engagement and enrichment I would like you to consider adding one more important e word to the logo and that is environmentalism like like this I hope you can all see this where we have added that most important e word thank you for considering this
008and for making environmental awareness more of your priority thank you board and superintendent superintendent for your time tonight thank you Sarah Willen are you here oh you spoke already with your Indulgence Sarah Weiland could not be here and we were asking if these students could say her part is that acceptable or no she would have to be here to seed her time to them but we appreciate you coming and your willingness and you could always email us your her comments thank you thank you and then we need to now we have amaris Soul Tour I'm just going to say the first team is that okay okay no problem is there is Kaylee here all right Kaylee and then Kunia Junior okay thank you Julia if you could get on Deck so you can start right
009away after her that would be much appreciated we are receiving that thank you for being here all right um good evening everyone my name is Kaylee and I go to school at Longfellow um I'm here to talk about uh vegan options at lunch right now um every day there's a vegetarian option given which we're very appreciated of but for people like me who are vegan I have to pack my own lunch every day which can like take time out of my morning when I have to get to school on time but also in the breakfast as of right now um once a week a vegan person could have a cereal with water or an apple every day and I think that it's very important to have a breakfast to keep you energized throughout the day
010for your classes and um yeah honestly that's all I had to say thank you thank you so much um hello my name is Junior Martins and I am a seventh grader at Longfellow Middle School um I'm here to talk about uh General neutral bathrooms because I think it is a very important topic um me personally I identify as non-binary and um I do not feel comfortable using the bathrooms at school because I don't feel safe being in them and the only General neutral bathrooms that all available to students the only one is in the office um so it's kind of like you need to ask the person at the office if you can use it which is really sad and I really think it's important to make students who identify as non-binary or trans to
011let them feel safe in places like school so they don't have to wait till they get home or they don't have to ask even more stuff yeah I understood thank you so much JC Cooper my name is Jace trooper I also attend Longfellow Middle School I'm an eighth grader and I also identify as transgender or non-binary and I'm also here to Advocate about gender neutral spaces as Junior mentioned there is only one gender-neutral bathroom on campus which is in the office building that's very inaccessible and is oftentimes locked or used to only staff only because of people abusing that privilege of having that bathroom according to a 2021 study by GS glsen 45 of lgbtq and non-binary students avoid using gender-saturated bathrooms at school because they feel uncomfortable or unsafe I personally have also experienced
012this a feeling of feeling unsafe at school been using gendered spaces including our locker rooms and experiencing even discrimination with inside the locker rooms where people are just outright rude and transphobic another study found that youth who experienced bathroom discrimination were one and a half times more likely to attempt suicide and with the increasing attacks on trans people in this country we don't need any more stress us trans youth who are already facing serious laws and bills that are directly attacking us and our families and those who we care about thank you for your time thank you now we will hear from our Lamar L followed by Martha Kane followed by Miss Betty followed by Lindsey novelt thank you a good evening uh board and superintendent my name is Romel Lamar L I've been teaching
013mathematics at Berkeley Technology Academy for about 17 years and I'm just here to uh you know support Sierra as well as um to speak a little bit about the institutional memory of Berkeley technology academy uh to be real brief it's succinct I would just like to speak to um the fact that when we were funded at a capacity to serve 150 students we were able to have 10 teachers when we had 10 teachers we was able to provide an A through G pathway we was able to provide different Academy you know learning academies because it's Berkeley Technology Academy and we was also able to provide the CTE pathway I'm proud to say that I was working under the administration that actually did you know do the um design work for 11.7 on your agenda tonight
014and yes I'm just here to advocate for our students uh appreciate the work you're doing and I could say a lot more I just look forward to having more discussions thank you good evening board members superintendent Ford marthel associate superintendent who can Dyke and staff and everyone present here tonight my name is Martha Kane I'm a retired Longfellow teacher and I'm here tonight to urge busd leadership to increase funding and support for climate literacy education during the 2023-2024 school year later this evening the board will hear a 10-minute presentation about the very exciting progress that's occurred this past year now when the board passed the climate literacy resolution back in November of 2021 they decided to allocate 65 000 for 2022 2023 subsequently that amount was reduced to forty four thousand but despite the reduced
015funding the climate literacy working group used what was available worked with associate superintendent hug and Dyke who's been fantastic invested a lot of their own Sweat Equity and pulled off some pretty incredible events that you're going to hear about in tonight's presentation but here's the truth support and funding for climate literacy needs to be significantly increased and included and to include dedicated Personnel in order to build upon this year's successes in mid-march the climate literacy working group sent a letter to the superintendent's budget advisory committee with a proposed budget and job descriptions so I'm here to urge busd leadership to fund this proposal and I truly believe that if you do that support and funding will position busd to become a leader in climate literacy education thank you very much thank you good evening board
016members I'm going to try to talk fast last week was too emotional I didn't get to the point so today I'm going to try to get to the point in 1976 rise was funded founded by Berkeley High youth seeking educational Equity it's been a hundred percent funded by the city of Berkeley years ago I was part of Latinos unidos which merged with pcad to form United in action and we fought for the 2020 initiative that was looking for educational Equity still to this day have received no funding we pretty much serve the African-American Community the latinx community the resource Community the newcomers the ELD Community we are 100 20. but no funding I've written many grants to try to subsidize the inclusion grants the chancellors grants tons of them the city has told us for
017years we need to start diversifying the first place to diversify would be from the school district that receives 100 of our work efforts our program is not sustainable my my staff is below salary we have waiting lists of people trying to come in it's just not sustainable the rfps for the city contract four-year contracts are coming up this fall usually takes me two and a half months to write those I give up my entire winter break to write those contracts the city like I said is asking us to diversify so we've made the hard decision that if the school district chooses at this point not to invest anything into us we're asking for 234 000 and that 234 000 could bring on two more case managers could give us sustainable salaries and take on 92
018more kids we are pretty much the only program at Berkeley High School that will take on IP kids and 504 kids so we have made the painful decision our contract ends in June 20 um June 2024 that if the school district doesn't fund us that we will close our programs down thank you uh following Lindsay novelt we will hear from forest bori and Erica England hi my name is Lindsey novelt and I'm speaking as a parent Community member and as part of a group of educational Partners called reading for Berkeley reading for Berkeley is working hard to build Bridges between parents Educators community members and our schools we recognize that information can be a powerful connector too many of our families don't know what to expect in terms of their child's progress in school or
019how to work with the educational system common concerns are how do you know if your student is on track with reading how do you know if your student is getting what they need what should intervention look like and how do you know if your student is improving recently reading for Berkeley created a guide to help families navigate the path to reading success and the result is a comprehensive 20 Page not one toolkit that teaches families about key educational rights and what to ask to make sure their kid is on track for grade level reading we believe that many families can benefit from a single resource that endorses working together with schools to help all kids learn how to read early reading help is essential EAB found that 75 percent of students who are behind in
020Reading in third grade never catch up compounding the issue sometimes schools don't tell families soon enough that their child may be having trouble with reading some families might only find out that their child is struggling after they've Fallen far behind our school system under this great leadership is reviewing the way it's teaching how kids how to read and it's making changes to help Educators follow evidence-based practices we hope that this resource helps strengthen the partnership between families and schools as we continue to work together thank you thank you hi thank you my name is Forrest fourie I'm a seventh grade world history teacher at Longfellow Middle School today I'm here more so as a faculty The Faculty advisor for the green Tigers you heard from three of our green tigers and I really want to
021just advocate for the same things as them also I'm a member of the GSA faculty advisor on campus so I definitely want to get behind the the vegan food options and the non-gen the non-binary changing rooms and restrooms on campus and I'm also here to speak up for so our school's going under a lot of renovations and it's been a really undemocratic process I cannot recall anybody ever coming onto our campus and talking to staff and students about what we actually want to see changed on our campus so uh I'm gonna just stick to one issue though because it's the one I feel most passionate about and I would I really don't want to see an artificial turf field at our school so they're bad for the environment in a decade or two it will
022become a massive heap of trash uh they pollute there's a lot of studies that show that it's it possibly leads to different types of cancer um there it's a decision that's nearly impossible to reverse it leads to more injuries uh it create some one concern is that uh the get the grass can get too wet um but we actually have a bigger problem with heat and artificial turf will create like a heat island and Berkeley really needs to be a leader for the future and an environmental policy uh not just for our community but far beyond that so I urge you I um to please look at studies that are not from people selling artificial turf and I brought two copies here I have studies from Yale different Health agencies journals periodicals from all from
023especially California our community and also the nation um thank you very much for your time thank you good evening my name is Erica England I'm a fourth grade teacher at Sylvia Mendez I've been working at Sylvia Mendez for nine years and I've been teaching for 20 years I've taught at several schools in Berkeley Oakland and New Mexico and I've worked with lots of kids in lots of different situations lots of building configurations and I'm here today to express my concerns about the proposed plan for our School site during the school's upcoming modernization first of all I want to say how grateful I am for all the work the district is putting into trying to improve the building and our campus I really we notice that we appreciate it um and of course there'll be sacrifices
024made during the construction but the current plan that's being presented for what we're going to do during the construction is just not viable and I want to highlight some of our biggest concerns one there'll be a dire lack of outdoor space almost all of our current yard will be covered in Portables where will the kids have recess where will we do PE um if we have such limited outdoor space we're going to see big negative impacts on student behavior on Social Development on physical development on learning second big concern is there's not enough indoor space in the plan to meet our student needs so they're without a cafeteria kids will be eating inside the classrooms if the the plant currently has no science room no Library no Gathering space there's very little space for offices
025and Alternative Learning environments some of those spaces require confidentiality there's no indoor space for PE in the case of rain or smoke so my third concern about the current plan is that we're going to be right next to an active construction site um we're talking noise dust pollutants construction materials all over the place traffic and hopefully not by even possibly construction accidents we just can't put students close to that level of a construction site for years um and I also want to say the timeline is disingenuous it's going to take longer than a year or two it's going to take a long time for the two phases of this so I urge you to look for other options please take a look at the plan to see if we can get something that works better
026for our students so we can complete our mission thank you thank you now we will move to our online public commenters we have three Alicia Thompson followed by David Schroeder we will receive you now and they show you man I'm mute good evening to you all I would like to discuss my school program Berkeley independent studies at the effect the effects of the lack of funding we endure you say students are our priority if that were really true all schools and programs in the district would receive proper funding alas this is not the case Berkeley independent studies is a program that provides additional educational support for students K-12 yet due to underfunding we cannot fully operate this program to its full extent as a student I am disappointed and dissatisfied with this Berkeley independent studies
027provides just as much educational support as any other program you also say the Mission Vision values and goals of Berkeley unified are encapsulated in the four East Excellence Equity engagement enrichment equity in the in Access and resource allocation and educational outcomes our wishes were also true in this case due to do also to our lack of funding is our lack of resources students will come to Berkeley independent study for a multitude of reasons including bullying and other mental health issues we only have one academic counselor between bis and BTN that is the equivalent of having one or two academic counselors for one full K-12 school this is Injustice to our students and their families along with our staff also and the fact there is limited limited to zero Mental Health Resources doing due to our
028lack of funding it's despicable we are still students here no matter if we spend our time actually learning rather than rushing from class to class we are tired of constantly begging for more financial support we are demanding it because we are people too you cannot treat us as if we are not in this District thank you thank you Mr Schroeder followed by Robert Collier we were receiving Mr Schroeder thank you board colleagues and Community let's celebrate the generations of BTA and bis students who are just on kpfa the garden program played a transformative role in their lives as it has in mind as a high school teacher at bis but the garden is not enough for my already depressed student who just lost a loved one prematurely we must better serve our sites disproportionate concentration
029of students with mental health challenges students deserve funding for a therapist another counselor so students can all access academic counseling a cook not minimum wage so students can have hot meals no more puddle in central campus interrupting connectivity for North Campus a replacement of the Portables please be sure our campus nurtures students not the fungus and the Portables which recently left my math classes without our own room thank you for your consideration I see my time to whoever's next thank you Mr Collier we will receive you now yeah thanks very much I'm Rob Collier I'm the father of a seventh grader at Longfield middle school and I'm here to speak tonight about the reparations task force I support the concept of reparations to address racial disparities in achievement levels however with all due respect the
