001everyone and welcome to the june 14th special meeting of the berkeley unified school district board of education our meeting is a little different tonight we actually have a workshop on our strategic planning process for the district and for that reason our public comment will be a little bit later on uh in our agenda this evening but i have the honor and pleasure of opening us up and beginning with a couple of introductions the first introduction that i have this evening is pam hopday who will come in her own way in a few minutes to walk us through the strategic planning process she's been our consultant and our partner with this work and we are so excited to have her here tonight excited to receive her when she comes and excited to continue on this work
002and partnership with partnership with her so would you like to say hello for a couple seconds pam before we get to go to the rest of the protocols i would love that thank you um and i'm excited uh for the berkeley community and staff and students and everyone who's watching to participate in the very first workshop that's a strategic planning workshop so thank you khadijah thanks so much pam additionally we have a couple of more cabinet members who don't typically come to uh who are not typically faced uh on this screen every single evening uh but they are here with us uh for the strategic planning process and they'll introduce themselves in their own way when they um it's time for them to present but if you all just want to wave your hands really
003quickly and say hello that would be really awesome thank you and then of course the rest of the board of education um if you don't mind sharing the screen it's also my privilege to walk us through our protocols for tonight and so i'll do just that in a moment as soon as the screen is up i'm sorry uh we're sharing the protocols um should i just share my screen would that be helpful if i don't have it i've enabled screen sharing for everyone now okay thank you oh thanks so much reuben all right uh next one or i'll go over the gender really quickly or pam did you want me to do that or yeah that would that would be great or i can do it whichever you prefer um okay how about i do
004the first time you do the rest okay yes so of course we had our welcome and introductions i'm going to quickly go over our protocols which really will help to set the tone for our work this evening and then pam will come with the cabinet to walk us through um the first phase and first part of the strategic planning process which includes the model as well as the focus areas and some discussion and recommendations we'll take a brief break and then we're going to really focus on the majority of the evening will be on the priority matrix as well as focus areas the major five focus areas for the board and the cabinet to talk about together and to determine if there are gaps and what are we missing and each of the cabinet members
005will be presenting their own matrix rep representing their departments and their staff and uh will then facilitate a discussion uh with everyone in a workshop format and just um uh a reminder that this is unique and we really encourage the public as khadijah said at the end of the meeting to give feedback to the board in the cabinet about your observations about this process tonight um so we'll have observations um and uh public comment and at the very end everyone that both the cabinet and the board will give closing comments um about the process tonight and speaking of the process tonight um it is like i said in the beginning a bit different than what we are used to with our typical meetings and i'm excited about that um so tonight we will have an
006actual workshop as you if you've been watching for a while you'll know that the board has been engaging in a couple of different work workshops this year and this one is no different however this workshop will require us as both the cabinet and the board to meet some of the following protocols or norms um we want to ensure that we are working collaboratively uh throughout this work and so that requires for us to find places for both alignment and mutuality right and in addition to that we want to ensure that during this workshop tonight we are doing away with all the formalities right so no more president brown or vice president babbitt will instead call each other khadijah and tai and laura and trish and it's really important that we remember that tonight is about
007being informal and that will help us to get to our our goals of um alignment and mutuality it is important that we share different perspectives because that will also help to get to our our goal to uh to establish alignment um it's important that we establish trust and that we lead with trust and create an environment that is comfortable and open for working relationships that will help us get to our goals in 2022 and 2023 the academic school year we know that these types of workshops are important because they are a precursor to um as passing board action and so we know that tonight's engagement in participation especially from the community at the end of this workshop is uh important and important part for um for us to participate in additionally um this is the
008purpose of tonight's workshop is to help us focus on existing priorities as well as identify resources that will help us to to support those priorities it's an opportunity for us to apply our skills of emotional intelligence it is an opportunity for reflections and observations and that will happen at the end of tonight's session as pam mentioned and then additionally as i mentioned a couple of times we'll have public comment at the end of the meeting and so i am very excited about this process it's been a long time coming and when i say a long time i mean the school year coming but it's been a long time coming and i know cabinet has been working incredibly hard on this so first before we begin just on behalf of myself and on the board thank
009you cabinet for engaging in this work um it you all have a lot of priorities and a lot of things that you were wrapping up in the school year um but you took the time to ensure that this was also a priority for you as well so we're excited to engage with you on this work and let's get started so just a reminder as we start we all first began brainstorming what a three-phased approach would look like for strategic planning and because we felt mutually that there needed to be a focus on setting up priorities we really skipped many of the important phases of strategic planning to provide an opportunity for each of you together to have fun to relook at each department in a way that provides a set of metrics for both board
010members and the cabinet to be able to look quickly and when you have an idea whether it's a resolution or a new project or an initiative to be able to see what capacity is and what resources there are so that it doesn't feel like oh this is a new great idea and do it rather than let's collaborate together in a workshop forum next slide the other thing that we had talked about is having uh the strategic planning process be focused uh with ad hoc committees that would involve the community and um the column that is missing here are students and we were going to be very student focused with staff and inclusive and all of that can still happen in the future um as you see the baseline it's really the the formation of the
011key component of this strategic planning process that gives the architecture for you all to be able to use the metrics that you're going to see tonight as a lever so what we did in phase one all strategic plans have overarching goals and we are calling them focus areas and we spent time really studying reflecting doing some benchmarking on what other school districts what other entities have for focus areas and we want to present those tonight and have lots of dialogue with everyone in the workshop informally about are there any gaps did we miss anything um should we prioritize these normally they are all weighted equally and um i think that will be a very informative and and fun discussion um then we're going to identify really the scope of the major initiatives and projects that
012each department and division will be focused on for 2022 and 23 and we developed the architecture i'm going to use that word again for a project matrix that includes mandated projects core functions operating principles then we talked about major projects in the 2223 budget cycle that are new and ongoing and projects for district sustainability and reliability and and this bucket contains systems and process re-engineering that departments and and and divisions are currently undergoing and want to do in the future and then identifying projects that are currently not resourced or on hold and integral in this matrix what's going to be very very important are the board priorities and you're going to see those highlighted in yellow tonight as each department gives their presentation so anything that's highlighted in yellow it's a project or an initiative
013that ties into each of your board priorities now what's really important is the board and the cabinet will be able to utilize this matrix quarterly to have updates and to brainstorm how to insert and implement new resolutions at different workshops so as a board member when you have a really big hairy audacious idea that you're really excited about the idea is the first thing you would do is to have a workshop where with the cabinet where you would discuss your idea and then you'd be able to look at the matrix and see to implement this what are the resources needed and that staff time as well and what might be put on hold for a brief period of time or a longer period of time so that you can easily reprioritize together as a board
014and a cabinet so that's the beauty of this process so focus areas um they're large concepts they're based on your on the board priorities the lcap and other board approved plans and in strategic planning we never want to have more than three to five overarching goals or focus areas they nest all nest under a diversity equity and includes an umbrella or lens and all new projects or existing projects should be looked at and decisions made through that same dei lens the focus our area areas are then used as your compass for what you're really implementing in the berkeley school district so let's take a look at them oh first brent did you want to update this slide yeah i can i know that the board will will remember this sort of graph we've actually been
015using it now for about two years is the foundation of our budgeting the first time we kind of put together a summary of board priorities that looked like this was i think back in january of the previous school year and it's been kind of the the foundation of budgeting decisions it was also something that cabinet members looked at as we were both sort of reviewing department goals as they were trying to articulate things that they were working on aligned with board priorities as well as pull forth a lot of the compliance oriented work that they do so just just know that this is something that was featured at multiple points in in the sort of planning for tonight's workshop so anything as we get into the matrixes anything that you see as i stated earlier
016that's highlighted in yellow refer directly back to your board priorities okay here are our um five focus areas that we're really excited to present to you tonight and um the first one is fiscal stability and responsibility and you see cabinet members names under each of these as i read them and they're going to talk to you more about the definitions and why they were chosen modern and efficient processes and systems structured collaboration and engagement academic excellence and equitable outcomes for all and wellness and belonging and as you think about important projects or topics for discussion they should be able to nest under one or more of these goals and we'll talk more about the application and the use opportunities later so with that let's um we'll have each cabinet member discuss these definitions of the
017focus areas and then we're going to have kind of a workshop discussion pam can i just note before we move on the title at the very top of this slide i think it's really important that we we share with the board that we didn't specifically call out a focus area for diversity equity inclusion but that this is under the umbrella all of these would be under the umbrella diversity equity and conclusion yeah thanks reuben okay pauline take it away okay so i'm gonna do a very brief um introduction very brief summary because fiscal stability is throughout all the um goals and all our efforts in the district whatever we do we try to make sure that you know we have a positive ending fund balance and of course we have to accurately track our revenues
018our expenses we have to look at our long-term needs or risks um and we obviously have to be transparent when we're doing this reporting um and obviously we focus on the district's fiscal health as well um we need to make sure this information is clear accessible and tailored to a variety of audiences the board of education the community or various budgeting partners the language is a little different even though the message is the same it's delivered a little bit differently and we meet with our budget partners and our unions and it's important that they understand the key aspects of our finances as we work collaborative collaboratively to support effective programs and ensure stable operations so that's my um my um abbreviated version and i can go into more detail at a later date thanks pauline
019sure okay max so when we talk about processing systems usually everyone's eyes start to glaze over it's like the least interesting of these focus areas um and you know when we call our community and our teachers about their priorities it's usually pretty low but our processes and systems form the foundation upon which everything else is built and if we don't have a solid foundation of processes and systems everything else is kind of on shaky ground so it's really important that we have modern efficient systems that allow us to provide the services and the support that our students need to learn and our teachers need to teach and if we let these systems become antiquated we're forced to devote more resources to fixing problems we have longer response times we have more issues we have we
020have to devote more staffing to that infrastructure component which means less staffing resources available in the classroom so i i mean i'm the tech guy i'm a little prejudiced on this but i think that processes and systems are a really important focus area trish everyone um i wanted to start this just with a 30-second story which is that i was at berkeley high school recently and a um secretary asked me if i would take a call from a parent who was very upset about a safety issue and and there just didn't happen to be anyone else around it's not my normal role um and the parent was insistent they needed to talk to someone so i took the call from the parent uh who was very concerned about safe safety issues at the high school
021relevant to some recent events and i really listened and the parent i assume was in tears and i was soon in tears as well because what they were experiencing like i could really feel it because i wasn't speaking i wasn't lecturing i wasn't offering advice i was like really hearing them and i left that that day and i've talked to several people about this experience and it it really has cemented for me something that i've been gradually learning while i've been working here at the district which is we as communicators certainly me and my department but all of us we have to always be learning from our audiences and we have to be listening to them and we really can't do our job if we can't hear them um community input collaboration empowerment you know
022these things are not only valued they're like essential to getting this right and getting this work done and and i know for sure they make me better it's not always easy um emotionally and just sort of you know the workload of having to listen but it it just creates profoundly better results so that engagement with our community like i see more and more how important it is and we also can't succeed as communicators if our messages can't be heard i mean this is like communications 101 so we have to talk to people where they are so that's about being accessible two-way multilingual culturally sensitive in all of the work that we do and really customizing what we're saying to the audience who needs to hear it and communications at busd they they have to be
023designed to maintain a focus on teaching and learning and and to assure that we're both hearing and providing information that can be heard so that we're making the best decisions that we can for our students and for our families all right this one is me and that's fitting it's the academic excellence and equitable outcomes for all and as the associate superintendent chief academic officer this should be my one and only priority of course we all know in school districts we get pulled in many directions but everything comes back to this this is why we are here and doing this this work that we do which is making sure and ensuring that all our students are receiving this academic excellence and equitable outcomes and you can see by the definition we really want to emphasize that
024not only are classrooms joyful supportive and challenging but that our teachers are really getting deep into the standards they're collaborating with their peers our curriculum is meaningful we have an assessment system that is utilized and not just give tests but actually analyze the assessment results and make change in the work that we do our schools are organized in a way that support this improvement among teachers and of course schools can work on the equity gaps closing those gaps articulate the strategies they use to adjust those gaps and impact student learning this is why we are in this business this is really important and key and everybody not just me not just ruben the way the slide says everyone is responsible for this element of the work um everyone from the board on down and so
025this is a really key um focus area for us sam last but not least um so i have uh the warm and fuzzy category otherwise known as wellness and belonging um so wellness has become something that has been very important in the last few years as we dealt with covet and everything else mental health wellness is now one of our biggest focuses and um the thing that goes hand in hand with that is making sure that people feel like they belong um and making sure that we are building a community and so that's one of our big goals in busd is to make sure that we are helping people to have a sense of belonging to the busd community as a whole whether they're a student a family member a community member or staff and
026making sure that we are addressing all of that so that their mental health their physical health emotional health so that they can focus on um growth either whether it be academic or professional growth okay reuben let's go back um if we can just for a minute to i think it was slide eight that has all of the focus areas so we heard and as reuben pointed out every single one of these focus areas it's really important that we note that they all sit under the umbrella of diversity equity and inclusion and what's interesting about focus areas for you all to discuss now um is did anything that you have thought about throughout the year would it fit under one of these umbrellas or these these um focus areas that will really drive the future of
027the district now these should be able to last for at least three years and it might be that the board has several priorities and you can then prioritize these focus areas or not usually these focus areas are all equally weighted which we did in the matrix that we're going to show you tonight but let's talk about do you see any gaps and remember with a workshop as kadesha said we are informal we it's not the normal thing of staff presents to the board board reacts everyone can discuss together and and i'd like for cabinet members to talk about um what do you what did you find as you were putting the metrics together um about these focus areas that you liked okay i'm sorry just a question i don't want to jump in uh who
028are you who are you prompting to sort of the cabinet i'd like just the cabinet to share with the board a little bit about the development of these and as they were putting the metrics together what you liked about them nesting things under them well i i said it a little bit when i read the fourth metric there um you know yes it's pretty easy to say oh academics reuben or systems max or but the reality is we all have roles in each one of these sort of five areas every even you know pauline with business if her role she impacts academics tremendously um if in in her department so that you know it really pushed i think for me my thinking on my department my division and where the work they do fits under
029each of these sort of umbrella or focal areas how much are we interacting on a day-to-day basis with the business office with human resources with technology with communications and they're they're all integral in sort of how we do this work so it's really great to see sort of these five buckets of work or areas that truly cover a lot of ground for our district i think for me um if you take the bigger topic of recruitment i know recruitment and retention is one of the uh priorities of the board as well as it's a big huge topic in hr um but recruitment um as you'll see when i do my matrix is i can split it into multiple of these um five categories um because they're different pieces to recruitment it's not just one thing
030and so um with these uh different um [Music] priorities we uh i was able to sort of figure out more of like specifically what what are we doing in these different areas within my department and be able to put more a little bit more of um hopefully something that's a little easier to like swallow and understand in in my matrix i think putting uh putting these projects that we're doing under these focus areas really helps highlight as ruben was saying how all of this is a shared responsibility and even though we introduced these focus areas with me introducing um systems and processes and academic achievement i'll have items that fall under academic achievement because um you know that we're all working towards the same goals and we all have our our hands in all of
031these areas yeah i echo really what everyone also said the cross-functionality of the work um sometimes as you're in it you don't get to step back and realize like all the contributors to both the success in your department and all of the ways your department is sort of reaching out cross-functionally across the district so it's a good a good way to look at your own work do you um as a group did we miss anything is there a gap for any of you or observations as you think about these and just pop in julie i just have a question of the cabinet um because i i understand the focus groups i mean the focus topics um i'm curious when you think of the umbrella of diversity equity and inclusion what does that mean to you
032in the context of the the focus because it's it's good to have that as the umbrella and we say it a lot all of us you know that we're looking at it through this lens but i i thought i i would like to hear a little bit more about what that means to you guys as you thought about that so i think for me um and i diversity definitely means um something a little bit different in the hr world than it would in a couple of the other areas but to me it's more of like the thread that we're we're braiding into everything that we're doing so like while we have these different focus areas with we're sort of always looking for the core of like the diversity and equity and inclusion making sure that
033those things are being addressed no matter what the topic is um at least that's how i look at it is is that it's sort of like the core of the the braid that we need to have the the um the backbone and i i would say even more explicitly for the academic side of the house it means whenever we're going through and creating any curriculum adopting any new books that you always have this connection and being really explicit about that do these materials represent our kids you know we have these backgrounds of lgbt you know the lgbtq plus and actually there's a much longer acronym now there's i a plus two it's a little bit longer um my kid just taught me that and there you know just making sure that we are focused because
034we you know we bring in a new curriculum you know i know that in the budget we're talking about a math adoption within a year you know piloting next year and really doing the math adoption well we need to make sure that focus on equity is part of that work it cannot be separate it needs to be included you know tomorrow evening you're all going to be hopefully approving your new director of equity achievement and belonging and that's a really important role in this district it's going to keep that focus there um so it is part of the umbrella and we have to we want to hold each other accountable to that well you know when you bring something new or you're hiring or you're always having that lens in the work that you do
035um you know and i would push even further with hr with sam i would say for part of the recruitment maybe we as a organization need to be more explicit in our hiring i've seen districts do things like searching for an anti-racist principle like literally naming those things um you know and sometimes you have to be that explicit but i think having this umbrella is really key because it just helps us center our work observations from everyone else so this is when khadija we get to have fun with everybody popping in and thank you um julie for starting that laura what are you thinking i was going to say pam we may have to popcorn to prom i know i know i know i'm i'm interested in what laura's thinking um well i'm actually anxious
036to get to the actual priorities and focus areas um and i definitely appreciate all that i've heard thus far and i would just like to add that if we could really implement our equity rubric that really is how diversity equity inclusion is formally introduced into all of our work good anna i um yeah i'm just kind of like laura ready to get to the meet but i also really enjoyed um didn't want to lose something that trish said how important in all of these different areas it is to have that authentic engagement with community and students and know who our clients are who are we serving right and like um just really make sure that authentic engagement and it's interesting because dei can be defined it's defined so differently right by all of us so
037in some sense it would be really nice if we had just one definition but it's also really beautiful to hear the diversity of voices um but i think also like you know making sure that we we are always um accountable and pushing ourselves to do better by having these authentic moments with our students and with parents so i really appreciate sharing that i'm curious too about john's fee i know he's he's on vacation right john kalis and so um how the cabinet worked to get kind of john's input just on his work on facilities and transportation and would love i don't know if the cabinet has any input on that or brent and um but i'd love to see how uh what john also thought about these focus areas just because his work is so
038important and not everybody gets to always hear about it yeah i can jump in i appreciate you asking the question so um john has been a part of every every sort of step in this process and that included the original brainstorming of these focus areas that took place in a cabinet retreat about two months ago i would say i mean in fact um had we not been required to postpone our first meeting john was prepared along with max to walk the to walk the team through his completed matrix so it is prepared at some point i know that he would love the opportunity to share it but we'll be sure it gets into the board's hands and know that he's just been involved every every point of the way um just couldn't be here this
039week because he is um as you may have heard tried to get into yellowstone which is closed because of the biggest blizzard of the century apparently so he's he's now on his way home no yeah that's terrible but i'd love to pour it on but i'd love to hear his analysis at some point because it's so um fundamental to how we serve our kids so okay ty how about you um i guess i would say i also you know what trish said really resonated with me both for the reason anna said um and just because it epitomized for me how sort of what i love about how staff driven all of this is and seems to be and and that um just i mean hearing trish talk about like you know um real you know
040communication in real time and so even though that particular anecdote isn't really what your job is to pick up the phone and talk to the person who's calling berkeley high um the way that you talked about it as an expert in communication like cabinet you all um you know you are the experts you all have the professional expertise that we as board members don't have and yet the sort of structure of our meetings and the way we the structure of the district um you know puts us up at like the top of the org chart we have we have every other school board meeting is you know us you're just asking me questions are you presenting to us and so pam i really appreciate this format and and i and i think it's also just
041a good reminder of you know the different things we bring we uh hopefully the five of us bring important things to this enterprise but really it's just that our roles you know we have a particular role which is setting policy passing the budget um but i like the way this is kind of reorienting us to the professional expertise of staff because nothing we do really matters um if it's if the day-to-day work you know isn't what it needs to be and you all are the ones who know what it needs to be and how to do it so um anyway i'm looking forward to it i appreciate the structure of this whole thing khadijah yeah my observation is that i also appreciated um the structure of this and i appreciated um especially learning about the
042intersectionality of all of this i think you know as educators we know and we understand from our lens how everything is connected especially when we think about the core which will be which is our students but it's really great for our community who will hopefully watch on youtube if they're not here now um to see it to see this as well um and especially i think we're moving in the right direction um knowing that or having dei as the overarching goal um because you know as we said in board meetings before as we said publicly um equity is everyone's job right diversity is everyone's job inclusion is everyone's job and so having that overarching umbrella uh driving the work is important right i think what happens my just my observation as reuben was saying earlier
043what happens is when we think about academics right that's typically where we think about equity happening or where we talk about equity happening but equity happens everywhere throughout the district and so this is the opportunity to kind of shine a light on that which i think is important um and uh oh the other thing is uh your question pam in the beginning about the focus areas um i think they're perfect i don't think there's anything uh missing from them or anything that we needed to add i think that was your original question like is that something that is missing um and i don't think we are missing anything at all i think we're on the right track but i'll know more when we get to to the meat of everything thanks for the opportunity to
044chime in yeah pauline any comments uh well physical you know goes through everything that we do um the only the only comment i would have is that a lot of times pistol is always kind of trying to catch up with what's going on so i think um if we were involved um and some of these projects are discussed so when we have initial grantors we can provide some input up front about fiscally how this is going to roll out so we don't have a lot of confusion after um it's been implemented a lot of times we're implementing so many things and we're moving so quickly that um basic steps sometimes get missed and then there's all of this catch-up afterwards so um recently i've been involved in the um in the city of berkeley mental
045health grant and i'm talking to the grantors and we're having a discussion of how we're going to set up the grant the fiscal people are there it's very clear we know our codes we know budgets and it sounds um it sounds very you know mundane but you know putting together like 30 40 projects all at once and the questions that we keep com keep getting they're the same you know so it gets a little um frustrating i think for fiscal to be always kind of trying to play catch up understand what's going on presenting reiterating the rules so um i think we just need to be um probably get us involved a little bit earlier in the process so we're all on the same page great okay reuben let's move onward to stop changing that
046level of participation everyone and additional questions from laura and then one from me okay thank you i just wanted to um confirm that safety is included in wellness and belonging i mean it could be implied there but it's not really stated anywhere were you guys thinking that's where safety belongs laura when you say safety are you talking like physical safety are you talking about coved like physical safety comments from anyone about safety it's a good catch laura i think how about the rest of you i agree um you know we've been having so many conversations about safety you know since roughly january but sort of much more intensely after recent news um i actually i think this would be a good conversation for us to go back and have um that's just sort of as
047i'm thinking about it laura that's where i think it naturally nests would be in the wellness and belonging category um curious to know what everybody thinks of that though yeah i think it's important to understand that not all these projects cleanly fall under one category so we all had to make choices here as we were um identifying our projects and where they go and putting them in what it's probably the the category that is that that falls under the most um but i have some projects that touch on safety uh that are not under wellness because for me they nested more under revolution processes systems or or other areas but i think that the more direct safety specific projects i agree would be included under the wellness uh i was just gonna add that um
048i have one section which is emergency incident or critical incident response which has some safety components uh relative to that and that is where i put it under wellness and i also put covet under wellness and i just want to echo max putting it under the modernization and the processes and procedures because i think that a lot of pieces of safety is is having things in place ahead of time um to help prevent things from happening so i i agree with both trish and max in terms of where it could fall khadijah did you have a comment i'm not on this so i didn't want to interrupt the conversation on this was going to continue muted okay so this conversation was perfect if we talk about workshop process just popcorning being able to as laura
049did bring up what about this and having people respond that's what you want in these informal sessions and they're very informative that way so what i'm hearing everyone say is you know uh brent let's take this back and talk as a cabinet and when we come back uh the end of july that we add safety probably to wellness and belonging and laura thanks so much for pointing that out it was a really good discussion well i but i i think the what i heard is that it doesn't fit just in one because i do think very importantly it belongs in systems as well so i think it's a good example that these things are cross fertilizing so i you know so i would just do that caveat that i think it fits in systems and
050i forget what the other category is called systems and systems [Laughter] good point julie any other comments on the focus areas so reuben let's move forward or were you going to say something reuben well i know khadijah had a question still and i want to make sure we get his questions questions well it wasn't a question it was just something that i was going to add to my observations um just to really highlight how important it is to have these focus areas um from something that pauline was saying that kind of triggered me like when we think of all of these new things we also have to think about how to fund them we have to think about how um you know how much work will be on staff or think about how it happens
051um but my original observation is that when we talked about i think it was on slide eight um the uh chart that we see often um that is identified as our board priorities that's actually just our our writing list of things that we've been saying we want and i think it's important to highlight that because it is very different than this professionalized practice that we're doing right now which identifies priorities for us and so that was an original part of my observation that i wanted to call out um because this is our first opportunity to really develop priorities together as a group um and so that's what this is and i just wanted to to highlight that and anna you're you were quiet i want to hear your observations for me um i think i
052kicked this off right or like i followed right after time you did i just wanted to know what you thought of the process so far how's it going you and laura were part of the ad hoc committee with pauline and sam and you're used to this sort of thing this sort of workshop but it's new for everyone else and i was just wondering i like it i miss being in person there's something about the stickies and moving around and breaking out into small tables that i missed from the ad hoc um i don't know i'm you know i'm coming in this with with an open mind but i do think for strategic planning it is nice to be in person and to have that small group discussion and to come back all together and then
053um go up and you know prioritize via via the anonymous sticky note and then look back and say oh many people thought safety could belong here or here you know like yeah that part of strategic planning i kind of missed um and i hope that and i don't know if in july it's possible to do that in person with the cabinet because i just think um there's more like creative thinking sometimes when you actually get to have these smaller group breakouts um so i missed that um but i will say that there there are things that are like tran i know that we're gonna hear i'm sure that john has thoughts on transportation and equity and how it runs now he does wrong feelings about this right and so like okay i want to keep
054going and see what did he think or where did that belong right um like laura curious about things that that could fall in different you know in different buckets and also miss just having that small group discussion where we talk creatively about how things can fit in multiple buckets and you know look visually at how you know how this whole team right see where where we see different things fitting so maybe that's a july kind of part two kind of thing that would be wonderful i had talked told ty ty you will remember this part of workshops is being able to have fun together and um i have a hat activity that i told ty that i would have to send him a hat even if he was on zoom and we were all together
055uh and it speaks to what you were sharing on it just that interactive nature that workshops in person provide i miss that too thanks for bringing it up okay ruben are we ready yeah so i'm gonna be introducing the matrix and i'm assuming based on the agenda we have that we before we jump in we're gonna take a break right after i introduce the matrix is that the plan yes okay so let me share my screen so this is before you get started i just want to i'm sorry ruben i just wanted to give kind of a um higher level thinking of the research this matrix that we have constructed is research based and it's provided to you and if you look and reuben's going to go through this in detail but i just want
056you to know to prioritize projects projects are nested by departments and divisions under each of the five focus areas and as you all talked about this can change you know many projects can can really reside under a variety of these five focus areas but here's the cool thing for boards and cabinets to be able to work together you may have priorities one year where you want to introduce new initiatives and you specifically can say i would like all of us to integrate this under one of the focus areas so you're actually driving the strategic focus of the district that's that's the beauty of having these five focus areas or let's say that someone's working on re-engineering uh let's i'll pick on sam hiring and when that project is almost done she may move it from
057one focus area to another and so when you have another workshop quarterly with nikki this becomes a road map for you all to work through together and it's very fluid that's the biggest thing i wanted to say it's fluid and that staff should be updating these monthly okay reuben go for it all right check my thunder there pam but that's okay i'm sorry but i wanted to give that emphasis no i appreciate you um so one of the things we did i'm gonna talk a little bit about process i think sharing a bit about how each one of us in cabinet took the sort of the dysfunction this template um and made it our own but then also how we gathered the information necessary for this template so speaking of that educational services i do
058have the largest sort of team in the district so i met with all my directors and sort of managers and had them essentially do a download of sort of the mandated projects core functions that they do other responsibilities major projects they're currently working on and or are planned for the following school year 22-23 and for some even that go beyond 22-23 and then of course any any projects initiatives work that they are currently doing or in going into the next year that actually is going to change some of the systems and the processes we make uh an example of something like this and actually i think it might be sams which is like the informed k-12 system is a new system that's brought into our district that's taking this paperless that's going to fundamentally change
059how we do our work and hopefully make it more efficient and then of course this one was a tough one i think for me personally because everything feels like it should have a priority and everything should be resourced which is what are the projects that we are you know we envision doing and either we haven't been able to get to yet or um we just haven't been able to resource to to do them and so you will see some projects and or samples of work that fits under that category for each of these sort of forwarded items that you'll see um you we try to as best as possible sort of figure out how much time is committed to this work um and for some you'll see hours um some people use it as portions