030way the superintendent and board presidents have gone about this has been deeply counterproductive from the beginning there's been a serious lack of transparency the task force was created with no formal board discussion it was never on the board agenda there was no public notice there was no formal public comment there was no vote by the board now it turns out that the membership of the task force is a secret and its meetings are closed to the public in all my years of being active on busd issues I've never seen anything like this and to hear the excuse that because it wasn't voted on the by the board because it was done in secret therefore the brown act doesn't apply therefore you can avoid any further transparency that's just mind-boggling lots of parents I'm hearing from
031are Disturbed precisely because we as a community need the reparations initiative to to be dealt with successfully it needs to gain broad public acceptance if you want funding you're going to need a ballot measure and you'll need other two-thirds or 50 55 percent depending depending on how it goes on the ballot either those will not be easy even in Berkeley so for starter there's two types of sunshine uh that you'll need to regain I'm not sure what happened to your um sound Mr Collier no can you oh can you not hear me uh give me one second let me see if I can mute you on my computer and put my mic to it can you speak now yeah where did you lose me where am I the ballot manager yeah so anyways you'll you'll
032need either two thirds or 55 depending on how it goes on the ballot and that's not going to be easy even in Berkeley so two types of transparency I respectfully suggest first of all legal Sunshine get this lawyered this topic is a legal Minefield you need the district's attorneys to do a proper review of The District's options precedence and the parameters for Action number two public Sunshine make the task force public do what you haven't done which is Port put the topic on the board agenda like any other important topic make it a regular discussion item with a regular staff report regular public comment in regular report discussions transparency creates a healthy process that leads to public support the lack of transparency so much positive time please do this the right way thank you thank
033you we appreciate it all of you who came out this evening to speak with us for public comment that does conclude our public comment period um at this time I'm wondering if we need to take a recess so that they may fix the system do we need a recess president baby I moved for recess okay all in favor aye aye aye all right we will adjourn um as soon as we can thank you so much I mean not adjourn I'm back thank you I really all want to know um oh yeah excuse me yeah um testing one two three [Music] thank you yeah that's right did you see pictures I don't know experience foreign [Music] foreign all right thank you everyone for allowing us that brief recess we are back up and running so I
034will now move towards committee comments is there anyone here for committee comment we will receive you now all right thank you um my name is taliba Martin I'm here representing the parent advisory committee and students labeled as prioritized which includes those eligible for free and reduced lunch our English language Learners and our foster youth the purpose of tonight's statement is to give an update on the work of the committee our last pack meeting occurred on April 27th and included a presentation by director Matt Espinosa and lcat budget update by director Lisa estupin and continued work on the lcap recommendations draft which was completed yesterday thank God and sent to the board uh director Espinoza shared his vision of the district's equity and engagement structure including the goal to have Opie Staffing at all levels from
035pre-k through high school and the recent hiring of a supervisor to give structure and support to the site leaders the lcap budget update was provided by director stupid highlighting the areas where spending was different than originally allocated and projected changes for the upcoming year the bulk of the meeting was spent reviewing the draft lcap recommendations the comments contained within the document are the results of weeks of self-driven investigation and inquiry by three subcommittees who met bi-weekly over 10 plus weeks and worked to build a coherent list of recommendations suggested specific actions and questions comments it also includes the work of the district TSA who worked tirelessly and well above the allotted 0.1 FTE for the role while in the past a 0.8 FTE TSA was responsible for the lcap this is currently the sole responsibility
036of a 0.1 FTE of a director and a limited time consultant these four to five hours paid time allotted weekly are not adequate to support the lcap impact needs because next year is the start of a new cycle we recommend taking the time to go back to basics audit current program efficacy and impact and streamline our actions to directly improve the ability to reach our goals and measure them precisely we see the expanded potential to reach our lcap goals in the following three bright spots the move towards a data informed culture the launch of edu climber is a significant step towards using a single system to collect and maintain data we support the continued investment and Improvement of this system and the Brea Department especially as it pertains to informing instructional improvements focus on organizational
037Clarity the pack appreciates the focus on building a sustainable infrastructure that reduces The Strain on Educators increasing efficiency and efficacy expansion of the office of equity achievement and belonging the creation of a district office of family engagement and Equity serves as an anchor for the OPI department and the school sites the supervisor role was recently filled and is providing essential support to staff creating cohesive structure across sites along with metrics to gauge the effects the effectiveness of the interventions we see some work still needs to be done in these three areas shift measurement to data that is specific to the program action create a fully funded coherent strategic plan increase engagement between families and learning while the ultimate goal of the lcap is to provide a set of recommendations to the district regarding the lcap
038the process to achieve these recommendations is as important as the document itself at its best the process allows all parent members the opportunity to be heard and provide meaningful feedback as well as the chance to become educated leaders in their school community despite initially low turnout at the first several meetings this year's Pac was able to achieve a collaborative and engaging environment through use of personal phone calls texts and emails to members encouraging meeting attendance and participation templates to assist members in engaging their school sites creation of subcommittees which met bi-weekly over four to five sessions in addition to the monthly or bi-monthly General meetings to create small groups for more personal connection expand learning opportunities and to hold space for different types of communication Styles this helped avoid pitfalls of capturing only the most
039experienced and vocal voices creating conflict or lack of Engagement in the group the recommendations produced this year are the result of what appeared to be a positive welcoming and inclusive environment created with intention thank you to all of these parents many who balance this work with service on their School site council's PTA and other District committees challenges to the pack work continue to include sufficient resources and time for the superintendent or designee to properly educate stakeholders on the relevant issues related to the lcap and for the relevant data to be updated in time for review we look forward to the district's response to the recommendations they are the result of a labor of love for our children they are presented to you with the belief that the Berkeley Community has the capacity to create a
040quality education for all children if we stay focused and work together thank you thank you and thank you so much to you and the parent advisory committee for your service this year are there any other committees here or online I don't see any hand raids online I will move to Union comments is there anyone here for Union comments okay uh well then that takes us to board member and superintendent comments would anyone like to go first board board members all right lead the way student director singer hi good evening um I'd like to begin just by thanking all the public speakers that came out specifically students um it's always amazing to see students and today we got a great example of just the breadth of student activism within Berkeley it was amazing to see students
041of all ages engaging and advocating for the educational Journeys as someone that's going to graduate in a few months I'm constantly thinking about the state that I'm in I'm leaving Berkeley Berkeley in and who will take over my grades work and advocacy and I'm glad that I'm seeing the future of Berkeley advocacy here today so I know that I'm leaving it in very good hands um a quick update on things at BHS we recently had our student elections and I'm glad to announce that filling my position for the 2023 to 2024 school year will be Caitlin Liao Caitlin has had a wealth of experiences in leadership in Berkeley and is well versed in many of our issues I'm really comp confident in her ability to take over and I look forward to introducing her to
042this position yes I look forward to our discussion tonight and thank you excellent excellent come on jump in board members director shanaski sure um I've been busy looking around at various things happening within the district so I was really excited to attend the Berkeley High School climate showcase where students presented speeches on some really great ideas ranging from Green jobs to permaculture class and divestment of our teacher retirement funds and I was really impressed by the um just how thorough the presentations were and what practical ideas were presented that we could actually really Implement so I was I was thrilled to be there I also got to join the superintendent on a tour of Willard Middle School and I was just so impressed really I think the most impressive part was being in the classrooms
043and seeing the engagement between the students and the teachers in those rooms the growing leaders program just blew me away uh I don't have knife skills like those students do I I was so impressed um and I also had the pleasure I think Betty's gone of spending a couple hours with the rise uh staff this week and the work that they do is so incredible and I really hope that we will support that as we think about how to integrate the work of the latinx resolution and the black lives matter resolution I think that the Rise program really shows us how that can be done in a sustained really impactful way couple more things um I also um um uh one of the board members who attends the p o meetings and I was really
044thrilled to join one of the community listening sessions on beset as well as the community opening of our Berkeley High theater and I bring that up with bsep because bset funds go into many of those programs and so I hope the community knows about Monday's listening session Community listening session uh for bsep will take place here in the boardroom at 5 30 on Monday and we really need the community to come in and see all the incredible work that bsep allows us to do and find ways to support the renewal next year and finally I want to announce that I have office hours at Casa Latina next Thursday from 3 to 4 30 I have to cut them a little short for my kids dentist appointments but I'll be there until 4 30. so please
045come join me um and share your ideas your thoughts your comments your concerns um yeah thank you so much thank you Dr Chang thank you so much um uh thanks for all the young persons who came out and spoke that's that's so encouraging to hear all your voices um of course every month we have um different types of important Heritage and awareness months and Affinity months um for the District of course this this is an important month with regard to the budget so I encourage everybody to come on out to public comment and and give your perspective and tell us why your program or service needs to be funded I want to do a shout out um to the Asian American heritage month which is May there's going to be an event on May 19th
046here actually from 5 to 7 30. our superintendent will be there our social superintendent a number of our students I will be there we have folks from the community as well the theme of it is um uh activism and the Asian American Community a long time friend of mine Harvey dong will be there who recently he and his spouse who were part of the third world Liberation Front of UC Berkeley part of our history here they are closing their long time many decades community-based independent bookstore Eastwind books which has been so critical as a cultural center and space for speaking about ethnic studies and our very diverse histories here in the United States and in Berkeley it's also a Jewish American History Month these are months by proclamation that's an important Community here in Berkeley
047in April it was Arab American month it's also very relevant to the conversations today and our budget review it's Mental Health Awareness Month um you know I certainly support the funding of our Mental Health Services and um and I am empathetic to the many comments from members of the public and staff about hiring of additional counselors It's also again very relevant to the comments that students made today the awareness that they are helping to raise up it is uh on May 17th it's International Day against homophobia transphobia and biphobia which happens to be a day that on the 17th was when the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the international classification of diseases hard to believe that that was actually classified as such but there are still some places where that is a considered a
048medical disease I'm not here though and finally it's so relevant to me as a middle-aged person it's older Americans month so I don't know what the benefits of that are but um at least I'm being recognized here as your Elder on the sport so thanks so much please come on out and come to our board is a very important month for for budgets thank you so much thank you student director Brown hi I'm really cold right now so I'm really sorry but I want to say thank you to all the speakers that came and spoke today especially the students it's great to see that the leadership is growing and how determined our students are going to be even after I'm leave I'm happy that it's going to leave like everyone's just leadership just all growing
049in determination I really love to hear it um at Bradley technology the main concern happening right now is getting ready for next year the BTA leadership has been working really hard to get more staff as a main concern I also getting elected class and just more funding for next year like expanding our lunch and our nurses um also congratulations to all the seniors who chose their college for next fall and crafts to the seniors who going to a different route I know our future is going to be bright either way so congratulations for that and that's all I have to say thank you all right director Brown good evening everyone um first as my board colleagues did I'd like to thank everyone who spoke tonight in regards to climate change vegan options during lunch gender
050neutral a restroom spending for our climate literacy resolution rise reading for Berkeley as well as the construction Renovations uh and the safety of our environment as well as those who spoke in regards to academic counseling for BTA and the pat comments um all of your comments this evening were not set in vain and we appreciate the time that you took away from your families or your life to come and speak to us in advocacy for the betterment of our schools and especially to our young people I feel like this is the tonight is the most comments that we've received from young people and it really warms my heart to see our younger generation taking on that role of advocacy and your voices do matter so thank you so much for speaking to us as my
051board colleague said there's so much to celebrate this month but I'd like to identify uh first a Jewish American heritage month and um uh Asian American and Asian Pacific Islander heritage month and I like to call your attention to two people who I think are important for you to know the first is Judah Judah Moniz who was the first uh North American college instructor of Hebrew language in the United States and was an instructor at Harvard uh University well it was then called Harvard College and I'd like to also bring your attention uh to Alice Fong Yu who was the first a chinese-american to teach in a public school and she taught right across the bay and has been a pro or was a prominent leader in San Francisco and so I'd like to bring
052those two Educators into the space today and celebrate them as we celebrate both aapi heritage month and Jewish American Heritage Month director Chang brought your attention to events that are happening throughout our school district but I also want to bring your attention to events that are happening Beyond and connect all of those who may not be familiar with jcrc which is the Jewish community relations Council who also be putting on events in regards in support of Jewish American Heritage Month additionally Emma had the phenomenal opportunity this weekend to participate uh in the Berkeley Public Schools fund Community block party and had the joy of being a MC for that event along with President Babbitt it was a phenomenal event where we showcased so many of our incredible young people within our district and celebrated our
053Educators as well as our young people and our families in our district and so if you didn't come to the block party I'm sorry you missed out on a treat however please use this as an encouragement to attend as encouragement to attend the block party next year and a huge thank you to the executive director of Berkeley Public Schools friend Aaron Rhodes as well as her team of all women for their governing board so thank you for that work finally thank you uh director shanovsky for bringing our attention to rise and I am happy to announce that my meeting with them is tomorrow so I'm excited to learn more and also excited to give advocacy on behalf of rise to our city to ensure that the funding continues for that exceptional program in our district
054finally um one of my one of my board committees is the policy committee and I'd like to bring your attention to two policies uh that will be coming forward to you all this evening and are listed as our information item the first is our public art policy and the second is our questioning and apprehension policy and I'd like to publicly thank um the work of the policy committee including our staff for uh your thoughtfulness on these two policies and for um your eye and your view that is always a student's first approach so thank you so much and those conclude my comments thank you thank you vice president hi everyone I just also want to appreciate our students for coming out tonight and to discuss all the different very important topics that you discussed with
055us I also wanted to say um happy API heritage month and happy bike month I think I'm the first director to mention that may is bike month it's one of my favorite months of the year and so on May 18th 10 of our campuses will be celebrating bike to school day thrilled about that that's a really great number for us go Berkeley and as we know the transportation sector is the leading sector contributing to greenhouse gas emissions so sustainable Transportation plays an important role in helping us become a more climate resilient Community I hope that my board colleagues fellow students District staff will support this important event in our district and support Alameda County safe routes to school so look forward to seeing everyone in the bike lane on that day and if anyone needs
056a refresher on how to ride reach out to me happy to ride with you I also want to share that I was honored to attend Willard Asian and Pacific Islander club's night market last week where we celebrated the beautiful diversity of our aapi community at Willard thank you to the students families and Educators for hosting this wonderful event I enjoyed Filipino dancing the lion dancers all the different booths celebrating the full diversity of our aapi community so I wanted to give a big shout out to the apic club for hosting that event and um I also really want to thank our long fellow students that came to talk about the gender neutral bathrooms and our increase increased need to do better to support our non-binary and trans students I will follow up with our superintendent
057and director of facilities to learn more about how we can create more welcoming spaces for our trans and non-binary students I just want you to know that I see you I hear you and we can do better to ensure that all our students feel a sense of belonging in our schools finally I'm really looking forward to our board discussion tonight there's a presentation on special education and so I hope that people will pay close attention to that because neurodiversity is also incredibly important thank you president we don't traditionally do this but if I may I forgot one very important thing that everyone should be aware of that we celebrate in the month of May yesterday was National Teachers Appreciation day and we did not announce it and so I just want to take this opportunity
058to thank all of our teachers in Berkeley Unified School District for the work that they have done personal thanks to one of my teachers who's sitting on the front row Miss Kane for for what you instilled in me and what you continue to instill in our communities and I just want to leave you with this funny uh teacher student conversation so student walks up to a teacher and says can I do anything to change my grade and the student says to the teacher or the teacher says to the student it's May and so the student replies oh I'm sorry may I do anything to change my grade so to all of our Educators out there it is May however there's more work that needs to be done as we hurry to the end of the
059school year so thank you for the work that you've done and the work that you will continue to do thank you thank you and thank you so much uh I Echo all of my board colleagues comments and I'll just make two brief announcements and give you an update on the Committees that I've been a part of since our last Gathering um this Saturday uh Tommy Smith is having his annual track and field at the UC Berkeley Edwards Stadium please come out and celebrate and bring your kids also this Saturday is a peace walk starting at noon and it's starting at San Pablo Park and then they're walking from San Pablo Park to Civic Center Park for a peace rally and I am a one of the members who was scheduled to attend the PAC meeting
060and I want to thank the parent advisory committee as Ms taliba told us for all of their hard work with subcommittees on top of their actual um meetings it is greatly appreciated and I want to encourage all of our colleagues to really read their comments and look forward to the timeline on when the superintendent will respond to the parent advisory committee comments and hope that we will see their recommendations reflected in our budgeting and priorities I'm also a part of the two by two committee and we had a very interesting conversation on April 28th in which we learned more about the graffitis particularly at Oxford and the things that we need to do as a city to kind to try and mitigate the graffiti the amount of money that is actually costing uh busd to
061continually cover that graffiti um so we are trying to work with the city uh to partner in that endeavor the Milvia street parking lot we talked about we're still continuing those conversations and want to give a huge appreciation to the facilities department for the alternate plan that they are putting forward it looks really exciting um we're going to really take it to the next level with classrooms and more CTE Pathways and more offices and still get the tennis courts done so we are definitely on the right uh track in in my opinion with the Milvia Street new project let's say and then we also had an update on the 2020 Vision which is going to be renamed to yep youth Equity partnership so maybe we'll get a cool shout out like Berkeley yep I don't
062know that wasn't as funny as your joke I guess but anyway Berkeley yep and um we will get a presentation on how they are really building their foundational steps so that it's more integrated in what we're doing um as Betty Miss Betty talked about with the 2020 Vision fully funding rise how do we really take what the city is doing with what we are doing in bosd and really integrate and make sure that we are um moving in the same direction of the four e's which I heard a lot tonight so it's working superintendent you're getting it out there the four e's are working and um so grateful to see that alignment uh really coming forth I also got to attend the climate Equity uh fairs and hear our students and my goodness they were
063amazing one of the students she was giving her presentation and at first she was looking around the whole room right I'm like oh this is so good the next thing I know she's just looking at me and then I'm like oh is she looking at me for encouragement then she's looking at me again I'm like oh no she knows who I am looking at me because she really wants us to implement this in vosd so we went to support our students and we definitely left with a mission and a charge as director shanowsky reported out and I just really want to appreciate their work appreciate the research that they did appreciate their teachers for their amazing leadership and support of the students and of course appreciate also Martha Kane who while she wasn't my teacher
064she did teach me about the green new deal and she has been very important and instrumental in my own education and I'm glad that we've been able to bring this forth as a community initiative through our climate literacy resolution which we will hear about tonight so we will move now to our superintendent's comments good evening everyone it is so hard going last because I you know I have my cue cards I can't say that she said that he said that they said everything that I was going to say I have no jokes for you um um but I will give you a little bit more detail about some of the things that our directors have spoken about so one I do want to acknowledge that it was national teacher appreciation day but if you did
065not give your teacher all the love don't worry because next week is actually um teacher appreciation week so you have an entire week next week May 8th through May 12th but also I want to recognize our school leaders because Monday was National School principal day and if you did not shower them with love you got time we love on our folks every day because we know that our leaders and our Educators do amazing things not just one day of the year or one week but every single day so if you have not had the time to say thank you to our Educators take the time tomorrow and say it and let them know that I told you that it was a Monday National principles day and then next week national teacher not National but Teacher
066Appreciation Week um you heard that this month we are celebrating um Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month and Jewish American heritage month I want to make sure you all know that you've received an email and on our website we have a ton of different resources of ways that we can uplift celebrate and acknowledge the history and the heritage of both of these very important cultural groups including intersectionality and just a lot more so if you have not dug into those resources please make sure that you check your email or go to our busd website we have a lot of information there that we think there's going to be some great resources for you as you work with your students at home and we have a lot that we've already shared with our Educators to
067do with our students during this month but every single day of every single month we celebrate and uplift the diversity of busd um with that I think director Chang mentioned to you that we have an aapi activism event coming up is actually going to be on Friday May 19th in this room from 5 to 7 30. what he didn't say you didn't say it all is that uh a part of that evening is not only um are we going to have crafts are we going to have food from a restaurant games a Hulu performance and a panel that's going to just really talk to you about Asian American Heritage but also Asian American activism we will also have child care available and so if you are interested in coming or if you were thinking about
068it know that you are welcome and your babies are welcome too but we are asking folks who need child care to please sign up on our district website um we are holding as director shanoski shared our second be sep Community conversation on Monday May 8th from 5 30 to 7. again that will be here in the boardroom we really are encouraging folks to to tell folks about it and bring a friend it's an excellent opportunity for you to hear about all the amazing things that we have been able to do as a district with our b-sep funds and how we have really provided um all of our babies with so many things programs people and resources that other districts really struggle to do because of this community support and Community engagement and so you will
069hear about our small class sizes our student support efforts our instructional technology our vapa program our libraries and so much more and you will also have an opportunity to give some feedback and input around the various buckets of the B sub that we're funding and give us some of your best thinking and ideas so it's an opportunity to hear and learn but also an opportunity for you to share in your feedback as well I got one that none of them had okay so last night was the the Lakers versus the Warriors I was torn because I'm from L.A but I live in the bay so I didn't want to go so I went to the busd Middle School Battle of the books was you there were you there oh okay it was um let me
070just tell you see you know our board members and our everybody's like oh the I get to see the kids at bust on a regular basis and so I'm not wild anymore because the amazing is is regular what I've never seen is a battle of books so what they do is they're in teams it's the three middle schools you know about this too it's Willard is Longfellow right and it's king and they got cool shirts and this is intense right this was the eighth annual apparently and they read like 18 plus books and then they get up there and they have to answer these questions about these books that's I can't even read like two right and they answer these is so intense it is so fun it's so amazing and it was a battle
071but it was so much about community and celebration and to see the different um groups come out and celebrate each other was amazing the winners got medals they had their shirts that the students made and so if you've never seen it or heard of a battle of the books it's here in busd and we'll make sure to invite you um next year but there y'all don't know about that did you um oh you know about that okay so that's the end of my comments but I just want to celebrate there's so many amazing you've heard about a lot of amazing things that are happening in our district um every day on the weekends and our amazing partners and so continue to thank all of you for being the community that we have that allows us
072to do so many great things for our students and with that I'm going to pass it back to our president thank you all right we will move to our first discussion oh no I'm we won't we will approve the consent calendar can I have a motion to approve the consent calendar I'm up to approve the consent calendar okay it's been moved by director Brown seconded by director Chang Miss Barrios can you call the roll yes I can student director Brown yes student director Siegel yes director Chang yes director schanowski yes director Brown yes and vice president vasudev yes president yes okay consent calendar passes unanimously now we will move towards our first discussion item which is the climate literacy update I welcome those presenting to the podium Aaron is online associate superintendent hugandyke you also
073have the clicker and if you want me to change I can I can change slides for you as well I might need your help on the video sure uh Miss Bauer if you would like to um unmute and do your camera if you like at this time hi everyone I'm here I have kovid which is why I'm not with you right now but I am here oh that was you in the count no I'm just kidding yes all right uh good evening board members student delegate superintendent uh members of our community I'm Jill hogandyke the associate superintendent and I am joined tonight by two of our fabulous teachers Aaron Bauer who is and you move your mic closer I am joined this evening um by two of our fabulous teachers Aaron Fowler who is with
074us on video who's at Berkeley High School and Ellen McClure who's with us today um teacher at Willard um I also do want to acknowledge Martha Kane who gave public comment earlier but she really has been an instrumental part of our steering committee and committee work and has really provided a lot of additional capacity with Sweat Equity so um there are also many other teachers who have worked to launch um this effort this year and I also want to acknowledge our young climate activists that we heard from earlier we will also be hearing from one of our other student Advocates there's Ella suering later in this presentation our District's mission is to enable an inspired diverse student body to achieve academic excellence and make positive contributions to the world and I think that we saw
075from public comment today and what we'll be sharing this evening is that we've got a lot of students working to make positive contributions to the world in the context of the care and attention that we need to have for our climate um so I want to to start with some oh let's see looks like I may have to do that right okay next slide we'll start with some accomplishments um I'm not going to spend too much time on the next two slides because they really do comprise the bulk of our presentation today and Aaron and Ellen will be sharing this in more detail but we have a board resolution that was approved in November of 2021 and we worked this year um to launch this effort um I think this happened the week or two