060of a full-time equivalent personnel like 0.1.05 of an fte of course that's over a span of a year we do know some projects are cyclical where there's a ramp up and then it slows down and it comes back um and then whenever possible if those specific budgets tied to them we try to include that as well and of course what years the work is being done and if it's you know work that happens every year versus just a time timeline project and the last thing is the whale and you see an image of an orca underneath the time and so pam asked us to note with the little symbol of a whale um any projects that are that really one are maybe cross departments but also take significant staff time to accomplish and that might
061be time outside the regular workday as well we have a number of projects that go beyond the workday that include engagement of the community for example and so you will see in each of our presentations uh the whale and for some of us we have pods of whales that means there's a lot of whale projects in there um so you will see that too but i think that's that's all of it um but we're really excited yeah go ahead yeah the only thing i would add is i want um everyone at the workshop tonight to understand that every department and district will focus on all five areas and of the focus areas and then there will be projects and initiatives that are listed under these bold headings so you'll see mandated projects core functions operating
062responsibilities the projects under those major projects that are identified in the 2223 budget cycle new and ongoing projects for district sustainability and reliability system and process re-engineering and projects that are currently not resourced as ribbon said or on hold now after the presentations we'll talk about application and synthesis for you when you do workshops how you can easily use these to then have discussions of how you add new projects in and put some on hold where resource where you don't have resources and that includes staff time and why the whales are important is it shows you especially board members as to how departments and divisions say we're overwhelmed with these projects these are the biggest time constraint projects any questions on the matrix i think it will be much more clear as people are presenting
063them after we take a break too but any comments no you're ready to get in the meat and potatoes i see it [Laughter] okay can i add pam i know that for for me personally when i did the activity with my team um and i asked them to think of the five focal areas so many of the things they listed were like one two three and four one two two three four five like so many of them hit for three or four of the the focal areas so it was really tough for me to decide which one to put it in but there was a lot of crossing between them yeah there there always is and the nuance of that is you as leaders everyone you know on participating in this workshop you can reprioritize
064and you can really say i recommend we focus under this strategic focus area this year and it changes the mindset for staff and students it really does so do we want to take a break khadijah let's ask everyone if you want to take a break thumbs up if you want to just keep on going thumbs down would you gotta use your thumb so if you want to take a break thumbs up keep going thumbs down all right people want to break them so we'll take one thanks okay um it's 5 35 should we say five minutes brent do you think it's good yes it works for me it's good five minutes so 5 40. let's just say 5 45 and then we'll okay that works 545 is perfect is that okay khadijah yes it's okay
065thanks pam uh-huh um i'm gonna be a few minutes late back i'm gonna move my car i'm in the office i'm gonna go move my car to in front of the building i got you pauline i heard you i didn't want my head on sorry i'm going to go move my car uh ruben so i'm going to be a few minutes late back are you in the office you've been on your own no no i i left i'm home now okay okay i'll be back how about the warriors and we don't have a board meeting thursday yay not yet anyways you're right not yet we may just decide to have one on thursday anyway just in your honor reuben hold on i i'm not sure you're gonna get me to it sorry it was a
066good game it was a harrowing game it was it was really good uh pauline will be back shortly she went to go move her vehicle um i think we were waiting for vice president habit insane why don't we bring up that next slide uh reuben i'm on it there it is okay um should we wait for pauline i think we can get started because max is first okay i just i i just want to talk about process for a moment so what's going to happen is you're going to now see the meat and potatoes the application as each department with their staff or will be meeting with their staff began to play with this matrix for the first time and um strategic planning is all about metrics and accountability and the ability to be flexible
067and to move things around so um that's new for everyone and i'm really proud of what the cabinet did at its starting point to share with everyone in this in this workshop but what we're going to do is all five cabinet members will present and after they present like max is going to start and then he's going to facilitate a workshop discussion with the entire group and share observations and um you know we want everyone participating board and cabinet alike rather than thinking with your critical hat on which is a really important part of this for the cabinet and the board but together to think about wow are there things that you didn't know this department did or how much they did um you know observations about staff's role and the whales you know the
068the time the huge time constraints with some projects that you might not have been aware of and so the education um that i know we all um in cabinet meetings myself included it's it's really fascinating to see what happens in this district and anna i'm so glad you brought up john because john kind of is a separate entity he's very unique from the other five departments isn't he and his matrix is really um he created the matrix and let and yet he has so much money that is funded um and uh you will see his because he will want to present it too and he did such a good job with it so i'm anxious for you to see the diversity within the cabinet for such a large school district as yours so max let's
069launch all righty let me share my document so uh before i dive in um i just want you to keep in mind um we were asked not only to list you know the new projects but the things that we do throughout the year that take up so much of our time and the tech department is really staffed to maintenance and support levels more than 85 90 percent of our time is spent just keeping the trains running supporting our users maintaining our existing systems and fixing things that break so you'll see that as we go through this that the largest chunks of time that our department spends are on those types of things i also want to take a minute to explain some of the conventions that i used on on mine particularly in the time
070column here if you see just a number with nothing else that number represents hours that we expect to spend on this over the next year if you see something with fte after it that means that this is something that takes up so much of our time that it was easier to express it in the number of full-time employees it takes so a 0.5 fte means that a full-time employee spends approximately half of their time doing this job also max did you say the hours were for the course of so like the school year yes okay thanks so um yeah and like reuben i i went through with my team and i asked all of them to to kind of list out the things that they do [Music] you know what categories they fall under um
071what focus areas they fall under and um like ruben we found that many of our many of our projects and tasks fall under multiple focus areas but we selected the one that we felt had the greatest sway over that project or or task um it's also important to remember and you'll see this repeatedly that no project lives entirely under one department so you'll see projects on my list i will have listed the hours that my team spends on it this also may fall under other lists also i'll have projects on here that i have not yet started or unfunded that maybe more than one of us is working on and we haven't yet gotten you know because it's not yet a funded uh project we haven't gone through that process yet of of bringing it
072all together and reconciling everything so um for the sake of time i'm going to focus primarily on those things that are have the have the orca the whale which are the things that we're spending the most amount of our time on and for us of being technology that falls primarily under modern and efficient processes and systems so our team supports the network that keeps everything in the district running and that's thousands of access points wireless access points switches routers servers and all of that equipment has to be uh updated we have to apply software updates on a regular basis we have to back up back it up we have to replace it when it becomes end of life we have to um fix things that break and swap them out quickly to get everybody back
073up and running when things go down and that takes up a full half of one employee's job just just keeping that stuff up and running we also support the clocks and the the bell systems and the paging systems and the alarm panels and the cameras and all that's also thousands of pieces of equipment there's thousands of cameras in this district alone um thousands of speakers in our schools so that is three-quarters of a full-time employee's job just to keep those things up and running we also do the mandated reporting for calpads the california longitudinal longitudinal pupil achievement and data system which we have to report to multiple times a year requires ongoing maintenance and you know we we send up our reports from the information that's input by people in the schools in special ed
074in all different areas and sometimes something is wrong there's a conflict it spits it back out and says you have to fix this error or you can't report for your school so we have to work with departments to figure out what where that error is get it corrected and re-send it up that takes a big chunk of time in and of itself along with these various other mandated reporting tasks our student information system which um houses you know teachers take attendance on enter the grades in parents check the grades in attendance in students check the grades and attendance and all of the departments in the district utilize this to some extent we we spend more than a full-time employee between our multiple staff members supporting that in terms of the new projects that we have
075in this arena one of the biggies is of course our new hr and financial system rollout escape which we have been working on and you'll see this in multiple departments uh lists we've been working on all year and uh we launch in july and we expect to spend a lot of time on training and support and working out the bugs and also [Music] integrating creating new integrations to leverage some of the more advanced capabilities of the system which we don't have in the current system uh upgrading and revamping the low voltage systems the clock spells paging systems i mentioned many of these systems are past the end of life they're no longer supported servers need to be uh acquired and replaced cameras need to be replaced new cabling needs to be run this is something
076that is one of those areas where both john kalis and i are working on this and we're both in the stage of gathering requirements and costs and we'll bring this into better alignment after we've completed that stage uh among the projects that are currently not resourced or on hold um is the purchase installation set up of some sort of endpoint management system and this falls under the larger umbrella of cyber security for the district as you know cyber security has become a huge issue uh for large organizations and all large and all school districts nationwide cyber attacks have become much more prevalent in the last couple of years uh we need to make sure that we can protect our students data and keep our systems up and running and there are a number of steps
077that we need to take for that um one of those is um setting up some sort of endpoint management systems because currently um and this if we if it was um if it was resourced this would fall under system and process re-engineering because right now for instance if we need to install a piece of software on all of the computers we have to do it manually on each computer one by one because we don't have any sort of endpoint management system that allows us to push that out to all of our computers so it's very inefficient use of our resources so this is an important thing that we would like to get prioritized and funded max you have about six minutes left thank you for that mandated projects in the structured collaboration engagement includes providing
078we spend a lot of time providing guidance for various uh schools and departments on purchasing the technology to meet their needs and getting the best pricing and making sure that it's compatible in terms of academic excellence and equitable outcomes for for all uh the deployment of that technology spend we spend a whole lot of time doing that with our site techs we also spend a whole lot of time supporting the technology that is in the classrooms in fact that is the biggest chunk of time of any of the tasks we have on here once again looking at district uh uh system and process re-engineering we're looking at uh we have already started rolling out new av systems for our classrooms and we as the board approved on the june 1st meeting we have this new
079software approval process uh but uh there now that we've created the process all of the work has to be done to make that actually happen which includes reviewing and all of the software that is currently in use in our classrooms against the ada accessibility matrix and identifying alternative software platforms where items are not accessible also another project that is not currently resourced is moving the berkeley high school to the multi-year academic planner which would allow students to map out uh their courses over the entire term and the school identify where their gaps are in terms of yeah you see uh requirements um and graduation requirements and such so in summary uh i wanted to state again that no project lives in a single department all all of these projects require collaborative efforts amongst multiple departments
080um we are staffed maintenance and support levels so there isn't that much time for us to carry out these new projects because we're spending all of our time just keeping the existing stuff running some key statistics over last year closed over 11 000 help desk tickets almost a thousand a month supporting teachers side admins district staff parents and students we provided 4 000 new chromebooks and configured them in classrooms that's with 125 classroom carts of chromebooks getting replaced we issued 270 new spots in partnership with the ad hub and we replaced fully replaced the network equipment at three schools our projects last year included the launch of an entirely new student information system which was a huge time sink for us this year um multiple fte dedicated just to that project our staff were working
081extra hours all over the place and the transition to escape hr and financial system we got the grant funding to and purchased 2300 chromebooks for students to take home and 270 hot spots for students to be able to check out from the library we've been working with the admissions department on the new online registration process we have designed and gotten funding for a new district-wide dark fiber network we've been we designed built and tested in collaboration with the city for the city council meetings the ability to hold hybrid meetings in the boardroom with with participants and council members and potentially our board members both in the boardroom and [Music] connected in a distance uh zoom format and of course the coveted response has impacted every department in the district this past year has been just
082putting everything else on hold except for the very most essential things because uh as i'm sure trish will tell you it's just been a constant game of changing moving goal posts and changing guidelines and re-engineering everything um as we've gone so uh that's my list um i welcome comments and questions and reuben let's go back to full screen if we could of everyone and then max can facilitate the discussion is there anything that caught anyone's eye that you'd like to learn more about um anything that you didn't see on here that you felt should be on here um i'll jump in with things that caught my eye first it was really helpful um to see that time category and to see how much time staff is spending on a specific assignment specifically the fte like
083seeing how much of someone's job is um dedicated to a specific task i really appreciated that um i wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about your projected projects specifically the upgraded um technology systems um i saw you up there you have promethean boards um and i saw that the timeline from that is 2022 to 2026. is that right max yes um so this is not happening all at once uh some schools are uh are getting the new avv systems as the classrooms are modernized so they'll be done under the modernization and for those schools that that can't wait like um the for this this summer we did a number of classrooms at berkeley high school uh where they're not um where they have very antiquated systems and they're not going to be
084modernized quickly enough to uh address the issues that are there so it it's a combination of factors that's going to affect when each school or classroom gets their av system upgraded and it is going to roll out over multiple years max i really appreciate the work you put into this thinking of you know we framed the matrix sort of in the work around this diversity equity and inclusion piece and i know with yours it's a little different but i'm just trying to think of some entry points in the work i know when you know i was only in berkeley very short time one thing when i when i arrived that i noticed was that berkeley isn't technically a one-to-one district right we don't provide devices to all students you know we provide devices but it's
085not like a typical one-to-one district and i'm curious if there's you know is that a project for the future is that something that would eventually be part of this work and how does the equity piece fit into some of that work and the decisions around that um so as far as the equity piece i i really want to fall back to the fact that we have now provided check out chromebooks and check out hotsput spots in every library for any student who needs it so we're hoping that addresses the equity issue um because the in classroom use of devices um is right now based on the grade level so um and it's based on the use in the classroom so it's really an instructionally driven uh initiative whether we want to identify the funding for
086that i think falls back to whether or not we consider that an instructional priority for our district and how we're going to use how how we're going to use it in the classroom how we're going to train our staff on integrating it into their lesson delivery so it is not currently listed on here and it it though we do have one-to-one uh in i believe grades four through eight um [Music] and we have uh half classroom sets in grades three of chromebooks and we have approximately one for every two at the high school level so there is an extensive input implementation of chromebooks because they're not check out chromebooks if if you actually counted the number of chromebooks we have we have more than one chromebook in the district for every student right now but
087because they're not checked out to the individual students it doesn't work out to having one for every student in every classroom thanks max and and just jump in julie i had her hand up before i did so go ahead okay in a workshop we don't really need hands just just talk like we did in the ad hoc committees pretend we're in a room with a bunch of stickies yeah exactly okay exactly well think no thanks max for me i think the berkeley high multi-year academic planner was new and just learning about that and how it ties into a lot of like ed services work i'm just for me um trying to see how like how we can make that work happen because it seems like it's it's pretty important um and being able to support
088students too to meet their uc and csu requirements so that i just want to elevate the importance of that and then the other thing you know we've been discussing and i think it's great at the board meeting in terms of our budgeting priorities like language access interpretation but there's a big technology aspect to that too right like if we're talking about interpretation at meetings and making sure that the technology set up for that and language access and you know especially as we get to use more i don't know what the meeting situation will be like next year right like if we're going to be on zoom more if that's becoming a permanent thing but i just wanted to flag that that's a bucket of work that i didn't see there but i know it also
089impacts your department max because you know we need to be able to we want to as a board authentically engage with our families that are monolingual that are limited you know english proficient but the technology needs to be there to do that and so how do we introduce that into your very long list already and then have an open discussion where that falls into the priority because it's being flagged as a budget priority and so and that that's exactly the kind of feedback that we're hoping to get here and i've taken a note of that thank you and and just to add a point here that was a great example if max when you have a workshop and there's a request to do something and you don't have adequate resources or staff time then you
090say what do we put on hold and you use the matrix to begin to have this collecial collaborative discussion because we just can't keep adding on things right that's why we're doing this so this on ana thank you so much it's a great example of something that the board can have as a priority of course but then the discussion in that workshop with these matrixes is the most important thing and max your role would be to say i would recommend and with the cabinet and the superintendent to be able to say we would recommend xyz be put on hold for this year or three months and pauline would add in resources and so all of a sudden the decision-making becomes this feeling of not being directed but collaboration and and so that's exactly why we're
091doing this makes sense so um are you saying that you would like me right now to say what i i think we should save that but we're gonna start it right for everybody and and khadijah this is a great opportunity as you think about another workshop with with nikki you know these are are the things uh that we would do uh and remember this is fluid and what we want the board to react to on the 29th is the process julie um so thanks max this is really informative um and i think um you know the aha or the wow is just the amount you know and it you know it but when you see it the amount of just ongoing maintenance just to keep the systems up and running let alone trying to update
092them um and just appreciating all of the work that your team does to keep things operating and how it is involved in every single thing we do um so the question that popped into my mind is i think i can't remember if on one of the areas if if it was like 85 maybe it was in the summary slide if it was 85 of the time or the staff are on just basic maintenance of keeping things going and so my question was actually kind of a staff to um scale ratio and are we staffed in our id it department in a way that actually allows us to fulfill the work that we need to do and has there been an analysis of kind of our itc our department size compared to the the size of
093district that we are and are we are we right sized for the size of district or you know we also have this dynamic of where uh you know we're a small town with a big city mentality are we you know a small district with a big it mentality and you know that we're we we've bitten off more than we can handle so i'm kind of curious about capacity in that sense well i'm gonna i'm gonna get a little real here and i'm gonna say that um in this district we work very hard our our tech team works very hard our staff work very hard what we want to get to is a place where we are working very smart and that we are um maybe not working as hard and they're accomplishing more and um
094i think that part of part of the problem is and i you know i've only been with the district a little over a year now but um the district has for a long time focused on on a number of areas and new projects with a very with a limited staff and that has meant that [Music] some of these um modernization and process improvement tasks haven't happened as much as they have in other districts for the sake of implementing new projects and now i sometimes feel like we're we're kind of swimming against a river of oncoming support issues and things that are breaking because they're past end of life and they're no longer supported and we're just and we're constantly swimming as hard as we can just to maintain our place in this river and the
095reality is at some point we're either going to have to provide you know [Music] extra resources give us a little motorboat here to get us moving or we're going to have to take some time and swim off to the side of the river and during that process let ourselves get carried down stream a little bit go backwards a little bit so that we can stop and put those processes in place that allow us to work more efficiently and then we'll be able to walk up the side of the bank with much less difficulty uh instead of constantly swimming against a stream that we don't have the the the resources the strength to fight um so i i do feel that uh the one of the things that we need to be able to do is
096stop and step back and and put in those processes take the time to put in those processes uh which if we don't have the additional staff now um [Music] means that some things will have to wait longer so it seems like in your area as with a couple of other areas there's like some serious risk to not doing something so like when we look at the matrix we don't see what risk might be to not do something or i mean so right now there's like a lot of stuff in there and i'm wondering if through the cabinet discussion exactly what you're saying is if we need to step back in order to modernize something to just move forward if that's a worthy exercise for the cabinet to do because by stepping back there's unintended consequences
097of other because we're all connected of other things not happening so just wondering whether that's part of the process pam like as we start to map this stuff out looking at where the pain points are that could really throw us into a different position in a couple of years if we don't pay attention to it to the extent which might mean that we don't pay attention to something else right now so yes you're absolutely right i i want to say along those lines for instance i i have on here just an item about um you know cyber security there are things that i feel we really really must address in this just in terms of cyber security but in the public forum i can't outline what those are for you because that would create a
098risk it would advertise our weaknesses to the people who might abuse that but um i i do want to say that i i think that that needs to be a high priority that hasn't necessarily been as high as the district in the past uh and that there are significant risks if we don't devote the resources to going back and remediating some of these gaps i just wanted to kind of quickly jump in of course that's what workshops do all right just go for it okay well i mean i i just want to i guess you know appreciate this process it's in a way it's sort of obvious but but i don't think in my seven years on the board we've had a conversa conversations like this and um i'm just sort of reflecting on it
099and wish we had you know a couple hours for each of these buckets or whatever um because i have questions and have similar thoughts to what julie you know said about seeing all the stuff we don't normally see but just on like the structural point that um again is kind of obvious but i'm just reflecting on it is you know we as a board we pass you know we pass resolutions we um direct staff to do things like um like the middle school you know reassignment plan the take-up time what was that um uh um but but we don't it's not like we ever direct the it department to answer 11 000 tickets you know but and so when when we when we but but when we take action or issue direction staff has to
100do that because that's the board saying and that's how things work but um but because so much of what what you all actually need to do every day we don't see or even really know about um it crea it creates this impossible situation i really love your analogy your extended elaborate analogy max of the river and everything um because it seems like only we can't we can't have a workshop in every single decision we have to make but i really like that we're sort of setting up this you know process for at least the most important things or as much as we can um because it's a zero-sum game there's if we don't add capacity it's a zero-sum game unless a bunch of people a bunch of our employees are just sitting around doing nothing
101which i don't think any of us think um you know there's only so much people can do in in a work day so um i'll stop there but but i like this and looking forward to the next iterations of it wonderful i'm going to keep us moving but that was a perfect workshop discussion it really was and um it's exciting to hear that you like the format and that there's an educational component and that it feels very very collaborative and thank you very much can i just ask him is it but it wasn't actually a perfect workshop discussion because if we were actually having a workshop we would like wrestle with the answer to you know we'll you know honor propose this so what are we going to not do or whatever so this is
102like a work perfect um [Music] could be if we were to continue it right it's a model this is just workshop number one you know and you've never done them before but if there's a pain point that comes up on the board you can recommend to khadijah and and nikki let's have a workshop and then um the cabinet provides input and their expertise and you do wrestle with things and come to consensus um on on recommendations moving forward before you have to vote or before you even lots of times after a workshop you don't need a resolution so um it's an efficiency that boards and cabinets do um and you learn so much with one another your different perspectives so these these were great examples and anna kicked it off so thank you for that
103so um we're going to move pauline to last because the money's so important and um sam you're you're on [Music] i guess i should unmute myself so that you guys can hear me all right um try to make it big enough so um mine you're gonna see some colors so you're gonna see in this first focus area a very big whale um because this folk whole focus area is a huge amount of time um that is spent in my department um so when i spoke earlier i talked about uh recruitment and recruitment you're going to see multiple times different pieces of it so here the focus is on the budget part of recruitment um and that's you're going to see that piece on there um you'll see the green which means that it's something that
104other departments are involved in it and i see i have a spelling error that i'll fix later um you'll see like max just talked about with escape um so you'll see on here in terms of major projects for this next year um i also have escape on mine um with less hours than what uh max is looking at for his department um but still hr will be um dealing with quite a bit of work um and then um if we go to the second focus area again another big whale you'll see recruitment again a lot of focus on um in here about the different processes and the technology that we've done and all of that you'll see escape again and the new position that you guys created is down here under major projects um the
105new position that was created at our last board meeting um and then here we have um informed k12 which was one of the things that was already mentioned that we do have budgeted that is helping us to re-engineer things and create our paperless forms and then one of the things that is on hold one of the only things in hr that's on hold because so many of our things are mandated is the fact that we do need to scan and digitize employee records uh we're still dealing with paper files um and so there's an estimate on what that might cost um because it wouldn't be a one-time thing it would be a an ongoing system that we would need to use um and i'm estimating that we would possibly get to this in 24 25
106school year in terms of focus area number three in terms of collaboration and engagement specifically working with the unions working with other departments working on discipline because it's never just one person involved in the employee discipline working on our evaluations um one of the whales is um contract negotiations especially this year we have all four unions that are going to be at the table local 21 is the only one not at the table quite yet um and so that takes up a lot of time um both for the actual negotiations as well as the implementation of those negotiations um and then one of the things that has been needed and that we're working on is a nuts and bolts training for all of our administrators and managers to help support them in dealing with multiple
107things so you'll see that under our thing the items that need to be re-engineered um and then for um focus area number four for academic excellence you'll see recruitment again and retention um sorry the dogs are playing behind me um and so you'll see that recruitment again here is also a whale um this is all of the work that we do to um actually find people um and to um bring on all the different types of workers and most of this area is folk is actually funded through bara including our retention and then one of the projects that i have for this next year is to really create a true plan um to help increase our recruitment and retention with measurable goals and um all of that um and working with our educators of color
108to do that so that plan is sitting there as a major project for this year coming up and then in wellness and belonging you'll see uh like employee orientations which is how we welcome employees into the district um the attendance and leaves which is a big whale takes a lot of work about working on leave processing in the subsystem health and safety there's that safety word um which involves working together with risk management workers comp uh doing the ada pro interactive process as well as any religious or medical exemptions that we have to process and then again retention supporting having a supportive culture and climate addressing employee concerns and making sure we're getting timely responses and so one of the projects under there that has to do with re-engineering is continuing to improve our customer
109service on our processes to make them more user-friendly and responsive to our stakeholders and that is everything so i i know i was very quick um sam could you just clarify what your time allocate is that per month per year just with a time frame uh it's approximately um most of them it's per year some of them it's it's per month um i wasn't consistent unfortunately but most of them are it's um per year and then you'll see where i have fte where it's a lot and sam do you want to facilitate the discussion about your presentation sure um so i'll stop sharing for right now um and any observations questions i just have a clarifying question and maybe i missed it but under the um item for budget there there isn't anything does that
110mean that i know this is not true but does that mean that there aren't any you know budget implications or what was your thinking for that i don't have anything prescribed specific in my budget towards those things so i have a very um small operating budget uh most of my budget is fte um and so um there are a few items that i have specific budgets for through bara in terms of recruitment and retention but very little of my budget is specific to um certain topics it's more of generalized operating that's more specifically what i was meaning like retention and recruitment for example you know i'm thinking that maybe for your goal that you brought up around um you know working with the teacher of color network to for retention and recruitment that could be
111something like going to hbcus to recruit um but you know there's going to be need to be an associated budget with that unless we can you know just get get a free plane and um and on that part i did actually put on there there there is i believe it's 30 000 that we have towards recruitment um that we can use for those type of things as well as materials um and all of that kind of stuff holding our own fare we did hold a fair uh on the cheap this year um and um we're hoping to expand that next year um because it was a sensitive time not everybody wanted to come out in person um so um but we're we're hoping to expand that and yes uh visiting h uh hb c's and
112l that um are is definitely a piece of it that we want to work on um as well as making sure we're getting advertising out there not just on edge lines as well as another budget item to think about yeah thank you kadesha and thanks for your work on this i'll just can i say something at a high level pam of course i feel like we have under the diversity equity inclusion lens all these great ideas right like same with but like we're not really getting to the reducing work part we keep coming up with great ideas for every time the staff exactly so i get it this is your point but like in budgeting essentially through the budget we are adding a bunch of more work right and so i just want to call
113that out we're all on the same page and so uh unless you know i'm i'm feeling like everything needs to be workshop more like how how do we get to the results i guess i know that there's a beautiful process here pam i'm like how do we get to the resolve where we actually help the staff and be able to prioritize because right now at the same time that they're telling us we're tapped out we're adding a bunch of new stuff through the budgeting process and um yeah one thing that's not there sam in your presentation but i just want to call out that's also important is like in negotiations your role on boarding a new superintendent is that's a lot of time too it's not capturing this you know you know that's gonna be
114a you know a lot of work that you're about to take on and so we're not calling that out and i i feel like it would be great to call that out too i mean there are hours so you're you're going to be on boarding a whole new team and that's going to be a big chunk of your time too yeah you know it's so important isn't it everybody um honest comments and i know you're all thinking the same thing and the most important part of you this group supporting moving forward and kind of jumping parts of the strategic planning process to get to this was for this discussion and if you really like this format then it's easy to want to support it on the 29th to then put a process together with nikki
115of what you would do to address these things in a workshop format yeah because i was gonna i think on a you're it's so right to like call that out i think and um and uh i had the same kind i had the same question and i know we're not getting to that tonight um to me the answer is we have to restrain ourselves until we get until we actually have those the real workshops or if we all agree agreed on that kind of process and that and that it doesn't to me i mean maybe pam i don't know i'm curious whether whether you feel like this is true it doesn't for every it's not like we have to have a full special board meeting for every for everything there could be like one once
116part of this is just um like us like having that realization of the the of it being a zero-sum game and figuring out there may be different iterations of this that don't have to be as robust if it's yes well i think we should do you know i'd like to do this thing and and and sort of having a culture of the superintendent saying to to me as a board member okay but we're going to have to figure out what the what gives them if if the rest of the board agrees with your majority of the board agrees with you that we should do this and so maybe that doesn't look like a full workshop maybe it looks like doing it through some one-on-ones or having a brief a briefer conversation at a board meeting
117but i too would like to i don't know where it fits in like figure out going forward in the short term how we actually operationalize this yeah good it's pretty easy to operationalize it really tai it is and um what's important is to flip you know the excuse me that's the timer is up for the time it's my by the seaside sorry sam that was your timer um but to to know that staff will give you i i was saying flip the wedding cake upside down staff can give you recommendations their recommendations and then you have discussions and they can move quickly so it's not that the board has to come up with all the conclusions its staff's role to really bring to you a lot of different models that you could choose from that's
118great i like that the other way that it made me think of um [Music] sam again because you're a backbone department you know there's certain things by compliance by regulation you just have to do you don't have a choice um and it goes back to me kind of this question is what does it mean to be under the umbrella of diversity equity and inclusion and might there be some sys i don't mean systems change like i t systems but systems protocols you know ways we work that not only might be you know proved to be potentially more efficient but like it's a replay there might be some reprioritization under this vision around diversity equity inclusion like if we want to do a much more proactive engagement and outreach into communities of color and the hbcus
119etc that again becomes the trade-off and there's probably some training in the right people we need to do that so that is part of the strategic planning is also operationally what status quo and what might we actually need to shake up a little bit and if we shake it up what what risk is there that you know something might move slower because we're actually going through a change management process and i think about that within hr you know because there's so many things that we just have to do but there might be some things that we want to do differently but it's going to take some work to figure out how to how to do that and take the existing staff and look at that you know look at what it would be so those
120are some of the things that pop you know that percolated into my mind and julie as far as process what you just brought up is so important because the next iteration phase two really would be doing just what you said only getting student and staff input and it's amazing what they say you know and and provide and it can be done quickly so just think about that i guess the question what i'm not what's not shouting out at me is like from departments this is our goal what what i'm getting really clearly is the weight of all the work that's happening i'm not getting at at the end of f at the end of sy you know 23 this is what i'd like to see that we've done and we've pivoted or didn't pivot you