076after I started in August so I had nothing to do with the launch but there were 30 folks who gathered together really on on the kickoff and from there it was a Grassroots effort um to cultivate some early adopters and eager teachers and leaders throughout the district to come together to start planning lessons around climate literacy that we could then look to share and expand with others we also want to note that we had Trey training for student leaders and two of our student leaders had the opportunity to visit Washington DC to um appeal and use their advocacy skills at a more National National level um this work has also been in conjunction with uh developing relationships with Community Partners and you can see a few of those listed here 10 strands through the San
077Mateo County Office of Education the Community Resources for Science and the Oakland teachers achieving or advancing climate action or otaka on the next slide um you can see uh highlights from our showcase so there were really two primary focus areas for the work this year one was on the development of our climate literacy lessons and the second was to host the first annual climate literacy showcase and so you heard a little bit about that earlier in our public comment and from our board members who had an opportunity to attend and will be able to see some photos and hear some highlights of that work from our teachers and those climate resiliency fairs will continue in the month of May and then on the slide also wanted to note that our Librarians have compiled a list
078of climate change reading book books for reading and those are posted on our district website so um The Learning can continue after the school year closes as we head into the summer so with that I'm going to hand it over to Aaron so I just want to share a little bit about the process we went through this year so at Bert there were really three grade spans right K through five six through eight in the high school and with teachers who volunt who didn't volunteer but teachers who had the bandwidth and were excited about being early adopters met once a month um to start thinking early in September about what climate change literacy would look like in their subject matter and their grade level and so I can speak to Berkeley High we had at
079least 30 teachers that were working on various projects throughout the year culminating in the Spring Showcase so Aaron Smith and Daniel Mulholland Bears along with many of their science colleagues put together a climate science fair and resiliency Village that was hundreds of students looking for climate Solutions and using scientific reasoning to present those projects even vapa was involved with this they had a reuse mural from the mural Club Andrea sanguine did a advanced ceramic sculpture garden with group projects around climate the multilingual program which are our ELD newcomers that what I belong to We did an interdisciplinary project and it was our first interdisciplinary project that we've ever done and that was on climate change in our students countries of origin and so Christopher hondro sochil join us and Masha Albrecht all worked together to
080allow our students to make presentations about the impacts of climate change in their countries of origin some of which are the most impacted places on Earth such as Pakistan Bangladesh the Philippines Etc and so our students were involved in both statistical reasoning and cause and effect language and you can see I can go on and on our Math teachers did a really sophisticated math project with solar panels angles and the u9 a week after the climate showcase did a teach-in mini conference on Food Systems Transportation water and climate change and that was a project involving three of the u9 hives they had a donor who also donated a vegan lunch and also supported their efforts and even CEC and the World Language Department were involved econ classes so you can see there was a huge
081breath to the project at Berkeley High that extended Beyond one grade level or one subject area and I think what's really important to understand is that rather than climate change literacy being siled as a special Pet Project or something that's separate what it did was create an anchor point for a lot of collaboration and project-based learning and interdisciplinary projects and the Showcase if you can go to the next slide I can just show some pictures here you can see our library was full all day the multilingual program had 70 students that were accompanied by the Spanish language classes from Allison Kelly's room as well as Ileana natu CEC students they all did teach-ins here um on their countries of origin but I think what's important to note is that when you go to the Showcase
082that's really just the tip of the iceberg that this was months-long preparation that teachers did and student learning that went on for weeks around information and educational pedagogy that wasn't just related to climate science but like in the case of the multilingual program was academic language we used a lot of the strategies in constructing meaning they were learning how to produce speeches for the first time one of our student teachers from the math department did her tpe on teaching these students to understand how to express statistical information correctly around carbon emissions and they designed their own charts and graphs and Christopher hondros taught them how to do academic science posters so you can see here that climate literacy is really sort of the Anchor Point but it's allowing us to do a whole lot of
083other things that are aligned with our curriculum and content standards can you just go to the next slide and then these are some more pictures of the outdoor climate science Action Fair and I think what's beautiful about this day was that uh Mr Rock had said you know Berkeley High does not really have a school-wide event that everyone can plug into academically so this was something emotional joyous and special for us because all all the small learning communities came together and any teacher that was interested found a way to plug in and I think as we build this project going forward this is going to become one of those joyous Traditions that's still steeped in academic rigor Jill did you wanna as our next slide um the video or are we gonna have Ellen talk
084first I'm sorry I think the video is next the video is not videos next so one thing I did want to say is that we also spent quite a bit of time building the capacity of our student leadership around climate advocacy and of course Ella suring is one of the co-founders of the climate literacy resolution she and 30 other climate activist students this year went through two days of community-based organizing training and so I'm going to let her speak for herself oh we can't hear her oh shoot give me a second um completely continue and then come back Miss various do you want us to continue and then we can try to come back I think Max is going to go ahead and okay and share on his end should we come back to the
085video is it ready right now problems with her computer that she's using to share it um we could potentially join with your computer if you have the link um you know what just in the interest of time we can share the video with the with the board and post on our website would that work and then we can move forward move on but we so everybody can hear from Ella we'll get that posted on the website uh Miss Barros can you pick up with um slide seven so I'm going to speak a little bit about the element change the view to Natural speaker notes there we go um if we could go to the next slide um we'll see some of the work from the elementary school so I'm a middle sorry I did that
086okay I teach in the growing leaders program at Willard Middle School but I'll speak a little bit to the elementary school so Earth week was a time um to Showcase a lot of the work happening at the elementary schools of course we got climate marches climate parades at some of the sites we heard from some students that did the cool the Earth skit and in the month of May there'll be climate resiliency science fairs and you can see some one of the students from Washington Elementary in this slide um and then if you can go to the next slide at the middle school level our big achievement this year was the first annual climate Fair bringing together all three middle schools and in our working group the teachers on the working group this really was
087our framework for our work this year a goal that we are working towards um to build lessons to build projects that could be displayed at this Fair another great part of the fair was really that it was a bridge between all the grade levels so we had a lot of Elementary School families that came out to the event to get excited about the work that they would be doing in middle school we also had Berkeley High students that were teaching the younger grades and so and then of course you know all of the um the three Middle School communities that came out and you can see in this um in this photo some of the curriculum projects that were displayed of course that was like the focal point of the climate Fair we had teachers
088from all three middle schools that brought student projects from a variety of subjects so we had art teachers that were involved we had English teachers science teachers that had projects stem um cooking and gardening so really this was a way for teachers to get involved with their subject area um and it was just a framework um to design these projects around climate literacy and if you could go to the next slide we could see just some of the activities that happened over the day the course of the day we had more than 300 people that attended and students could fill out climate passports to get excited about and try out all the activities and learn from a lot of their peers projects we had over 40 bikes that were repaired um just in time for
089bike week by safe routes to school so we also had we built a lot of Community Partners in this work so Community Resources for science came out to help and you can see that with the worm bin investigation those microscopes like I said safe routes to school Chabot Space and Science Center and the list goes on and on on transition Berkeley hosted a repair clinic so just a lot of Hands-On projects for students to get excited about the work and one of the things that really stood out to me and one of our goals was to get more teachers invested in this work and so we saw a lot of teachers that came out who didn't necessarily do a curriculum a project this year and I had one teacher actually come up to me and
090say now I see like the vision I can see myself getting involved in this next year and developing a project in my history classes knowing that I can do it at some point in the school year and then it'll be showcased at this event next year so that was really hopeful outcome of the event so we're just going to close out with a couple of next steps just want to recognize that this was was year one and in the context of that there were a lot of things that we were trying out so um the team is going to be intentional about conducting an after-action review um and a survey so what did we learn by developing climate lesson plans what was the impact that we intended to have for students and how might this
091inform our work and what's needed for the year to come we will be codifying and Publishing the lesson plan so for folks who are familiar with the cooking and gardening website we have open access to the cooking and gardening lessons there so we want to make sure that we can provide access not only for our internal teachers but as Martha alluded to in her public comment how can we be a leader and in the Bay Area in California for other districts who are interested in this work and we are working to identify site-based climate literacy leaders for next year want to knowledge that you know Ellen and and Aaron really took on huge leadership roles at the high school and the middle school and we want to make sure that we can identify that same
092level of leadership across all all grade spans and we had Inc we had participation from a lot of sites and a lot of different grade levels but want to continue to build the momentum and I think as Ellen just shared sometimes folks are not going to be the first ones to jump in the pool they're going to wait to see what happens with that first round but there was a lot of positive energy so we are anticipating growing participation and we are working to identify resources to support the ongoing work through the S back process and so we are being intentional about looking at all of those asks and how we can provide the support um for the climate literacy work and then I'll also finally just to continue to strengthen our Community Partnership so
093more to come as as this work involves and that concludes our presentation thank you so much it really gives me such a great sense of Pride to see what happened this year when we were talking about it everything that we were envisioning about how this could be very collaborative and project-based learning and really built into the curriculum and yet still steeped an academic rigor I am so appreciative of all of your work and I know that we've only spent uh 44 000 to date on this so I do want to acknowledge your labor of love because you obviously have gone above and beyond what we've spent so we really really do appreciate you um taking your heart for this topic and really expanding it to reach our children's Hearts because as we've seen tonight that
094this gets them engaged this does hit our four e's and um Miss power I must say you look great to have coven my goodness um I will open the floor now to other colleagues who want to comment director Siegel and then vice president ambassador thank you so much for your presentation um I really want to commend you on the it's really is apparent that this kind of these activities were very accessible to all students and even those that weren't able to participate um I remember many of many students wanting to engage with uh the climate events on campus during that week and people that were really actually disappointed that they weren't able to make it so I'm glad to see that this program is going to increase and I also really want to thank you
095for collaborating with students on the like on the development of this curriculum um I think this serves as a really great example of how students and staff can work together to make change and institutional change within wsd and so on that kind of same theme I'm wondering as a part of your feedback and I'm part of your surveying you could survey the students um that had the participated in the climate literacy program so that as this is fresh we can hear student engagement and student perception of the curriculum brought off the bat so that any misses or any miscommunications or so um you know the highlights or the pros and cons of the curriculum can be highlighted in any way uh and then also this is kind of a little off but I'm wondering how
096we can maybe integrate looking into possible solutions for how we conduct busd and also Berkeley and how we can improve our own like participations in climate like decreasing our carbon footprint or whatnot and you know future curriculum or whatnot thank you so much uh yes I just want to uh to thank you Miss Fowler and also miss McClure uh for your presentation today and for the great work I really um just appreciated learning at Berkeley High in particular how we're working with our students in our MLP program as uh you know someone I used to work at the World Bank in the carbon Finance unit and we know that developing countries are those that are disproportionately most impacted by the by the effects of climate change so it's great that we're bringing you know students
097that come from different countries to be able to talk about this very serious issue and how it's impacting you know disproportionately low-income people in their country so thank you for doing that and I I love the public speaking element of it too and supporting with just Literacy for that particular population I have a I know that when we adopted the resolution we heard from a lot of community members walk like Berkeley a lot of sustainable Transportation Advocates about how it was important that we were integrating our work with safe routes to school and existing curriculum in active Transportation because we know that's the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in California as well and so my question is you know having attended recently a breakfast with AC Transit and it was a breakfast that was
098dedicated on educating a lot of elected officials in the East Bay about the importance of increasing ridership because Transit is losing so much funding right now and it's in a really dire State and so they wanted to educate School Board directors City Council Members Mayors from the East Bay about the importance of partnering with AC Transit and increasing ridership right so they you know made sure their Outreach staff was there they offered to work closely with our district very excited about that but how are we working closely with safe routes to school in AC transit to talk about the importance of taking sustainable modes of transportation to school to increase in the amount of students in the student transit pass program which we talked about the previous board meeting as part of our transportation plan