121know maybe we're not pivoting um so that it's not just the it's not just a checklist but we've been able to make some strategic decisions that are often hard yeah brand any any observations on that um no no i'm really valuing this conversation first of all i'm glad to just sort of you know see it happening and i can see sort of lots of ways that that it can happen in the future um you know in terms of those sort of strategic pivots julia i mean i think that this is exactly what we're looking to accomplish is that in the context of all of the work that we're doing much let's say 90 of it has to happen no matter what um that there's sort of agreement on part on the part of cabinet and
122the board about what that sort of ten percent of change looks like um and and so this you know sort of sits more manageably inside of the department's overall workload and i do think that you know as a next step for cabinet we could very easily take this back um and sort it particularly in that sort of new work category which is trying to illustrate sort of things taking place next year that will be new to be able to write out goal statements you know what would it look like if done successfully the template would lend itself really easily to that i think we want our goals to also include our regular work though i don't think it's just the 10 of new stuff yeah that could be yeah a really good discussion okay i'm
123going to keep us moving sam that was fantastic um really cool okay now we get to the big gorilla ruben whales gorillas is his work the big gorilla or yes it's when you think about ed services and and when i learned what's under that umbrella it's that is the big you know huge somebody reminded me today that gorillas are vegetarian and they're very healthy so they might be big because i'm very healthy healthy i appreciate you julie thank you sadly i'm not i'm not a vegetarian but thanks so i don't know even where to begin it is a monster department with lots of different pieces um and it could be very over overwhelming very fast because just listing off the different departments that are currently under the associate superintendent um there's a lot i will
124start with i did not include the budget column because there's that would there's a variety of reasons i could i could put in there but there are lots of budgets you know i would say the majority of the district budgets a big chunk of it goes to this department and who we serve um so starting with fiscal stability and responsibility uh you can see that i listed quite a few and i used the fte nomenclature i didn't do hours um and these are really rough estimates um and there are some items here that are probably greater um and i'm actually shortchanging them on how much time it takes because it is cross-departmental and there's lots of people involved but you know in the mandated projects you have everything when i think of fiscal stability responsibility
125your site plans your state federal compliance your lcap which is obviously a very big task but it is connected directly to the budget we work hand in hand with pauline and her department and it can also withstand hr um and i included wales next to the state and federal compliance if this is done wrong or not paid the attention it deserves it does cost our district money whenever there are findings and errors so it's really critical that that has the attention it deserves similar with lcap we don't want to be out of compliance other wales i included the amount of hiring i know hr does a significant lift in the hiring process but head services actually spends a significant amount of their time supporting supporting hiring throughout the district everything from special education personnel before
126and after school staffing tsa's principles you name it we're pretty actively involved in hiring uh another piece under ed services this year um we did move in kathy fleming with the piece of bear works i've been sort of intimately involved in that work um and yes we have a director director working just with this item which is great but it does involve the rest of the ad services team it involves a number of our managers who support programs and you can see that obviously that directly ties to the fiscal area i'm going to try to talk fast because there's a lot on here um you know not only are we dealing with k-12 we also have adult ed um that i have been working closely with tom reed at the berkeley adult school i currently
127serve on the northern eliminator county adult school consortium and that's some meetings as well and then of course we have an amazing cte manager someone's chatting i'm not sure can't see you but someone's on i don't know who needs to mute it's okay um you know with wind skills i'm fortunate that he is in our district because he handles so much of the work around ct but then you know it's not just running programs there's reporting that's directly tied to the fiscal components this year it seems like every year we have new grants that are added that not only require obviously writing the grants to to receive those grants but also the management of those grant dollars and the reporting of those grant dollars and a big project that will be coming up that we're
128going to need everyone supported is the be set up reauthorization and you know that's on the horizon i'm gonna move down i will say one thing i struggled with was what to put on hold or what's not resourced i will own that but there's i would love to put many of these things on hold so many of them we can't because they are mandated yellow highlights i think we mentioned earlier for some try to highlight items that directly tied to priorities of the board so here as we move into modern and efficient processes and systems you can see examples of some of the work that we do some of my whales are not aligned perfectly so i apologize for that but this school principal development leadership support that's a big task and realistically it lands
129on the shoulder of sort of one person who really provides that support even though we all play roles in that and that is a really big task and that mostly supports the k-8 one thing i didn't note when i've completed this task that there's very few items referenced here that directly support berkeley high school and i think that's partly the structure we've set up in the in some ways berkeley high school has started to function or has functioned as a sort of standalone item where we need to really fold it into the work that the ed services team is doing highlighting the data dashboard work that's a that's a big project that neet needs to continue to develop sees as your the board is well aware we have two current plans with a third planet
130coming and we've we're adding some support ready coordinator for seasise it is definitely a whale of a project and with the goal of course is to not have to have a c-space plan because we've done everything necessary to change that the trends of disproportionality this year we've had a middle school assignment plan that's going to move into next year of course as decisions are made and we need to implement some systems are working to bring on board that would make things more efficient elevation is a software platform that is directly tied to english to learner student data tracking um and that was that implementation started this year but we will be fully launching that next year um we've made some shifts in our special education programming bringing services back in-house and that's definitely to support
131ongoing efforts i'm hitting you with a lot this is like said the gorilla structured collaboration and engagement you can see the number of different committees and um groups that we work with in ed services from our pac dlac we have um partnerships with usdapi latinos vetoes berkeley we meet the pta council the ed services team itself meets and collaborates as a team we um encourage the school visits the principal supports the cac meeting which is around special education all of these are meetings that happen either monthly more more than one time a month or um quite often and involves a number of the ad services team the pno is a community that beats every other month or actually twice a month um then we have these other processes like the two-way version recruitment assessments for
132enrollment that has taken a considerable amount of time and work that is a change that we made in the enrollment policy specifically for silva mendez when we went to the third one third and one third model for enrollment and that's added some layers and complexities to the work and then of course certain major projects we brought in pk which we will continue next year and the b sub pre-authorization is also listed on this page here this is an example of a project or an item i would say we should potentially put on hold which is peach guy is another family engagement component we did for els we did sort of multi-layered programming this one was less successful and i would say yeah we could probably drop that one off you can see how hard it
133is for me to find things to drop off here's the fourth area which is the academic excellence and echo outcomes for all and you can see that so much of our work should land in under this one umbrella and you can see um i did include a bullet and i have to say this when i first shared this with cabinet team this first bullet support of standards-based alignment instruction curriculum training and feedback to teachers was not on my list and it was not on my list because as i collected information about it what everyone is doing in my department this didn't come up because it has become in some ways an afterthought because we're so focused on all these other things when really i would say that should be the bulk of our attention um
134but that's just sort of what we're finding and some of the challenges we see we're we have so many other things that we're focused on that that's the real that key bullet that needs to be priority number one for us you can see the work we do around english learner compliance just psas lcap all beyond the academic side of the house summer school is a major intervention that we provide that takes a significant amount of time from current head services team and additional people we bring on board we not only do adult school we also handle early childhood education and we have the pre-k programming berkeley is phenomenal they have their cooking and gardening program that's another area we also have a significant amount of professional development both certificated and classified that we have to
135manage and provide support for the bapa and library services course assessments both local and state assessments ethnic studies development actually listed as a 1.0 because you know we have a dedicated person that's a singular person that's focused on that work which is really nice but it also shares with me that maybe we need more focused personnel for some of these items we've added math adoption as actually i probably should be dropped down to major projects for 22.23 that will be a major project here highlighted are some of the major projects under the academic area we're developing the multilingual master plan we brought puente on board for next year as year one latino family literacy african-american success framework and the work associated with that we know that is a big group of items underneath that umbrella
136but we can't forget that we have the literacy action plan which is a three-year process it was prompted by the dyslexia settlement agreement that is significant amount of work that will continue into next year really next year being year one of that work the equal literacy development which is supporting that curriculum development how we implement that all those pieces we have ongoing support for things like emoji which we would love to expand in health years at some point um and then i just listed a couple things like we will need to do a science adoption at some point if we are going to expand puente them to other schools just like we might expand emojia to other schools that's items we would have to consider and lastly the wellness and belonging and i will say
137this is not even a comprehensive list there's a lot of things missing on this document but we obviously offer bears and learns um to our families we have programs like the black history or torquefest latinx heritage month api month celebrations that's just a few of those others on that list as well all the work around mental health and over um oversight um we have work associated with resolutions black lives matter's latinx college bound is a program we offer at the high school level and then we have a partnership this coming up with city of berkeley around this mental health grant that plan is being developed and should the implementation would start next year in the fall there's ongoing programs around disciplinary tricks to redevelopment revision and of course the attendance monitoring star processes were always
138trying to improve those that i think is everything or not everything i'm sure i'm missing many things but help me prioritize please so can i um the one thing that i think would be helpful for me is um i think this of all the departments would benefit from having each department do their own versus trying to lump it all into one like i think because you know special ed ed cert i mean each of those are a big kahuna in themselves um and it it would it would be helpful for me to like actually look at those potentially separately with maybe some big picture goals you know around that so because it's hard to decipher like you know priorities within that because there are priorities within each of them so that that's one kind of
139overarching thing um the other overarching thing is um i didn't see ophe in engagement um and it's something that i think is actually one of our keys to i'm sure it should be there but i think as an oversight i don't know if it was intentional because i don't think it's just a well-being thing i think it's actually a key strategy to um authentic engagement with our with our families so just curious on yeah we're with that so julie the the reason that's a good catch and the reason i i think kofi isn't there is because i served as a director of ophi technically and i think when i was developing this with my team i didn't do my own like i didn't do my own separate ophe department piece and so it's just an
140omission yeah they're squarely in that um that group like i said this is i know i'm missing things there's there's so much that could be included in there but that there's a whole department there that needs to be a part of it and you know as you think of this as drafts it's really helpful to think about you know reuben julie's recommendation isn't it for everybody cabinet i'd be interested in and board how or the team you know um if you would like more specificity from departments you know is would that be helpful what do you think one thing that that i'm like struggling to like um feel is really helpful is the fte breakdown um when you don't know how many total fde you were talking about in a department like it doesn't it
141just doesn't mean anything to me then it's 0.025 i mean it tells me an amount of time but i don't does that mean that um you know what percent of the department is is working on this one thing so maybe it's just as simple as we've got 10 fde and here's how they're divvied up on this matrix something like that but my eyes are kind of glazing over looking at those the hours too it's like well 800 hours sounds like a lot but 800 i don't know i don't know how many hours are in a year or you know what that really translates to so that's just a formatting i guess piece of feedback i'm not sure if other and if other people don't have that issue then never mind but um or something i'm
142struggling with a little well and i think it's infrared services the one thing when i look at this i think about sort of my org chart and the work that's done um you know we have a coordinator of certificated professional development we have a k a schools director in many districts you have a director of either elementary or secondary curriculum that's really tied to that work that doesn't exist in this structure and to me that's a glaring piece of that so when it wasn't surprising to me that that didn't come out of me collecting information from my team w's fantastic debbie's primary focus i would say 90 of her job is being sort of the go-to to our site principles for everything you can imagine and even though as much as they have conversations around
143pedagogy and feedback to teachers that's very minor compared to the work she does with her teams and supporting the schools and then factor in our structure we have currently with the high school and you know where how do we bring that into the mix of this work and that would be my honestly a big recommendation for nikki as she comes in um as the superintendent has the opportunity to hire this position my first thought was hire someone with secondary experience if you can just because you you need that connection to the ed services team in the high school and ensuring they have that support um so those are some things that come out of this work or this prioritization that i see is how can we structure at the ed services team so they could
144be more successful have more time to really talk through the academics and spend less of our time sort of putting out fires essentially i think that's a really good point because you know all of the work that you hold in ed services is so heavy like going through that list seeing all of the different aspects and and how so many it's over so many different departments but i think one thing that we lose um not lose but sometimes tend to lose focus on that needs to be highlight is like curriculum and instruction and i know that a lot of other school districts have specific departments or um you know ftes that are focused on curriculum instruction but the way it's built into our infrastructure is like you know everyone pretty much holds that work in
145the work in all of the rest of the work that they're doing um and so when we think about prioritizing um is that something that you know think about prioritizing the recommendations that you would have for nicki or have for the rest of us who will be behind is that something that you would consider wait can i ask can i add to that question is it that we just don't is there's a position we should have director of curriculum obstruction which we used to have years ago and we don't have it um or because it seems like well then who's going to put out all the fires that debbie's putting like so yeah so here here's my candid honest opinion on this i think that should be me right i'm the chief academic officer currently
146if everything was functioning the way it should and i wasn't spending as much time doing operational work or you know maybe overseeing admissions or overseeing like some of these other layers then i could spend more of my time focused on the academic piece really doing the chief academic officer work or debbie could continue to do some more of her operational supports i just think the reality of obviously coming off a pandemic that's been a challenge in this role and you know serving the associate superintendent is serving a different role here um and not just being the chief academic officer and i think that's just structurally what we have going the other piece i think is really important is like i said how do we bring the high school into this mix um because they they
147are a standalone entity right now they have their own professional development they have you know they have all these layers one last thing so berkeley and i remember seeing this when i came on board they're reliance on the tsa position to serve in some ways as experts of certain categories especially around curriculum it's great during the year when you have those teachers available but they're on the same teacher contract as classroom teachers so day 180 whatever they're done and so now if you walk through my district office the third floor it's a ghost town there's no one to plan with they're they're gone they're their jobs and when you really you could be doing a lot of that great curriculum work now with the team so i think there's just some structures potentially that need
148to be shifted reuben were there other ahas that you had with your team putting this work together um are they they're definitely you know i will speak to for example the eco-literacy work there's concerns on the team around where does it where does it actually fit in on our in our instructional minutes we know that it would be embedded in certain curricular areas but we are so tight on instructional minutes that is some work we've been doing with principles this year about like okay well how many minutes are we dedicating to reading instruction how many minutes are we dedicating to math instruction trying to get some uniformity across our schools and commitments really for that our minutes are extremely tight um so you throw one more thing in the mix you're giving something up essentially
149until you can really make that transition or fully embed that work so it doesn't feel like an extra in in what they're doing i think that's just the challenge we have structurally to help me put things on hold please no i didn't okay okay i don't think i have any like magic salute that life's so scary i'm still like i'm stressed out looking at that listen but like i i started this year with hair i did [Music] no one of the things well for equal literacy i was thinking you know and we had this discussion when we passed the resolution like you know the science curriculum the fact that we were redoing our science curriculum and kind of how it fits into that i think that's where i've seen other districts and particularly like sfusc
150right like and it's not everyone implements it's like an option right to put into the science curriculum at least in other districts and so um i don't have like a magic solution you know more than i do about this ribbon but that's one possibility my in terms of like strategic planning though what you were saying around like i should be the chief academic officer and um you know a lot of districts and i think pam i had like an offline conversation with you about this but a little bit but i know that a lot of districts are looking at columbus city schools because they really focused and narrowed their whole strategic planning process on defining um you know the portrait of a graduate that's unique to their schools like what does that mean and that
151was kind of their north star and their guiding compass for their strategic planning process and they really you know focus on like what do we want all our kids to leave with when they leave this district and i thought that was that was really great and then based on that they went into their priorities and objectives and they went into kind of their ed services work but really focus on building out together collaboratively like cabinet board that north star right our graduate student profile and i remember that reuben from from the ad hoc meetings you used to talk about that a lot and so any wisdom that you have for us since you're leaving right um that you think that would be important for us as board members to keep working with a new superintendent
152to help kind of define that and what do you think our north star should be as we think of ed services and specific planning for your department i def i definitely think some profile of a graduate would be really important to have to anchor the focus to the work especially on ed services you know and that could look a variety of different ways i've seen it done differently in different districts but it does provide like said that north star i was going to ask the board what you all felt the academic focus was for this district i was really curious could you name what the academic besides excellence and achievement what's could you name a focus area we do everything well that's it right well i always i mean my bucket tends to be around
153college and career readiness is that your graduates are able to you know get into csu uc or an alternative trade community college but that they're able to succeed in a post-secondary education um arena so that they can have their career in the future of their desire and then i mean there's a lot of work linked learning has done over the years around you know the graduate profile which is not like math reading you know it's not like hard curriculum it's like critical thinking skills communication skills and then it's what are the you know what are the things you use to build that so i really like that that frame um and you know we have i mean i think we have pieces of it um but we don't really have you know that kind of
154vision thank you you know it's so interesting um this discussion i just want to tell you this this is the core of a workshop this is it because underneath all of this you're really hearing each other you're defining things and i want to caution you not to be overwhelmed and to feel really good about this this discussion because you can continue this and the graduate profile has to be part of strategic planning that isn't an option as an expert in strategic planning uh it has to be how you do it how usually is you get your priorities um so that staff can rise to the top and begin thinking at a really high level a strategic level not being overwhelmed by implementing so many projects and that's why we started you know why you all
155wanted to start with this but all of that is possible and isn't that difficult to do so i want us to keep moving on yes well i ty had a comment well i'm just it's just that um yeah i think that that seems right and this is really good but and then this kind of goes to honest point before about and then at some point we need to get to like so for ben you said you know um we don't we spend barely any time on curriculum instruction and that's because of this structural issue and it's and then in response to well do we need a new job you said well no it really should be my job but i have too many of these things on my plate and so it seems like the
156next question is okay well then if i understand this process the next question is well then you um recommend to us what to take off your plate and we kind of have a discussion about it and it kind of goes to what julie was saying at a in the board meeting a couple board meetings ago where you were saying julie you know the elephant in the room about this whole process is we're taking things off the list and saying we we're not going to do these right now we're going to do these we're pushing them off and um that this process seems like a prerequisite to making those decisions or talking about that so that's great but then the next but that is the hard part when when we start taking people's you know things
157off the list that people want done now and so um and and i know you know rebecca sadly you're leaving us but it but it seems like the next step in this would be to have nikki you know look at that position and say well they're you know we want that person to be doing curriculum instruction they can't because they're doing they just don't have that many hours a day and so i'm going to recommend either moving these four things to somebody else or to the next year then we have that discussion i mean is that is that right in other words how do we get to the point where you're doing the job that you think you should be doing i think that's partly right i mean i'm not gonna you know budget cycles
158basically done when i'm not gonna ask for new positions to be added i think it's something as as we go into next year with the new associate soup and a new superintendent i think there should be a year of examining the ed services or chart and i think with new the new people on board like i would definitely look at that i would look at the the reporting structure of the high school i would look at all those factors recording structure of berkeley adult school and bta and how that all mixes and fits in and take the year with the new team to really really strategically think through how those systems are that the reporting system works and in the structure and if that means we move away from tsas and we had to pick
159up either a coordinator or a director in the following budget cycle then those would be the recommendations to make okay thanks so much and then when there's an assessment time uh for you all to look at this there are interim workshops as the ahas occur and so you're all up to speed as to how what one another's thinking but there aren't add-on projects in the interim yeah i thought i saw laura's hand up laura are you there did you want to add something yes i am here and i wanted to add something can you all hear me well yes and i can't see you so i couldn't see your hand i'm sorry okay no worry sorry my camera needs to be off at this second but my um i just wanted to really highlight that
160we do have well you kind of mentioned like we have teacher leaders we have professional learning communities we have ways in which curriculum is supposed to be standardized and rolled out and what i'm saying is it just is not happening and when you talk about the graduate profile in the climate literacy resolution it specifically talked about graduating students in the in their k through 12 experience climate literate and how you do that through the social sciences and how you do that through actual science and how you do that through the curriculum like we have zero waste classrooms right now who are leading this globally in the u.n what we don't have is buy-in on how we roll it out and standardize all of these things and so i think that's what a true curriculum person
161could actually do not just in through professional development workshops but in through the coaching and through going into the classrooms and doing those observations um and so initially that was what the k k-8 director was going to be doing was actually going into the classrooms and making sure that the curriculum was implemented in a standardized way now that shifted towards her working more on putting out buyers and just supporting students and other ways that's what needs to come to us in budget staffing recommendations it needs to come to us that we need someone to do this important work to standardize it because that is what we want and what we need we can't base standardize financial decisions based on our students not reaching standardized testing and we're not even sure the standards are being taught
162across all classrooms so that's all i wanted to add thank y'all thank you laura can i hop in on that and say um i fully appreciate what you're saying direct about it about um this wasn't the intention and and we need to communicate that to the board but as someone who's been here a little over a year and then struggling and i know ruben was here this time and i i didn't have that history i don't know if ruben had that history that that was the board's expectation so i'm wondering how we could set up a process that would allow us to identify um those gaps in the in the expectation i just want to throw that out there that maybe in this process we can we can figure out a way that we can
163make sure that everybody is on the same page on these expectations and ensure that we're working towards the same goals yeah the other elephant in the room is i don't think we can minimize the impact of covet over the last two years because even if even if we had the best of intentions we wouldn't have been able to do it so i think i mean i appreciate max your comment about there is history to how some of our our positions were we've always had the high school reports of the principal almost always you know i mean the superintendent you know that's kind of like the way it was always structured and so you know i think we have an advantage that you know the disruption for covid is we don't necessarily want to just go
164back to doing everything the way we did it before so we have a new superintendent we'll have a new associate suit so it is a good time to say what is it we really want to do and then what's the staffing and organizational configuration we need to get that to happen because i you know i think we need to be a little careful about beating ourselves up too much because you know we we we made lofty goals and then they constantly got you know especially this year even more than last year they you know we just had to survive so just want to throw that out there this was a great discussion and i'm keeping track of time at 7 18 and we need to be finished khadija at 8 15 for public comment we
165have two more presentations so we're doing really fine but do we need to take a five minute break i'm good to keep rolling if everyone else is did anna have i saw your hand i don't know yeah i just wanted to agree with what julie had said that we can't really minimize the impact of the pandemic and it's still not completely done right like there's all these issues that were exacerbated they're worse because of the pandemic we're still going to deal with it next year and so calling that out too and you know whatever future iteration of planning and prioritization we have just making you know things like surges right like what happens and what gets put on hold like we need to have those discussions because that's that stuff's not going away good okay
166so sorry that's okay should we keep going i don't think we need a break we're gonna keep going okay all right so um we go to trish next hello everyone um so communications department is uh currently two people myself and our full-time interpreter i wrote this looking at next year where we would have our 1.0 comms specialist that's a position that did just get um posted yay we have a lot of work to do so i'm looking forward to having that support uh and then i'm just gonna really briefly go through some of the things that the department um has done this year and will be doing next year and probably focus more at the end on covid and also crisis incident response and explain why that's challenging for the department so coms handles the
167school accountability report cards that's an annual report we fill out about each of our schools almost all of our work we do in collaboration with other departments translation and interpretation so that includes spanish and then we have contractors available to also provide arabic interpretation or translation and then interpretation for parent and caregiver and staff meetings meetings with counselors etc media relations is both dealing with incoming media requests and then also doing outbound pitches where we are trying to get media to cover some of our positive stories it has spokesperson work we escort media when they're at our schools we work with families to get media releases and we provide a lot of information to media upon request and then we work to fact check stories when they're live we handle three publications the a plus
168news the staff bulletin and the community report community report is an annual publication um and um the community report is sent to every mailing address in berkeley and so it has a budget relative to both design development printing and then mailing and then we also handle a variety of promotional materials that come to us largely from other departments ads posters graphics signs etc social media and um new this year we're now using hootsuite so that we can schedule our posts in social media and also review analytics which i think will be really important one of our goals is to grow social media as a platform for reaching a variety of communities we also monitor and track conversations relative to the district or about issues that are either important or could be important to the district
169we provide other services just kind of randomly um editing graphics writing documents for other departments we do a lot of outbound messages i yellow highlighted this as part of family support really providing pertinent information around all aspects of students attending schools and families accessing resources these come from the superintendent these go to staff these go to community sometimes they come from the pio we also write messages for principals so that they can share information often about covid sometimes other things with their school communities um writing messages included includes researching and drafting and editing sometimes compiling resources translating and then sharing it via a variety of platforms that we use to communicate with our communities we provide support for public records acts requests these come in and the ask is often across many or all departments
170in the district and then we also handle requests relative to covet we provide support for community events town halls and other special meetings at the beginning of the school year we have back to school communications both communications going to managers and staff to give them the information and resources they need to start the school year successfully and then we also provide communications for families as the school year is starting this might be how to access resources these are often a welcome message from the superintendent introducing new key staff reminding in social media when school starts what the hours are information about transportation nutrition services and then a variety of cova documents which i'll talk about further down newer this year and something we intend to carry over next year is developing and running more comprehensive
171campaigns around themes that are important to the district so you know this year we did a lot of work with affinity-based communications relative to resolutions and to our heritage month celebrations we built affinity resource pages for um many of our of affinity groups and we intend to build more of them in the coming year up next is an lgbtq one we also coordinate celebrations of these various special occasions and heritage months at school sites we see content attend events write superintendents messages with the superintendent and support all of this in social media this year we launched a staff poster project for aapi heritage and jewish american heritage to um to just really highlight the fabulous members of our of our busd staff community and let them tell their stories about how they identify we also
172do campaigns like united against hate week we started this year offering some support for recruitment and that included pitching media for the recruitment fair and also developing some social media and other outreach materials this is something i'd really like to expand next year i do think that especially in social media we have the opportunity to target communities with messages and i'm watching some other school districts do that so would like to do more of that sustainability are things like supporting the milwaukee forest the bike and ride to school other events that either fall under sustainability or also are nudging towards our eco-literacy work as well unknown probably to some is that we are sort of the help dis our help desk for the district so we get a variety of calls on most days asking
173for all kinds of information um we look at every single one of those callers as a customer and we see ourselves as performing a customer service duty so we want our customers to be pleased so we work really hard to get them to resources or to connect them with the people who can answer their questions etc and then moving down to this next section section five wellness and belonging so um communications handles uh most or probably all emergency or critical incidents responses um this i give this a whale not so much because it's point one of um our three employees work but because when these types of incidents happen everything else has to stop sometimes for a couple of days these are critical these are safety related we're often working with law enforcement they're just
174so many moving pieces and so even though the other work is coming in it really all gets put on hold and in a crisis i've just kind of listed everything here but you know we're working on getting the right team making sure we have the right information verifying the information is correct collaborating with local agencies making really important emergency safety decisions informing critical staff if they have duties or responsibilities relative to those decisions informing the community and then supporting media inquiries as they come in and stepping back and really looking at how this situation occurred our response and what we can do relative to like mental health support to safety protocols in the future either to be prepared for another event like this or hopefully to avoid the event altogether maybe the surprise tonight is
175that the communications department is all also the weather forecaster for the district so we handle air quality um during fire season this is actually quite a bit of work it's just monitoring um almost on an hourly basis how we're doing and then communicating to our school sites about uh protocols or changes relative to poor air quality and then sometimes having to communicate to the community as well and then on the most interesting part of this whole process for me was starting to detail the work that the communications department has done around covid and um really kind of explaining to me like when i put a 0.5 on this when i really looked at both the scope of the work and thought back through surge periods like january february and more recently how much of our
176work is now really focused on covid and every time one one protocol changes guidance changes slightly it triggers like 15 steps in response in documents that have to be update training that has to happen outreach to school sites changing testing working with public health it um you know i always tell the team if it looks to the outside like it's pretty easy and it's all you know it's working well that's good but underneath we're often really just scrambling to address the ongoing um you know what i would call a covid uh crisis and i would just add that you know part of this work is really maintaining a level of expertise this is for me training and then also attending a variety of meetings listening to the experts anna i see you in some of
177those meetings you know how important it is not to miss those meetings because of everything we're learning really on a weekly basis any questions um i have a question slash observation trish i'm glad you ended uh with the covet part because i think that was going to be like a a hot topic for maybe some of us definitely me when we talk about prioritization um i can't even speak to how much work that you've done around coven and the hours that you've spent um learning about covet as you say and and then knowing enough about it to be able to communicate it out to our school community but i do recognize that that along with the emergencies that you mentioned earlier takes away from a lot of the communication work that would typically come up