099how are we you know integrating that part of the resolution with safe routes to school and also with the Transit Agency and if we're not I think that's an area for growth for the upcoming school year yeah well I can speak a little bit to our partnership most of the school sites have a partnership with safe routes to school um just at Willard we celebrate the golden sneaker contest every year and that was something that we highlighted at the climate fair so I think some of those uh Partnerships and um you know contests that get students really excited about it they it also includes not just walking biking but public transit so I think continuing to identify leaders at each school that one host that event it can be a great part of climate literacy
100and building those Partnerships so I'm glad I'm glad safe routes was able to come out to or a bit thank you along the same sort of line with integrating other things into this work and the superintendent's goal on organizational Clarity I'm wondering about the sustainability program like zero waste I believe we have a position in our maintenance department are we integrating some of the work here with that work so that it sort of seeps out of the classroom and into the things that we do every day Aaron well I can speak to the fact that the sustainability officer Sophia Peltz has been in conversations with us all year long around how to uh organizationally work together with the sustainability office um and I think this is something we're going to have to flesh out over
101the next several years um but I know for example example Jackie omania is an amazing zero waste teacher she's super passionate about it she's developed amazing curriculum in the elementary school around zero waste and I know that the green team at Berkeley High is really interested in that and then the panel discussion that the students had where they they had completely come up with their own climate solutions that was the meeting that you were at um as well as Ms Babbitt and I think that our next step is to create some sort of organizational capacity for students to meet with our sustainability officer and think about the ways in which these projects can be made more robust through working with both of these but I think that's something that we have to flesh out more
102foreign thank you so much for uh your presentation thank you for your ongoing work I just have one question about how this knowledge and this information continues when our students are not necessarily in our Care at our schools so how does this continue when they're at their homes when they're in their communities and when they leave busd because we we want all of our children to be climate literate but how does this continue when they're outside of our care well for me a big focus of climate literacy is being Solutions based and like just from my own perspective a lot of the work is about giving Stu empowering students and giving them tools that they can take um you know in their life after busd or in their their lives while they're at posd when
103they're at home um so like the climate fair I feel like there were a lot of like examples of something that you could do at home like starting your own garden repairing your own clothes you know taking public transit of our bike those types of things and so for me um it's really important that it's solution space because I want to empower students yeah Dr Chang um thank you so much I just want to thank you for your hard work on um the Outreach with students and for engaging with students um also uh at an earlier age too uh climate literacy obviously is so critical to our education here um at USC but in general as a practice but um also I really enjoyed the the um the aspect of the very Hands-On uh the
104fair et cetera um that's a great way to introduce climate literacy in a very pragmatic manner so thank you so much I just want to let you know that I really appreciate your efforts so thank you thank you um and I'd just like to to close with um that the students at Berkeley High School they really understood our sustainability plan they really knew what our goals were what and how we could um drive to to make to reach those goals for example they offered a rain catch systems because they knew that we were supposed to reduce our water by 50 by a specific year and so they were really on top of it they talked about us using vessel for our reusables and um I just want to piggyback on that because we also used
105our sample reusables at the Longfellow climate fair with the soup which was made with vegetables from our garden which was very tasty but I do want us to drive that using the reusables home from our sustainability plan as part of our goals and how we can Implement that because that is to director shanowski's point a very tangible way in which we can really take this to the next step and so I know last year there was work being done on that and so I think we need to to really pick that back up and see where we are in the in their phase out and roll out of that plan so that's all for me and I just want to again give you huge appreciations and just highlight that all of their comments about how
106we can build and how we can go and grow really does mean that we need funding and we need positions and so I'll be looking forward to seeing that come back to us thank you thank you thank you so much next we will have our update on the 23-24 budget development we have 45 minutes for this presentation go ahead and just start it now I'm just kidding I'll wait for you so good evening board members superintendent and other superintendents assistant and associate um so this will be a very brief update um shouldn't take 45 minutes um last week I presented the budget um in quite um specific details um superintendent Fort Morella myself presented the board um with our budget update this is just um updates to that presentation and it's been a week so
107it's not in a lot of detail so we can um again our outcomes um that's and our mission we're presenting our budget not only without four e's but um focusing on our full care which is the next slide and then also looking at our core values of resource allocation so this is a repeat from the last presentation so in terms of our budget update um update on budget assumptions since we last met at the next slide next slide next slide moving through very quickly all right so on this slide um the the caller has been announced for 23 24 is actually up from 8.13 it's at 8.22 percent um so the question Still Remains is this going to be fully funded by the governor and also um what is going to be in the governor's
108main revised not only about the code about the Ami block grant the Arts and Music block grant so we're waiting um for the Governor's mere revision which is going to inform our budget on um in several areas including the cola which even though like it's gone up it may not be fully funded um next slide so um an update on our territory budget proposals um again these are still draft because we're still working with our budget Partners to finalize these proposals but in looking at our tiered approach um on the next slide what we've done or what I've done I've actually added a column to align our proposals with the board priorities on board um board resolutions so um this is just using the exact same format that we had before but aligning it with
109the board priorities on board presentation board resolutions and at our next meeting we'll be presenting the recommendations um just by um board priorities I don't know if that makes sense but so this is just using the existing format and adding a column just for clarity next slide um this um on the next slide Rosa Rosalina so on this slide um we this is a summary of the survey that we did we got over 40 um 40 responses and this is just looking at the different categories that we got um got in we had instructional and we're looking at the different things that we were asked for in each of these sections so there was a request for a wellness center at the high school safety included increasing staff for safety offices and for school campus
110aides professional development Athletics other site funding Equity achievement and belonging we had about five requests for that um that category and that had to do with additional Staffing operational costs and surveys and buying um getting a survey system for that program sped had several requests as well and um that included an audiologist software Staffing to replace agency personnel and increase Staffing and spread will be presenting after me in terms of their program um there were requests also for central office staffing and operational expenses so a wide variety of asks that covered several areas on the next slide we can see um we looked at some of these requests that actually were already funded um by all priorities or they were already scored and discussed um as part of the priorities so um our appointed program
111at Longfellow there was a request from staff to increase the funding that's already been under consideration from our priorities district-wide contact tracing we've looked at that as well and we've started putting it on our list of things that needed to be funded as as mental health as well or bus drivers for operations or nurses for the district that wasn't asked but that's already included in our budget and then our assessment office um in terms of Staffing for assessment contracts we've already looked at that and scored it so while the survey was helpful some requests were actually duplicative because we're already taking care of of some of those asks and then um also um the academic summer school that came up as a concern but that's already being funded by alternative funding so this is just
112a summary of um where we are in the process we are moving this along um but um it is we're going to be working with our budget Partners to finalize us so the next section uh we did modify the Arts and Music block grant and the learning recovery we had two um two small changes on the next slide um we reallocated one of the costs that were scored against this grant we've moved it to the to the um the learning recovery block grant and this was actually approved by the board tonight so it ties exactly to the plan that was approved and then one small change um removed 150 thousand dollars from that Grant to the learning recovery block grant and um and that's on the next slide Rosalina I'm moving through sir so um
113let's look at the next steps on our net on the other slide told it was a quick update one more one more one more so we are going to be um continuing our meeting with s back um we're obviously going to be looking at costs and adjusting our budget accordingly the Arts and Music um block grant that was approved tonight um and of course I mentioned the governor's Movie Vision is going to have a significant impact um on our budget our prop 28 funds a lot of questions about that but it's to be determined pending State guidance so that concludes my very brief update and we continue to work um on our budget to kind of finalize it so any questions director Brown then director Chang as always thank you assistant superintendent Fallen speed I
114was wondering if you could uh just for a reference go back to page slide number 28 I believe um it should be the uh Arts and Music Grant block grant slide 15. oh no this one right here 28 is the one I was looking at thank you um so I still see that the literacy action plan um is on that Arts and Music instruction or Arts and Music instructional materials block grant and I remember um the direction from the dice was in regards to the ability to put that on um The Learning loss Grant with the understanding that the learning loss Grant goes a year longer than the Arts and Music one um and I was wondering if we are still able to make that shift if we thought more about the shift the rationale
115for not making it actually we did investigate it but the other Grand this not that's not unallowable use of the other Grant so we have to leave it where it is so it's not an allowable use on the learning recovery block grant so can you tell me a little a little more um because this is a literacy action plan and the learning recovery block grant is more restrictive it's um I have a link actually to the allowed uses and we discussed this with um I think at our last BLT we talked at our last budget leadership team and we tried to determine if we could actually put that on the um on the learning recovery it's not an allowed expense so um so we have left it um where it was so and these are
116restricted grants um this they are um the Arts and Music block grant is less restrictive so okay thank you sorry about that I should have reminded no it's okay thank you I appreciate the update and we didn't we did increase the cost based on um our reference that we got for the climate literacy we did increase the um we scored the correct cost now thank you Dr Chang yeah um thank you so much again for the helpful overview and the um the um data capture that you've been conducting for some time now um I had a quick question uh on uh the ethics studies TSA and the programmatic supports for the efforts uh to review ethnic studies right um in terms of the tiers where do you know where that would fall in that's actually
117paid for by lcap that's paid for through our lcat program okay so it's now paid for with this grant or on the unrestricted general fund okay thank you so much um and then as of uh the unrelated follow-up question with regard to the wellness centers um uh what is the expectation for funding for that in well they're requesting um all of what I shared was um asks from the unrestricted general fund so our task now is to re regroup and try to score um like in order of priorities with and in terms of you know the uncertainty of our funding so this is something that we're definitely going to be looking at along with the other 40 asks that we got sure so they're just asking for when we say Wellness Center we're talking about
118they're asking for furniture and fixtures for a wellness center okay that's the that's the room that's already secured at the high school correct and I'm sorry one more question sure and I know you you've been following this very carefully but for the Title IX office um uh the request is for a counselor 1.0 is that my understanding if I'm interpreting that correctly where umina oh yeah yeah I'm sorry it's it's on I know there's so many uh columns here uh it's uh that's h10 slide 10. I think it's on page 30 slide 30. um it's Title IX office of civil rights and you have a consular at 1.0 um at 1 120. oh I see it um you notice it doesn't have a dollar amount beside it so all of these will be um will
119be taken into account we have a BLT meeting tomorrow so we'll be reassessing all of these that's on the second page of the priorities so okay so um there there will be a dollar amount they'll be attached to it and then it will be scored along with all the other asks thank you vice president um thank you so much for your presentation I have a couple of questions and so the um one I I really appreciate you adding that column on the resolutions and settlements so we could see how we're funding our board priorities that's really helpful and then on the latinx resolution in particular um can't we also just count some of the funding for Els under the resolution as well that call for you know support with reclassification I was just one because
120I only see Puente there but I know there's so much more than Puente and so right I think clarifying that might be helpful um just for well I think yeah let's answer right so I think what we were trying to code here were the areas that were being funded by these two particular funding sources you are correct there are a number of supports that we provide to our English language Learners that is required that are as required by law um and uh you know those are funded there's a there's a significant portion of that that correlate with our actions and expenditures with the lcap so we do we do have that but because we were focusing on the Block Grants we did that wasn't included here got it okay and then I know that we
121still haven't received formal comments from dlac and those are still pending to the board um so I just want to remind my colleagues that that we still have to see what dlax priorities are a couple of things um that I just wanted to call Quick attention to or just ask for clarification the 0.4 FTE that I saw for um stem programming for targeted students does that cover super science Saturdays and um the summer program what what does that cover yeah I'm looking um is it learning recovery yeah it's a learning it's in learning recovery emergency block grant that's not that I don't think that's the plan for Super Saiyan Saturdays can you clarify what that covers that um this was actually I think that was filling out part of the Middle School position if I'm
122if I'm not mistaken but I need to see the the details okay yeah I'm just curious if that's the first stem the stem support at the middle school I think is currently partially funded and we were looking at expanding that okay but I can I can double check that and get back to you that would be really helpful and then under mental health I had another question about mental health um does that cover some of the I know that we've heard through our community listening sessions the requests for culturally responsive mental health and group mental health I see that bacr and some of the existing services are covered but what about some of the feedback that we're getting from from Community stakeholders about the need for group mental health and multilingual mental health especially for
123families yeah so the the specifics on what is included here is really an effort to hold our schools harmless they have had mental health support services provided by Community agencies for a number of years those costs have increased exponentially um coming back from covid so we really wanted to make sure that this very real need that our school communities are articulating in the context of Mental Health Services can continue that's separate from um what are we have heard from our families particularly our latinx families on this need for parent workshops around mental health services so our Opie team and our uh Wellness uh Folks at the high school have worked to organize along with our Community Partners love in particular a couple of mental health workshops that are specific for our Spanish-speaking families um this
124year and that area of need came up in the listening and learning session so we are planning to continue that for next year but it wouldn't be out of this funding okay so is that a separate budget ask for the board or is that already no that's going to be part of the Opie work so the funds that for that support the Opie Department span lcap and besep so Dr Matthew Espinosa is building out the capacity of his team to help support that those types of workshops in conjunction with partnership from our community agencies and my last question about bacr and the external providers is I understand that there have been increased costs but at what point does it make sense for us to create those as internal busd positions as opposed to Contracting out
125I'm sure that that calculation has been done internally already but I'm curious like at what point does it does that become like a counselor position for the district as opposed to just Contracting out yeah there are different licensing agreements and so right now you know the mental health expert you know we're we're at we're content experts in things like math and English language art so we are reliant on folks in our community that have that level of expertise so definitely hear that question and what I would say is I think it's too early to make that that make a a direct answer to that question because we are currently undergoing the needs assessment through the mhssa grant so I think there's going to be a lot of findings coming out of that that through our
126partnership with the city that we can discuss and make some decisions once we have that information thank you yeah I have a couple of questions that are related so first um we heard from rise tonight and also at the last board meeting and I don't see any mention of that funding in here am I missing it yes you are missing it it's on the um tattoo um three um page so we're scoring um we've actually put this here it's again it's not finalized thank you and then I have a question about um on the slide before that the tier one funding prior year commitments about the college bound and RT Fisher programs I remember last year the discussion being about whether it was appropriate to use consultants and continue using Consultants or to integrate some
127of these programs into the district and I'm wondering if we've thought about that um you know it's it's 425 thousand dollars going out to consultants and so I'm wondering if there's a plan to integrate that into the district so the the whole purpose of the partnership with rt Fisher and African-American success um the whole purpose of the partnership with uh RT Fisher and the ASF framework is really found on this idea of building internal capacity but until that capacity is built being people being resources Etc we count on them as our as our partners they're very well integrated into our system and to help us with programs and Partnerships but the idea is that at some point it's a three-year plan but at some point we would have the internal capacity and not need necessarily
128the full extent of that Consulting partnership and I would say that is actually him up in s back and that's the philosophy that we have about Consultants period there are definitely times when Consultants are needed necessary and the only option but but our hope is that we build internal capacity um and not have to rely on Consultants on an ongoing basis but it is a three-year partnership at this point thank you um my questions are again in support of rise and Clarity around the city not funding them any further because I didn't get that from the uh yep presentation in our two by two committee so I just want to make sure that we're actually having those conversations with the city to find out if they're cutting you know how they plan on supporting these
129initiatives which are so you know vital to our district and then how do we Bridge those gaps so that we don't hear about it in public comment but we you know we're more proactive about if we're actually going to lose funding and so I'm not quite sure if they're actually taking the funding back or if they want to expand the funding with rise but I hope that we could get a clarified answer which for me goes back to um this entire like not this entire budget but as we look at these priorities you could hear there were lots of questions about what is it right we're seeing lines on a paper with with dollars and so I'd really like to see it in the sense of an org chart in the sense of the accountability
130structure and the measurable outcomes for for some of these spendings as we come as you come back with tier one this is why the tier two this is why how is it going to help us actually reach our overall stated our stated goals and so I know that you are doing that work through the foci right but then making sure that we are well abreast so that we can um accurately articulate also what we are approving would be helpful for me other than that I really appreciate this presentation and I look forward to um I know you guys have a lot of work ahead of you in the next two weeks I look forward to the next time we hear of where we are okay all right thank you okay now we will move towards
131our last discussion item and after that we are smooth sailing and it is only 9 15. 45 minutes special education budget presentation Sean messenger thank you for being here I was really hoping for a packed uh room thank you for you that state uh um thank you for allowing me to present this evening I'm uh very excited always to uh highlight some of the good work that our special education teams are doing within Berkeley Unified uh next slide so today's uh topics are going to be we're going to provide an overview of context over you context for special education services and busd and to do um some work around understanding cost drivers to the special education budget and outline uh the work underway to Monitor and address some of these costs so as always uh
132we're always following our mission we believe that our students with IEPs are always getting general education students first and we want to make sure that we are enabling and inspiring them to achieve academic excellence and make positive contributions to the world this also includes our four e's and making sure we're being very cognizant that that all of our students despite disability race cultural backgrounds are able to feel like they embody these four e's uh this slide demonstrates some of our demographics uh our current total right now it's constantly changing but it's approximately a thousand one hundred and ten students um this uh our total population of our students is around 9 200 so that makes uh about 12 percent of our population special education which is about the state average um the state average used
133to be around 10 percent um but we're seeing um increased numbers of special education services Across the Nation really and across our state uh the very top box there uh demonstrates um the numbers of students by race with individual education plans um I have the numbers as well as the percents one thing to note is that we're not if if we have any uh any area under 10 students we do not present that data just for um to make sure that um we're respected confidentiality of our students um so as you know we are um in our ccase plan where we are over identifying our black African-American children to special education and you can see from the highlights up there that um we have 308 students and uh 282 white students and our black students
134are only 14 of our population and then below I have disability categories numbers by race um it's not all of the categories because many of those categories only have a couple of students under them so we have other health impaired specific learning disability autism and emotional disturbance and the numbers of students currently under those categories by race next slide so on top of our uh our mission and our overall mission in uh Berkeley unified special education department feels that it's special it needs to have its own mission um so we want to create and sustain an educational Community where each child respecting their exceptionalities are welcome value to be supported made to feel safe can equally participate and expected in challenge to learn and achieve so an example would be um hearing tonight that our
135counseling at Rich classrooms were very involved in the um and the climate work that was at the site I know they're very excited about that some videos were sent to me with the work they were doing so we want to make sure all of our students are very involved and participating like any of our other students um on the right hand side I won't go through those but those are our commitments to our students families and students to ensure that we're actually meeting that mission um and we know we have a lot of work to do we always have a lot of work to do the work will never be done but I'm very proud of the work that our teams are currently doing next slide uh when uh designing uh uh growth for special
136education services we're looking always at what our superintendent goals are so we have four of them up there and later in the slides you'll see that have aligned some of the activities that we're doing underneath those those goals next slide so when talking about the special education budget I think it's really important to understand that we are not um that the uh the budget does not operate in um in a bubble um we uh are affected by uh how the system is operating so a more robust multi-tiered systems of supports in our system and and ensuring we're strengthening our tier one in the classroom and our tier two and tier three services um all in unison is what will help um decrease our budget as well as the services and quality of um of uh
137of services that our students are making as well as an academic outcomes so that that's just um some of that work is currently being done with our literacy action plan uh we're working very closely at special education services with a larger team and ensuring that we are improving uh reading intervention within the classroom as well as those tier two and tier three intervention services and making sure those are all pairing nicely so that our students with IEPs are getting additional services and that are tier one Services aren't being delivered in a tier two environment uh this is just um uh I wanted to share this slide because this is our um our larger picture of special education costs across our state and as as you can see um from 2014-15 we have roughly 12 billion
138and then 2021 we've gone to 18 billion so there every year there's increases in special education costs across I've talked to many directors who are also experiencing um the same in their own districts so we are not uh isolated in Berkeley for an increased cost for special education and what we're seeing in a lot of our um especially our urban city our Urban cities is that we're having a decrease in the population of in general of all of our students but either are and but our students with IEPs are either staying the same or growing so that does um that does create a bit of a quandary for how we continue to fund special education services um another thing to point out is even though that um we do have a uh presidential cabinet right
139now that has definitely been giving more money from the federal government the federal government still has not lived up to his promise from 1975 idea um that they would cover 40 percent of the extra cost um of special education so on average our California school districts right now are paying 61 percent of the costs um that's up from 49 a decade ago so we need to continue to Lobby our federal government to um to meet that promise of um of providing enough and fulfilling um the promise for idea next slide so these are our largest cost drivers um in special education as we know it's a large portion of our budget and then as and is in most districts um our largest cost driver of course is our staff salaries and benefits one thing and
140some of the work that I really want to point out is that through negotiations before before I arrived here um they uh agreed to uh caseload caps for our special education teachers so for example the California Department of Education names 28 as the cap for um for a case manager um to um to how old but for bosd we've agreed that this year that we're at 21 for our case look we've also have assessment caps so um case managers only do a certain like couple a month and then we have some of our teachers at a special assignment that support them and that a lot of that's coming from bset funds that we really appreciate um so what's important about that is that it's not only helping us retain our staff but it's also important
141quality of services because their um they're focused on less students which I know is a value of Berkeley Unified School District but it of course comes with the cost and that means we have to increase our FTE to ensure that we have more case managers mental health supports is another big area Counseling of course or arms which means educationally related Mental Health Services I think that h m are backwards so one of the cost drivers determining how much we spend on counseling is if our students have medical or non-medical and in a changing City where things are becoming increasingly hard for our families to um to to live we have more students coming in with that are more non that do not have Medi-Cal so that puts an increased cost on our district um we
142also have a lot of wraparound services or team-based care and what that is is where we'll send a team to work in a home so what we saw after the pandemic is we have students who have school refusal or don't want to leave the home so we pay for an agency to go in and provide those in-home services and counseling in order to get them to come back to school but also to help prevent them from going to a residential treatment center or non-public school we've also seen a slight increase in residential treatment center placements for some of our students after the pandemic as well and residential treatment centers can run from 150 to 200 000 a year so it's very costly legal settlements of course is another cost driver in Berkeley Unified School District
143and uh NPA costs for nurses instructional aides and hard to staff positions which I'll um I'll show give a little more detail and uh and one of the following slides next slide uh so I just I just wanted to this is just a slide to point out that um student mental health has um has been growing and a growing issue in our nation um even post um or pre-pandemic which you the link down there you can go to an article from the CDC around that um so we're seeing um you know a large increase in um mental health needs for our students we have our own strategies that we've dealt with here at Berkeley Unified School District so the more we invest in our mental health supports here the more our students will benefit from
144that and that's something that we've tried to do in special education services which I'll talk a little bit more next slide so uh this is our spending patterns for the last five years I can't read that so I'm going to look here I think I'm in that old the old age category that's being celebrated today uh so a couple things I want to point out here so that that uh line that's going up that is our uh FTE it's increased from um last five years and um that's from a few different reasons one is that capped case loads um that we've done so we've had to hire uh more uh case managers we've also hired a more uh We've added more FTE in order for our school psychologists to deliver counseling and provide some wraparound
145services at school sites when I arrived here our school psychologists were essentially testing machines but they have actually a lot more to offer they're very we have an amazing group of school psychologists here and they've been doing counseling um serving up to over 200 kids and they've also been providing additional professional development at our school sites around mental health and other topics we also at Berkeley High School we increased our FTE from uh 0.8 to 1.0 for our instructional AIDS and that was in order to meet the schedules of our students and it also has provided us time to do more professional development with those instructional AIDS as well um so you'll look at our if we look at our non-public agency costs which is the orange column here you'll notice kind of an up