178for you or it adds more rather to the work that comes up for you um and so as we move towards like prioritizing um do you see this covered communications continuing to fall under um your work or do you see this you know following under our covet officer or like how do you see this happening because this is a it's a lot of copic communication right you're going to those weekly meetings you're learning about the updates you're communicating it out um and it seems like that work could be focused on one that can be the focus of one one uh person instead of you know your department doing all of these things i think it's a really good question it's a conversation that we're having right now trying to understand um you know trying to
179plan for next year and understand if our responsibilities are expected the expectations from a public health perspective will change um trying to be better even though we have much improved our our systems i think there's opportunity to be better and then who manages that you know i um the coffin work is so hard to explain like i am the escalation desk whenever anyone is unhappy with what's going on or wants to challenge the decisions or wants to offer advice um it comes to me when principals are you know need to know something very quickly it comes to me and much of the work feels very very urgent because we're making decisions about can a student or staff member come back to school um and and it's you know it's personal and sometimes people are ill
180i mean they're just it's very complicated i mean i would have to say this i've shared this with dr stevens um i love the work and i have you know have a lot of expertise in the area now with support in the comms department with another full-time person um i think it's doable um however i would not object if there was a strategic plan that said um you know move kovit out of coms uh you know and this is something we are exploring that um you know that would make sense to me as well i would miss the work uh it's been really fun to make that contribution and i do have a lot of expertise but it doesn't mean that that can't be passed on to someone else and i can understand it or
181see it being passed on to someone else and it's still being your role and responsibility to ensure that our communication our community is educated on the shifts and the changes um because of covid but seeing someone really housing this work and becoming the expert on on on covert or on you know cdph guidelines would be i think ideal and allow for us to focus on the more communication work that you mentioned jump in on there otherwise i'm going to go on oh yes i forgot to keep raising my hand and not interrupt the polite way stick but like you know i i just want to really um second what um what khadija is saying right which what i see with a lot of districts is that usually the coordinator is not just the scheduler but
182the person who's going to all these different and yeah church we've been in the we've been in the trenches together at those multiple cdph meetings but you know that it's the coordinator that's doing that and i think next year is kind of a good time um trish to be more strategic and i'm curious you know what what brent would think but it's because i don't think statewide and you've been at those meetings and the conversations that we've been having that the expectation is that we'll be doing the level of site based testing that we've been doing this year right so someone like in wins position if we're if you're testing at a central location it's less coordination right at all our schools to and could have more bandwidth to attend those meetings and then escalate
183there's definitely a strong communication i don't want to underplay that communications part that goes into covert response because you know there's a huge team at cdph that does communications right for statewide issues and so it's definitely an important element but i think in terms of like the intense meetings and all of that they're still going to happen surprisingly you know the state took a pulse with the district since we're going to wind them back districts said no so there's you know there is still like a need to understand this the ever-changing landscape but i think because we're the direction from the state right now is you know more at-home testing try to condensers testing to one site on campus the the guidance that's coming out is going to be different next year i think that
184frees up some of when's time potentially to attend those meetings and hopefully you have a long list just like everybody else right and it's up to the superintendent to really guide you on this but i think it because of the changing structure of the of the covet expectations on schools next year there could be as you know khadijah mentioned the opportunity to kind of rethink that role a little bit so it's not doesn't feel as intense and i know i know it is because you know i work the lines blur like for me right between director working on covert response it's hard it's a it's a lot and it can suck you in so thank you and i just want to say thank you so much because looking at that list i just so appreciate
185you and um just the professionalism that you've really that you really dedicated to this work and have represented us really well externally and internally with covert response yeah so i mean i i would echo and one of the things that i heard in your presentation tristan um tell me if i i didn't hear it right but i think the experience with kobet has also seems to have put you in the position of your the incident command for all emergencies and i don't think that is the appropriate role for the comms person i think coms has to be a key player because so much is related to communication by but why you're the person monitoring air or the way we deal with an emergency response i'm wondering you know sorry look bug when when we you
186know look at the role of the safety coordinator i mean the incident command seems to rotate in the district based on the individual who was open to playing that role you know it used to be bernadette and transportation you know it's like it it needs to sit somewhere and someone needs to cultivate the systems and then communications is a key element of it so i'm just i mean i know that covet is going to shift i'm not sure it's going to stay the same level of investment that it is now so you know i agree with ana maybe when when berta could step up but i think the bigger question to me is what the role of the senior communications officer is in incident commands and emergencies being the person holding it or being a
187key member of the communication and liaison team because i think that's where the lines got blurred also because communications is often the liaison and there was so much information in the learning curve the liaison had basically became the person you know natasha and you as the experts so i'm just not sure if in when we're talking about earthquakes gun violence you know whatever other emergencies come up having a system where it doesn't automatically become you are the center of the incident command and i just want to say um and i'm sorry if i miscommunicated i i don't run incidents it's a collaboration i'm generally there because they're just so many communications components of these including gathering information gathering resources if any of you some of you have been in the room uh during these incidents
188i'm talking to the police i'm taking notes i'm coordinating their messaging with our messaging but i'm not making the decisions generally superintendents making the decisions and then there's also you know a principal of a high school maybe who's really leading the operation so um i apologize if i miscommunicated i would say though however that i'm you know very closely involved to all of it because they're just very large compute communications components to it well and i think it makes sense for you to be strategic in the communications components of it what i don't know and maybe it's because it's not it's not fleshed out clear enough is it it seems like at least in covid and another it seems like in the last couple of years you you've also been the heart of the coordination
189of it and i'm not sure that that's where the heart of coordination should sit i don't you know it's not that i it shouldn't i just think it's worth the conversation and maybe it's dependent on the type of i mean incident command is fluid right so depending on the kind of emergency you form your incident command so it might be just having a clear place where there's some ownership i'm just not sure it's where it says i i had a question for you trish um do you think there's any role um and i guess this would be like using this process like if so if you agree with this like what you know whether you need more capacity or whether something would drop off but do you think there's a role for your department or
190for you to train employees and and how to communicate with with families um because we you know we this is one area i feel like where as board members we do see a lot and maybe even see more than than you all see because we tend to get the sort of complaints and so we get to see the sort of forwarded emails from principals or from teachers or sometimes from classified staff it's usually principals or other managers i guess or lack of responsiveness or lack of communication um and uh and you know i don't i i've always been struck by honestly how poorly i think people in public education communicate with with families um it's always been disappointing to me um and and then you see some people and i'll just call out debbie dean
191i think she's so great at um at communicating with family so maybe it's probably her social work background but she's you read her emails back to families even when she's telling them and brent is great at this too um you know when even when the answer is not at all what they want to hear there's a way of communicating both timely in the words they use and of course you you're you're the pro trish but it just seems like to me that it's a learnable skill um and i personally would love to see it see your department do that but that's a ton of work so i guess my two questions are is that something like do you agree is that something that could be done and then am i right that that would you
192know require you know a lot of time that you probably don't have well i think that i think one i think it's a great observation i do that just sort of on the fly people come to me and certainly like around covid things get escalated to me i always copy people back so they can see um you know how we hear people going back to what we were saying earlier really hear them and um and then communicate in a way that they can hear us um no i think that's definitely like a staff training or something like that we definitely could do that we'd have to think about how to deliver that would that be part of pd maybe um you know i'm not sure but uh yeah it's good skill i used to be
193a media trainer so you know it's a good carrier carryover this is a good discussion but we're going to have to move on to pauline can we can i just ask something or add something really important before we move on um ty brought up a super sparked an idea um that i shared with the superintendent a while ago um that i think this is a good place to bring up um and that's a um chain of uh commands for communications um within the district um and i think that that would definitely be something that we could you know add to this list of prioritizations because trish even as you um gather many like family communications i think sometimes our community needs to just know like where to go and who to go to first um
194and oftentimes it's escalated to cabinet or escalated to the board um but say for example an issue with the basketball practice or something with sports and sometimes instead of going to the coach and then to the athletic director and then to the principal um it you know sometimes comes to us and i think if we had a document where people knew who to go to and how to follow that chain of communication and what the expectation is um at each uh chain i think that will assist us in um in supporting our district with you know a proper communications chain of commands protocol as well as um assistance and some of the things that we shouldn't get into the weeds of but allow and empower our school sites to be able to do that i
195think that's a great idea and it come with a back-to-school message yep i love that you mentioned that khadijah just because like at csba this exact issue came up at one of our trainings and there's this director that came up with their comms person like a response so that when parents send like emails you know to try to like go over like the rest of the staff there's like a standard response it's like this is a response to this this is a response to that that i thought was really informative it's like this long standard response but he's been a director for something like 14 years he's like this timer on the school board in southern california but i thought this was and then all of us kind of were like well we should use
196that template but um i'll share it out with you and trish you guys can see what you think of it but it's such a good point that you're bringing up because someone brought up this exact point at csba that would be good thank you anna for sharing it okay great discussion trish um and everyone okay um pauline the money lady yes the money lady who's working on her budget that's true but anyway um i'm going to share my screen um this is a really rough draft i have just started really working on this process and um i do want to work closer with our team um to get their feedback i have not been able to do that we've been pulled in several directions but um i will just share overall um the goal of
197the fiscal department um as a cbo what we're looking at in terms of core functions and this is a straight definition we protect the district's assets to ensure accuracy of records and we promote operational efficiency and we encourage adherence to policies rules regulations and laws and that's that's in in a nutshell is pretty much what i do and our department what our department focuses on um we do of course do all fiscal reporting which the board is intimately familiar with we bring our interim reports we bring our audits we bring our adopted budgets preliminary budgets various um various budget scenarios budget reductions budget um priorities um in addition to that um we i also indirectly supervise a payroll department so of course we have to make sure that our employees are compensated accurately and that
198their benefits are timely compensated time now the benefits are accurate and that their compensation is accurate um recently i've been doing more of um and i'm saying i because i do a lot of things um as a cbo and the team does a lot of things that support what i'm doing as well so um i've been looking at settlements mitigating settlements getting more involved in settlements in terms of the district's risk management we're self-insured for workers comp so that's an area that we're constantly getting reports on we have recently hired a workers comp specialist um i think she's going to be starting the middle next month but it's a constant monitoring of claims um incidents making sure everybody um manages our responses and then um you know we also have our liability claims um getting
199involved in settlements the district has several settlements that we're working on we recently had to implement a tracking system um because they're just so many and so varied so um unfortunately we have assistance um our insurance providers we work closely with them that as well um the major project that's um totally taking out of our time is a conversion from qss to escape and we've had to pull major players from our fiscal team just to focus on that area but that of course still needs supervision and still needs management so um we have to ensure that escape is accurately tracking and reporting all fiscal transactions and we are required to do dual entry until september when the district actually closes its books so from july 1 to september staff will have to remember whether they're
200working in escape heroes or possibly both so that's a lot of coordination and um just taking a lot of not only not only actually implementing but the meetings um have been all day meetings and um just taking a lot of additional time uh let's see this is a stage one let me go down let me trans school hold on um and of course um what we have done with the new system we're actually bringing all our fixed assets into our new escape so all our procurement that that used to be done in qss but now of course we have the additional challenge of tracking all the historical assets of the district in this new system so that's a um uh function that we not did not have in in qss so that's going to be
201really great for us at auditing time and also we're always asked you know about the district's assets so we have to kind of backtrack and kind of figure out where the information is so this way it will actually be in qss um let's see um there is an opportunity that i want to take advantage of um there is um a an agency that actually audits our fiscal expenditures to identify cost efficiencies and that has to do with our utilities we pay our utilities i think there is a lot of cost savings um possible so that is an error that i'd like to start looking into just being more efficient um another thing that um and this is just a laundry list right um i do chair budget committees thanks to brent i know now realize
202i am with the um what are my brands on s back i am the i can't remember so i think it's hysterical i mean you know every you know we kind of do things that didn't realize it had like a formal um you know name but anyway i do chair two budget committees um the superintendent's budget advisory committee s back and our budget leadership team which um brent coined the phrase blt and blt we were meeting twice a week as back every other week especially as it comes comes closer to budget priorities um cross departmental um i mentioned earlier i do want to see more crosstalk departmental involvement because i think um there's a lot of uh communication area we can focus on our communication and we can be more efficient in terms of working
203with other departments just in terms of setting out the process the fiscal process there are always a lot of questions we do have a handbook nobody uses a handbook but just in terms of um probably attending more new employee orientations trying to do more outreach to managers and staff so they're aware of how their departments are resourced and how we have to operate within an established guidelines and the fiscal department should be looked at as the department that says no is it if we look at as a department that we can't do everything we can do some things we do need to work with departments in terms of their priorities prioritization and um just figuring out how we can better um work with other departments so that they're aware of of why we do things
204and what our requirements are and um i guess that's it pretty much um projects that will be on hold i don't see any um we tried to get all our projects done and always is a little different from say um rubens area ruben has lots of um irons in the fire we tend to have you know set requirements in terms of reporting but i think there are efficiencies to be gained uh once we stopped kind of pedaling and stopped just kind of getting the work done just trying to set aside some time to fight to identify efficient efficiencies and to work with other departments so that's my spiel and i will stop sharing um do you want to facilitate the discussion for us pauline sure thank you does anybody have any questions suggestions silence is
205a good thing pauline [Laughter] i have a question um pauline so you said i know that you've been swamped you know with the budget um is your idea that you're going to go to the other categories and kind of flesh those out after you're done with the budget yeah so maybe that would be good to come back and see because the stuff that you laid out in the fiscal all makes total sense it's what you're i love the fact that you started it with what your obligation is as a department um it will be interesting to see you know the the well-being and the other the other buckets and how the fine because that's i think where the cross department stuff really comes in um so i'm curious on how that rolls out so thanks
206i'll be bringing that back after i'm done with the budget pauline um you said earlier something about um you wish you had you wish you were sort of in earlier in the discussions about programs um can you just say a little bit more about you know idea in an ideal world you know where you would see yourself plugging into those discussions so in an ideal world um when where it usually has to go about around grants and for additional funding that the district is receiving so um there there is a is a system in place when um if anybody i mean everybody is entitled to go for a grant um you know i prefer if they work with their managers but you know we encourage people to go go um to seek additional funding for
207their programs what will happen is um when these programs are or these grants are approved i think at that point um we can work closer with ed services in terms of the purpose of the grant probably look at the grant application um get more involved um i happen to have looked at two grand applications recently and had a lot of questions um just in terms of how it was going to rule out who was going to be in charge is it a certificated person um is that a person um supervising a classified um uh is a classified person supervising a certificated person and then more importantly um how are we gonna capture the costs are we going to have a unique identifier for this grant is it part of an existing program and to use