146and down pattern um but when you come to uh the last couple years you're going to see an increase in those MPA costs now this is only the first interim and um for 2022-23 um and we are you know we're about to close the books and we'll um we can provide further um further data to the board after afterwards but you will expect to see a bit of an increased cost in our NPA and then a little bit of a decrease in our um in our payroll and partly of that is because we have hard to staff positions um we have instructional AIDs that we've been hiring through agencies um and so we match that with the FTE and use our payroll costs for to fill those um our non-public schools also as you can
147see which is the uh blue column there um there have been relatively stable but this last year we have seen an increase in non-public school placements and part of that is due to um kind of the residual effects of the pandemic we are working really hard to pull our students back from non-public schools we've brought several back um but we've also equally have students going to in non-public schools so one of the things we're trying to do is we first of all visit non-public schools on a regular basis which is a requirement of the CDE as well as our Residential Treatment Centers so that we can determine oh okay this student's time for them to come back I think they've made a lot of progress um and equally we're also working on trying to create
148hybrid programs for some of our students so they may have dual enrollment maybe they're attending some time an independent study and maybe they're taking some elective courses at Berkeley High School so we're trying to change the mindset of Berkeley High School around creating settings where our students can be in in multiple settings so that they are building their own capacity to feel like they're empowered um and to prevent them from going to non-public schools by creating different pathways next slide uh so what I've done here is I've um categories under our uh our four priorities that are superintendent um Anika Ford Martell has set for us and I'm not going to go through each of these but I'm going to highlight a couple so one is enhancing organizational clarity um and the big thing I
149want to highlight here is the we're working on updating our special circumstances instructional assistant process the skia and what that is is a it determines it's a assessment that we do to determine um if a student needs an instructional Aid to support them and it also helps us determine how many minutes we would provide and what time of the day we would provide um and uh one of the big things that we're trying to do in the special education services is really working with families and our teachers to understand that an instructional assistant is very important for our students and provides very essential disturbances and we want to make sure that we're not creating dependency um it's sometimes adding extra adults is not really what not really what is the most um the best thing
150for our students so sometimes it's like making sure we're enhancing that relationship between the Gen ed teacher and the special education teacher um so that's work that we're doing across our site and that will hopefully decrease costs over time um a second for developing in a perfect process and structures to ensure communication with families and school sites this year we've participated in some alternative dispute resolution and facilitated IEPs and what that is is when an IEP team can't come to uh can't come to agreement around the uh fape offer free and appropriate education then we will often bring in a facilitator from the outside who is a neutral party that will help and we do that through the selpa that we have and that's helped in a few cases for us to resolve some of
151these IP cases we also of course have our supervisors and our teachers on special assignment who support the principals and the teachers at the sites to also work through those those are those complications um there's also uh I've also been working this year in a lot of professional development on how do we deliver reports in a friendly manner to our teachers as well as doing some professional development with our school psychologists on culturally responsive assessments we've been having a lot of conversations with that this year and then actually on Friday I'm having a conversation with a a black school psychologist who provides training on on that topic so we're excited for that work I'm seeing that it's almost time for me to stop improving alignment coherence around literacy and mtss uh again we are working
152very closely with our literacy action plan work to increase tier one and two three tier two and three reading teaching practices at elementary and middle school so we've trained all our case managers um around the using the double screener to develop baselines goals and progress monitoring that is definitely still a work in progress and will continue to be a work coming into this New Year we're sending a group of special education teachers and a literacy specialist to an orang Gillingham training in a couple weeks we've also been doing Wilson trainings for the last four years which is also Orton Gillingham based and as a reading Intervention Program for tier two and tier three um in addition uh some exciting work happening at Berkeley High School is that um in the last three weeks we've uh
153assessed through the star um about 300 students with IEPs to determine um where they're struggling with if they're struggling with reading and then um three of our teachers pulled around 60 students to do Dibbles with them and the plan with that is that in the next year we'll be doing more reading intervention at the high school so we're very excited about that work we know that we have work to do around literacy and we know that a lot of students have passed through our system that are in high school that still need that support so that's work that we're committed to and hopefully we'll build that bridge from um from elementary middle to high because we always hear about Berkeley being in Berkeley High School being its own entity out there so we're excited about
154that work um and lastly uh systems for a data informed culture decision making um we have also trained our special education teachers and using edgy climber um which is um been very fantastic because our teams now have a data source that they can all tap into um to see where our students are and actually when whenever something arises from a family they reach out to me the first thing I do is go to edu climber and I say okay where where are they reading at where's their math at um and it gives us a a place to all go so where we can build across our IEP teams and build that collaboration we're also visiting uh like I said non-public schools residential treatment centers on a regular basis and trying to students back that um
155we feel can be come back to our schools so with that I will take questions thank you and thank you so much for that presentation and that explanation and um I'd just like to start with acknowledging our decline in legal costs if you could go back to slide 11 and our settlement costs um I know when I I started on the board that was one of the initiatives that we wanted to to make sure that as a district moving forward that we did lower our settlement cost and so um seeing it um below 1.5 million down to 659 000 is a huge achievement and I'm appreciative of that and I think that speaks to why we increased FTE as well and I think that also speaks to why we approved the um reduction in the
156case loads and so I'm very grateful that we are seeing the the fruits of that labor and that we are seeing the our district really come into compliance with the needs of our students so I just want to acknowledge that and thank you for your work thank you anyone else director wants to death um I just have a just like as a point of clarity correct me if I'm wrong director Manson but it seems like um The NPS cost may also be Associated to Legal costs as well right and those are increasing definitely is there a way that we can get more specific information to the board on The NPS plus legal costs just those two togethers because I see them kind of separate on this slide so it's a little bit confusing for me
157to see if it's you know increasing or decreasing or yeah definitely and it's it's a little bit challenging right because sometimes legal through legal means we have students go to non-public schools and then sometimes our IEP teams Place students in non-public schools because we feel like we don't have the capacity to serve them here so it's a little hard to suss out the difference between those um and so it would be challenging to Crunch that but I'll work on that okay I have just a couple of questions um so let me know if you want me to ask them all together or separately you better do one at a time because all right another person category my first question is you know I'm happy to see that we're trying to engage more in adrs right
158and trying to resolve things as amicably as possible when there's disagreements but what kind of training are we doing for our case managers and our staff to de-escalate conflict to begin with at that meeting which is very hard you know I'm a full disclosure you know I'm a son with an IEP and it's the the process itself can be very difficult on both sides to navigate so on the PD front what are we doing to kind of you know de-escalate and try not to get to an ADR situation to begin with uh so once a month we have uh professional learning communities with our case managers and our teachers a special assignment lead that work um some of the work we've been doing is for example just as simply as making PowerPoints that each of
159our um our IEP team and related service people can all plug their input in so that it's very clear to the to the family um how we're doing um and how we're serving and um and trying to take some of that uh complicated IEP language out of it um in addition um we're always working with our case managers around um working with families and um it it there you know there is a struggle at times that happens right we have um our case managers who have gone to get their bachelor's and their masters who have um feel like they you know have uh they they know what you know through data collection they know what's um right for the children and then we have our parents who are the first teachers of um of of
160their children who also see things differently from their perspective so that is so how do we come together as a team um an IEP team is not just the school site it includes the parents so that's a constant reminder we get to um to families so um we do do professional development on how to run an IEP in a way and how to do it in a family-centered manner and that is it could be challenging right there's the reports you know there's an OT there's an occupational therapist a physical therapist um the school psychologist as well as the case manager all delivering separate reports and at times it can just even one of myself sits in the meeting sometimes it's hard not to to check out here and there so we work with our case
161managers to um to deliver those reports in a more friendly manner um and then when there's indecision and there's disagreement that's when oftentimes we'll call in maybe a supervisor to help um so and it's additional work that needs to happen and that is some of the focal area for next year as well thank you director my second question is I see a lot of black and latinx students with sld needs and how do we work particularly with our El students to kind of suss out and what is and ensure that the speaking issues are not associated with their ELD challenges can you just talk about that a little bit and how we maybe work with ed services on that uh yeah it's um it is a challenge to assess those out whether it's a learning
162disability or whether it's a language issue or speech and language therapists and our in our school psychologist are are you know they are trained they go to school to determine those we've also worked with closely around the reclassification process for some of our students which I know is a separate issue but um to ensure that we are recognizing students who have are who have become completely bilingual um so um that is a um it is uh it's an area of focus for sure um as well as just identifying students for Aid disabilities across the board we are seeing we have more black students and more latinx students in special education than we have white students in Berkeley unified and that would come back to that um that increasing that multi-tiered system supports making sure that
163we're being culturally responsive in our classrooms and connecting with families and ensuring that we are delivering strong tier one intervention in the classrooms and hopefully over time what we'll see is uh uh you know that pattern of over identification we'll see a decrease in that and my last question was just about reading intervention at the high school level and I'm glad to see that we have more support in place it seems at the secondary level just wondering is that translating to more hires or how is that you know more direct support at the secondary level of being rolled out yeah fortunately we have a team of uh teachers that are tackling this and um one of them or show Rachel mandahar has really um has really jumped into this work um fully and she's going
164to be setting up intervention classes and also coaching in our CLC classrooms so she'll be doing some Wilson instruction for some of our students that are really struggling with reading and then she'll equally be coaching some of our our teachers in the CLC classrooms to um to serve those students within those classrooms as well with reading instruction so fortunately we have enough FTE to be able to still keep our case load caps as well as use this use this teacher to provide that so it's not it has it wasn't an increase in our budget Dr Brown yes and then Mike Chang Dr Chang and is that it okay thanks thank you um director messenger for their your presentation and for all of your work um I wanted to go back to the the previous question
165uh that you answered and I just want to kind of stay there for a little bit now and and dig a little bit deeper I'm super grateful for our ccase plan and the work that is being done I'm also grateful for um your mentioning of culturally responsive teaching or or closely responsive pedagogy um however I'm wondering if there is a deeper professional development or best practices that we can adopt that truly um address the implicit bias in blatant racism that is leading to the over-identification of of black students and latinx students in special education um you know I know that culturally responsive teaching is effective but it is not enough and I'm wondering if those conversations are happening if they're being led by special education for our general education teachers and if not is there
166a space or is there a plan to address it not so much as a surface issue but to really really dig deep to the um to the issues of racism that caused the over identification yeah I appreciate that question um so this is work that really needs to happen across our district um special education department is part of a larger District so for example the case managers at the school sites are actually under um under the supervision of the school site principles so whatever work is happening at that school site those special education teachers should be involved in that but for example the related service providers are like our school psychologists we just purchased um cultural responsive teaching and they're going to be doing a book club next year led by our lead psychologist Shayna
167stumpfig so that's one way that we're addressing that um and our s our speech and language therapists we're also having those conversations because we know that there can be over identification as well in speech and language so it is constant conversation happening I do uh pop into these meetings and I do hear those conversations happening but in order to really change things it really has to be it has to be district-wide and we really need to start having um there should be regular race conversations that are happening whether it's in our director's meetings or whether it's at in our at our school site principal should be leading those conversations at their school sites um so it's nice that we have posters up recognizing um different cultural Affairs but until those conversations start happening um then
168we're not we're not really getting to the root the root cause of it um so we did through the csis plan we did have a group of the five Vision schools that did participate with Dr sahili and some work around implicit bias um around conversations around race and and some of the history behind racism but it's it was you know it's only a small group of teachers and and and our leaders so at some point we need to figure out Berkeley to find how we're going to do this across the board so that their their regular conversations absolutely thank you and my next two questions first um how does the district provide um orientation or how do we Orient our new families um into our special education services and what we have available if you
169want to answer that one I'll go to the next one after yeah that's um work that's been kind of on the side plate that I wanted to do and we've considered possibly doing like quarterly quarterly uh presentations to new families coming in otherwise we really depend on our school sites to have that warm welcoming to our families um our case managers um are often very good about building those relationships with families um I when I was a principal I depended heavily on my case managers to to bring those families in to have you know text them to have regular conversations with them but we have been considering um doing uh more of a orientation you know a few times throughout the year so that's something that we have on the burner for for next year
170I I appreciate knowing that because I think an orientation a few times a year is wonderful and not just for our families who are new to busd but for our families who are already here and may not be familiar with Services unless they've been you know identified by a teacher or another staff member at their school so I appreciate hearing that and then my final question which is um a bit of a loaded question or it may be a challenging question to answer however um I realized that in our district um declassification is a very rare occurrence um and so I'm wondering um is that a conversation that is is happening amongst our Special Education team I know that um you know many of our students have been retained in special education um and our
171number of students have actually increased as you mentioned earlier in your presentation um so what conversations do we have about declassification not just within sped but also with our families in in community and in partnership with them as well uh yeah we I mean we definitely would like to see more of our students exited from special education as they especially when they get you know into High School um and it's a very complicated conversation um and what I would say is it comes back to you know improving that the mtss model in our district the more we see our students grades go up their reading scores improve their math scores improve then those are the signs that it's time to um it's time to start having that conversation about exiting students but we also have
172on the flip side where we want to exit a student and a family is very adamant about keeping those services um so oftentimes we'll you know a student will be performing academically fine but maybe they'll have some social emotional struggles still happening and the parents will want to keep the counseling aspect of an IEP so the more we can strengthen our uh our our counseling and supports on the general education side of the house and and within our 504 plans we can it's easier to transition some of our students at a special education um but yeah it's it's a challenge right if we don't if our students aren't academically performing proficient then it's hard for us to argue that they don't need these Services anymore so it is a constant challenge we definitely have students
173that we exit um but uh you know we'd like to see it more of a more of a at a higher rate and then some students they're you know they they need to have IEPs the whole way through because they're you know they have um and and it shouldn't be looked at in a negative way as positive so yes that is those are constant conversations that were happening um and oftentimes I get pulled in the conversations to look over reports and see hey or you know what are we missing here or um you know there's students who um are getting straight A's but they don't come to school regularly um and so we have to ask ourselves well why aren't they coming to school regularly what is keeping them from wanting to come on campus
174so each case is dealt with individually and um yeah that's exactly what our teams do you do you think so thank you that question thanks so much um you have one of the more challenging jobs in the district it's a very technical and complicated area um for sure don't try to get a promotion or a raise just kidding you are on the hot seat in the chili room I'm kind of cold in here but um that's okay so I had a couple of questions for you as a follow-up as well so just laughing at me um there with the complexity in in addressing sped you know you uh what I'm what I'm hearing and also which is a traditional um challenge around provision of special education services you're you're addressing both the concerns around over
175identification and providing individualized services to mitigate disparity it's it's a really a focal point in many school districts including our district to address uh just uh disparate outcomes um I'm I appreciate I really like hearing that you have this um case manager to case um ratio um that's a way that in other areas that I've been involved in is a really helpful just a baseline standard I'm hearing that you're trying to maintain 21 the California Department of Education at 28 and you're monitoring that to maintain ftes for appropriate levels um one quick question related to that is um and all of this I think is response is a way to respond to complaints that capture that data to ensure you have sufficient Staffing to ensure that when um parents are raised concerns which um is
176inevitably going to happen at a percentage of the parents these are complex areas that involves their children it's also a very emotional area too um that you have appropriate Staffing that are trained in a culturally responsive manner so that um you don't get to a point with or you mitigate the number of cases that result in adversarial outcomes with litigation um one question would be um do you know what the longitudinal data is for the case managers to case ratio I know you're relatively new to the district um but do we have an awareness in the district of five years ago it was you know half that with uh 15 versus 21 um is it slowly creeping up over the years uh do you mean as far as caseload or as far as retention of
177teachers um the staff the case manager the case ratio that you have set right now you have a you set it at a Max of 21 right which I assume is is a cap but there's probably an average behind that longitudinal data it was likely uh you know I'm just thinking about my previous District in this one so I would say average case loads can you know normally even normally we don't get up to 28 right that's it's too many students so I would say an average of 21 to 24 um is is uh you know a doable caseload um but you know I you know it's funny talking to the old school case managers out there like I had 45 kids on my caseload and um I cared you know and I had to
178go steal paper from the thrift store um so you know I I I think it was probably around you can you can get up to 28. um and I and I believe that's where those cases were so what the um Union and um central office negotiated was that you know we wanted to match that with what are the average classroom size um that teachers are carrying and that was you know around 20. so um so that was kind of the premise of doing that I see this helpful um in terms of clarification on what where that part of the factors that come into determination of that caseload would be um classroom size um I'm sure that some of these cases have become more complex as um special education rights and services have become more widely
179understood and there's a body of Advocates that are involved as well um so as part of that kind of bigger package of understanding uh where where our data is and what type of data that you have available to inform yourself or you know do we have appropriate numbers of Staff or what type of professional development we need um with the educlammer program which we're all very excited about um is there um a data capture and edu climber uh counseling services as well as discipline outcomes for students with disabilities uh I know there's discipline in there I'm not sure about counseling um we have Infinite Campus which is where we are storing the interventions we've done with students as well as so counseling things like that would go under there um as far as an individual
180education plan for for you know education related Mental Health Services that gets stored in seis which is where we keep all of our special education data but we do um we do want to and through Infinite Campus one things that we do want is for example we want uh to build where all these interventions are were happening prior to um to being referred to special education because that helps us see what the history of and what things were put in place um to ensure that we're not over identified buying students so but I will say um Infinite Campus is not the most uh friendly platform so we have done a lot of training but I know that there's still a lot of training that needs to happen that our student services director Dr Shelley has
181been leading um around making sure they're inputting um you know discipline data and intervention data into that so that and then that's easier for our school psychologist to look into to see like when they're writing the reports to say okay I you know I see these different inventions that happened um because we don't want to be you know one of the one of the caveats under specific learning disability um specifically says that we should you know we should not be um identifying students if they have not had good solid tier one intervention but that's a really hard thing to prove right if you don't have that evidence um so uh one last follow-up is that for me one last Quick follow-up I I'm special I will I will allow you to continue your questions really
182quickly so uh with the over identification I don't mean to laugh while I'm saying that because that's a serious issue but um uh I am hearing uh you know the the the uh emphasis on the importance of um interventions and uh you know I guess I just want to get one little piece of clarity with um uh referrals counseling referrals in particular which is a form of intervention short of can be short of um uh disciplinary outcomes um is that something that uh an edgy climber capture or is it in says or is it in uh in the other in the program how would a case manager for example um capture that so that it is then produced for example if the school board wanted to review um rates of uh counseling referrals tied to
183the mtss and to the discipline Matrix versus um School discipline outcomes so just for clarity um do you mean counseling for um like on the general education side of the house so for example if a student's experiencing some emotional um some trauma or that they would get counseling through exactly yes that's what that would be um so so most of that um so Infinite Campus would be where that data is put um otherwise we have our Student Success teams so at our school sites we have cost teams and the cost team is um is uh is just the the School site and it might include a case manager a school psychologist a general education teacher the principal family liaison and what they do is they look at data together and that's where they would you
184know say oh well we need to provide counseling or we need to provide in this intervention and at some point if they're looking at the data and they see that that's not working for that student then they may say well let's uh refer to special education for um because we we believe maybe the student has a learning disability now what we need to get better at is making sure we're inputting that data into a system so that it's captured and easy to see so that we're creating a history um and really that's for me you know that's what the importance of keeping good paperwork is for in special education making sure our you know our reports are have all that family history in it because it really shows the educational path that a student took
185from kindergarten all the way up and actually in our ccase plan one of the areas that we need to do is we need to look at some of the journeys some of our students went through in order to see how they got to that pathway thank you so much I appreciate you giving me the extra chance thank you the last thing I want to mention is neurodiversity was mentioned earlier and I want to highlight we have a club that's been led by Pamela Vanderpool one of our speech and language therapists at Berkeley High School and it actually is a had fantastic attendance and it happens on Fridays at lunchtime might be something that um the board would like to visit but um the students have really taken that leadership on and I've been very impressed
186with um with that work and that's continued work that we're doing across so Berkeley should be proud that you know we we want all our students to feel welcome I know we got a lot of work to do with that but it's happening out there in pockets thank you really quick I did have one more um question or comment for uh maybe even for a future but I would love to know how we are supporting our after school staff and their supports and our Extended Learning Day program of our special education students how we're making sure that that flow through training that they're included in the IEP that they are knowledgeable and aware yeah we haven't I'll be honest we haven't done much work in that area um it could be we could set up
187to have some of our staff our school psychologists do some professional development in the after school program so that's an area that I can check with um or after school program supervisors around one thing to note is um when a student is in the after school program it really is a an ADA concern and not a you know the special education services ends at the school day and then the after school program it's um you know it goes into the realm of ADA making sure there's you know access and supports there but um it still would be beneficial for them to know like what are some strategies that you um accommodations modifications that you can do with after school work to ensure that our students are you know are learning um and that you know
188and honestly that's um an area of growth across our district right like there are things that don't need to be in an IEP that can happen in a classroom extended test time does not need to be in an IEP for uh for a teacher to say Hey you know you can you can mute them extended time so there are a lot of these accommodation modifications are they don't either be special education specific so those are some things that we can bring to the after school program as strategies for them to use so I will definitely put that on the the burner and um and check in and make sure that we're we're supporting the after school staff um sorry but I think that would be a great thing just to also include in general education
189like when you're looking at other models of special education as well there are things like like a co-teacher model for example um I would love to see that con or love to learn more about ways that that's continuing or happening in our district and so I'm happy to hear that you'll share that with after school but please share it um District wise yeah and there's there's definitely spots of code there's definitely um there's spots of co-teaching that happen across our district and it's an area of growth as well the hardest I think the most challenging thing about co-teaching is that you really need to you know you have one case manager and you have students with IEPs spread across the school so you really need to work on um you know trying to group students
190in classrooms which can you know be a little bit controversial with some of our you know we don't want some people feel like we should load our classrooms with you know call students with IEPs type of thing but in order for that co-teaching to work you you know you can't the case manager can't be in all you know in all 15 classrooms at the same time but it is a model that we've explored and is quite successful at a few sites with certain students um so and one of our um another big challenges is getting that time to work with our general education teachers um one thing that we do is in the beginning of the year we have our new teacher orientation and we spend um a portion of time talking with our new
191teachers coming in um around um what does it mean to be an inclusive inclusive District that you're going to have students with uh with um more severe disabilities in your classroom and so you should be aware of that and here are the supports and structures that are in place to help you with that but yes that is a constant work in progress of building those teams that are sites and making sure our case managers are working closely with our general Ed teachers and um and our instructional aides as well and making sure that they're you know they're constantly checking with each other but time always seems to be our worst enemy um when it comes to schools and um but that's what we need to do for our students if we truly want to call
192ourselves an inclusive District awesome thank you so much now we will move towards our second opportunity for public comment if there is anyone here or online that would like to take advantage of this time please raise your hand okay looks like we're going home a little early today guys um I want to remind my work colleagues about these um informational first readings because we do want them to come back to be approved as soon as possible so please let us know if you have any comments or concerns so that we could take it back to policy committee as needed want to wish our uh our student directors all the luck in this last stretch I know you have finals and exams coming up so we are rooting for you and supporting you as well as
193all of our students and at this time I will adjourn the meeting thank you