208julie's um phrase crosswalking it's very important that we don't have these individual silos so someone may go for a grant for i don't know to buy some pencils but we already have pencils in the district so i think um at that point it may be helpful for the person who's writing the grant to understand what's already happening in the district um that may be providing the exact same service so um so i i've always used julius julie's expression crosswalking so when um um i think i just kind of tries to um solidify our direction and our goals because a lot of times it's just so very individualistic and it's not kind of pulled together so where i would see myself coming in is um asking well a lot of people are new to the district
209um you know the spanish say have you checked to see you know where the is if this particular thing was funded who should you go to to get more information um on a particular program and then i would look at the budget you know let's look at the estimates i know you probably worked with us to get an estimate in terms of costs and then just see if the district has any obligation in terms of providing matching funds so we do have a form that we have people if they're applying for a grant they need to complete the form of course you know the difference is a rumor economy so it's like someone will say i think there's a form i'm not sure so that's part of the process as well we need clearly identified
210um processes that's on the website that everybody agrees to but back to our grant so if we're in involved in the beginning it just makes life so much easier we know what's coming down the pipe where we know it's going to be staffed with so many people we were closer with hr so we have more more of a shared document when it comes to these various grants so um and i've been working closer with sam and glendale just in terms of you know priorities having a shared doc what is hr doing what are we doing you know trying to get our position control you know um in gear so did that answer your question yeah ruben i think is it has it looks like pauline i mean i'm i'm thinking through my experience when i
211came on board um and obviously you know everything's couched and well we're also in a pandemic so i get that but one thing i did notice when i came on board which would be a recommendation as i'm leaving because you're gonna have to onboard another associate superintendent you have to onboard another superintendent um which is you know there needs to be some level of sort of connection with both you with sam with really the different departments because it took me a while to understand what what were the processes of this district because every district does things slightly different um and i think that would be really critical and important especially with with your department and your work um and the number of new directors we have within ed services like that team has changed over
212quite a bit um and of course they joined either at some point during the pandemic so i think it could be really important as we relaunch this year with the new leadership um to re-establish some of those procedures with the team um because it would be really helpful to be working with someone from business services as we think about grants as we think about you know the same things you mentioned so we're not sort of stepping over ourselves trying to figure these things out as an organization so i think that would be really a good opportunity yeah go ahead and then i just have like a quick question pauline i just wanted to follow up on ruben's comment like how do you when there's a new grant opportunity how do you identify like where the
213dei lens like how the district applies or prioritizes you know that new plot of funding like i feel like i'm curious how your work fits within you know because we're all working under this diversity equity and inclusion lens how do you see um how you prioritize your work and how you identify funding opportunities for different departments under with that lens in mind well i actually um i i'm actually not going out and um you know writing a grant but i we do have a form that that captures what what's the purpose of the grant who would this grant be serving um so it captures not only the purpose of the grant but then um from a fiscal point of view is there a match um you know what's a goal and to julie's point how
214is this kind of crosswalked with existing um processes um so i in terms of my equity lens i support the program that is determining um how the equity how we're going to be um serving our students and that's ed services but reuben to your point um i thought i thought it was interesting max during the whole process with escape it was towards the end after like six months it was it came to light that there was actually an operations manual and the problem with berkeley is that we've had probably 50 operational manuals but there is a document in place that tells everybody how you you write a contract how you work with hr how about the onboard there is a comprehensive manual and that goes to my point to kind of identify the resources that
215we have and to make sure it's commonly shared with everyone and that the information is updated so i think we're working now with the escape process to update that manual and um it will alleviate a lot of the issues that we have and our frustration in terms of dealing with the constantly changing staff and having it in writing would definitely help and there is such a document that i'll be happy to make sure everybody is aware of this especially our new superintendent and our new associate soup um as they come on on board just to kind of make sure that the transition will be hopefully smoother okay let's give everybody a big round of applause i mean good job now we go this way we need some music brand you know uh yeah for sure
216um oh wait i am pam i i found a virtual background for rebound hold on oh good yes look at that face this is great reuben oh that was so great um how do i get the monkey off my back no right thank you um we still need to have our final observations comments from everyone who's participated tonight and i wanted to ask you did you want to go to public comment first and then have our closure as a team at the end um i think it would be best um to maybe hear our um our public comments first if there are any and then give us the opportunity to close out um that way in that in our comments we can um you know acknowledge those those public comments as they're said um so
217at this time we can open up for public comments um again this is your opportunity to comment on anything that you've heard uh in tonight's presentation we were intentional about having public comments at the end of the presentation um so that you all can get feedback on what you heard or what you saw so if there's anyone here for public comment please raise your hand at this time and you will be promoted to speak i don't see any public commenters but thank you to those of you all who are here as attendees and we look forward to maybe hearing your comments later or by email all right so let's go ahead and do our our closing circle pin yeah um i think what's really important at the end of workshops is to share with one
218another an observation you had throughout the evening about your interaction with each other about the workshop and how it flowed and then we can talk about next steps and i'm going to let brent do that with khadijah but um and please let's just popcorn it without khadija or me calling on you and just kind of give your you know the intent was for us to take on this project um for for there to be educational purposes for the cabinet and the board and to give a process that will help with project prioritization um and education and and how to use workshops in a fruitful manner so just observations popcorn julie sorry we i know you used to play you're not gonna call them people but we're gonna do that okay um i i found this
219really valuable i really appreciate um you know learning um getting in the weeds you know not to get into the weeds but to understand the landscape how was that for a metaphor um and i appreciate the time that all the cabinet took to use the template and um it sounded like the exercise was also one that was a good experience you know on the staff side and a good starting point for some collaborative planning so i appreciate the openness of the conversation um and the information that was shared so thank you very much uh anna yeah i really appreciate it just kind of understanding what's on everybody's plate or multiple plates and shared plates um i think it you know it would be nice for the second iteration for when we get into the priorities
220and the difficult conversations to have those in person i think and also you know visually like kind of just like we did in the ad hoc like you know map out everything um visually because i think it is nice the presentation was nice but there's nothing like putting it together on a board and then everybody you know anonymously prioritizing and then looking back and being like oh this is what we collectively came up with right so i'm still uh waiting for that moment because i think that that's really important and it feels you know it's i called it out but it still feels that it you know on the you're i'm not really solving the problem because we're adding more things through our new budgeting process right so i'm like at some point you know
221we need to to have that difficult conversation makes it easier to have it i think now that we've seen the full list um and i do and i do really want to see john's list too because i think he carries a lot right and his input is important it's a member of the cabinet um but i but i do appreciate the hard work and for the i didn't call it out and you know some of the presentations felt like they weren't really fast like the first ones to spend a lot of time on but trish i just wanted to say in your communications as we give you feedback on on the covered response that i just wanted to acknowledge um how beautiful it has been this year that on top of all the code related
222work that you're doing you've also really uplifted all our diverse communities with this dei lens by having these more affinity-based communications out and i know that i've heard from very from various parent groups stakeholder groups that they have really appreciated just feeling seen by our district um and so i just i know that that you carried a lot of that and you know ed services we did a lot like a lot of i just want to call out that a lot of districts put many of their affinity-based resolutions on hold because of the pandemic and we actually try to do both and so i just wanted to call that out too and so grateful to ed services and to all of you for you know keeping the things that we have to do moving forward
223and you know even when we had to pause i think there was a lot of progress in this year and so many thanks to our superintendent and associate superintendent we'll miss you both and i really appreciate your leadership and on i could do popcorn to a staff a chicken i roll popcorn to trish great well thank you anna um i thought the vibe in the room was great it felt good to you know actually collaborate and be friendly casual maybe it's a better word appreciate also just looking at the long list of work that my colleagues are doing i'm impressed by all of them uh and i thought the feedback uh was you know very informative and and helpful i overall felt you know good about this as a way to look at the work
224ahead of us and to try to organize and be thoughtful about that and i think we should do it again i pick ty oh thanks um rebecca were you raising your hand hey ty you sure i i had a background for you which was in the weeds and then oh god the hand behind me is that going to generate an hr complaint [Laughter] damn you can't pick favorites okay um i can think of no better way to spend a hawaiian vacation than four hours with you all um no i this has been great i mean you know anna i both agree with everything you said and you know would put a slightly more positive spin on it you did say it at the end but like it will make those discussions easier i think you
225know we have i think this has this even though we didn't you know start cutting things out of you know out of the priority list i think we laid the groundwork for having a discussion we we so you know max we don't really have a we don't really get to hear from you and talk with you you know in this in this setting um and you know i just think it's it's graded so it's hard to find the time and um we had a meeting at berkeley high once like two years ago with pasqual and the berkeley safety officers and the title nine coordinator at the time dana clark and me and um aaron schwang and it was just this like you know mix of people mix of different roles in the district just talking
226about it was some discipline related thing maybe the expulsion policy and it was just such a we all recognized how unique it was for to just sort of come around and like sit around a table and talk through a problem so the only other thing i would add is to really second what ana said about being a person i just think if there's any way we can make it happen for the next version of this i hope we can because it i think it makes a difference but i just really pam i just want to thank you for um your vision and your persistence in telling us that this was a good idea that this could work um not solve all our problems but but be a good step and i only wish we had
227done it earlier so thank you and um i will um since i mentioned max i'll i'll send it to you uh thanks um first off i just want to thank tai for his dedication i mean it really shows how important you take this uh process and you take the work of these people that you are spending four hours in the lobby of a hotel to join this meeting while you are on vacation as an you know unpaid board member of the school district that that is just amazing thank you for it i mean that makes me feel like our work is really valued so i appreciate that um and i i really appreciated that the collaborative discussion and the communication i feel that the process has been beneficial in so many ways both in [Music]
228helping us kind of bring things together and and see each other's works at work in more depth within cabinet you know we tend to get focused on the problems that we have to address right now and don't often have time to take the more holistic look at all the work that each other is doing and also um you know in kind of uh calibrating that with with the work of the board with the priorities of the board and desires of the board so uh i i think it's been a great process and i will bounce it off to a khadijah have you spoken yet i haven't thanks max um i'll keep mine short but i didn't want to just really appreciate um this process i think it is um kind of imperative or important for
229us as board members to um know that when we are like adding on initiatives or resolutions or priorities um that they have to fit somewhere right and so being able to um see like in real time the time that it takes the fte that is dedicated towards um even just one specific um item puts things into perspective for us and hopefully puts in these things into perspective for our community as well as they advocate for specific things to happen in the district um one thing that i did want to highlight and appreciate is of course the work of you all as cabinet members but also the work of staff who are not necessarily here represented in this meeting but who helped to support with their priorities that helped us to be able to look at
230that prioritization list today and so big appreciation to our staff members who are not necessarily here um but their work informed what we saw today so i'm very appreciative and thank you all for that as well as an appreciation to you pam for coming in and you've been supporting um our district for a little while now um but it's nice to have you support us in this way um you know i was very for a while very serious about going through a strategic planning process um and needing you know our district needing to to have some some develop goals like as i look at other school districts i see that they have you know this three-year plan or this you know five year plan um so it feels really great that you know we're doing
231all of this great work we're doing a lot of work but being able to kind of put it into one place highlighting it with the five focus areas um as well as uh giving the opportunity for us as board members to kind of chime in on what we think um you know if we're going in the right direction or not or what we should be able to add to that journey um is helpful so thank you for the opportunity and for laying this foundation for us i'll popcorn it to uh brent you haven't talked a lot during this meeting which is very rare for you i i have been enjoying the conversation um i um i guess i'll just say sort of how how proud i am of the team this year um you know
232i i feel like they've done a good job over the last four hours and sort of illustrating the sheer quantity of work that they've accomplished and in most cases accomplished really at a high level and with a high degree of success under extraordinary circumstances um and i and i thought i would you know we've been kind of talking the technical details but there's sort of an emotional overlay in having completed all of the work this year that i think is distinct from any other year and that this team performed i think at an extraordinary level you know what they didn't mention is the number of days that members of this team worked while having kovid or came to work while they had family members who had covet or you know a whole variety of other
233personal emergencies that they nonetheless just didn't didn't sort of accept would interrupt the work of the district this year and all of that i think is is the sort of underlayment of all of the accomplishments this year so i just want to acknowledge you know for all of them thank you um and then i also um really appreciated just the the sort of tone of this conversation it felt collegial it felt curious it felt sort of you know what wondering and to the extent that this was sort of an interesting look under the hood to see the engine of the district i think that it sort of stands as a really positive example of how to proceed in the future um i'm also appreciative of of pam's vision sort of her guidance of the team
234to get us this far and i can really see that there's sort of multiple next steps that we can take um and then what i loved is that there were a couple of moments today where we we all i think sort of shared some ah-has um you know and it often had to do with just sort of making sure that um i'll call it the infrastructure for sort of systemic improvement exists in this district and that we not go you know chasing shiny objects all the time but things like renovating technology systems or making sure that we have a robust way just to focus on teaching and learning those things i think are all kind of they they came out in this analysis and they really beg to be sort of looked at further and
235that's where i think the real unpacking should happen that's how districts get better over time but you've got to build those systems in order to make sure that that happens so so a few observations but overall i thought it was very positive night and i'm appreciative to everybody for your participation um i think there's a couple people who have not had an opportunity to offer reflections i think that sam rubin and pauline do i have that right yes yeah so what if we go to sam next thank you brent um so yeah i really enjoyed tonight's conversations i felt like it was really productive and and helpful um and i think it was actually um really beneficial for us to be able to really sort of share this peak into what we do and what's
236going on in our worlds um because i don't think that it's obvious to everybody um and so um even within our own team i don't think it's obvious to each other um what we all are doing and so i think that that's an important part um and i just really want to say that i appreciate um this team um and the fact that we were able to come together and um and do the work that we did today so um so let's see was it colleen have you gone no i haven't gone your turn so thank you and i remember drooping after me yeah i think i just want to echo what everybody said um just um i'm happy we got together and talked about um what you know all our challenges max even though
237you know max is technically on my team i have no idea what goes on behind the scenes so that was really helpful to get max's list and um i just thought it was a good experience and we should definitely follow up and i will be bringing back additional details as requested so and i'll turn it over to ruben i get to close it out wow um you know it's really great to be able to share like i said sort of looking under the hood the amount of work that these teams do um and it has felt this year like we are you know working with our arm hand tied behind your back blindfolded on a treadmill like it it's crazy how much was accomplished in a year where we deployed the whole ad services team
238to school sites for six weeks and you know just one thing after another this team here the cabinet you know holding pieces together supporting school sites through chaos and tragedy i mean it's it's tremendous i've learned a lot in a very short amount of time in berkeley things i will take with me and i'm really grateful to all of you for that you've you've sort of given me a lot of insight um you i know that this process has also shed some light as well as just how do you prioritize uh the work we do um how do you tie that back to strategic plan i'm sure pam you'll hear from me at some point down the line and i want to come to saint helena right at some point i'll need to offer up
239you know my my st helena diggs as a retreat area right um it could be a good retreat so yeah now it's it's been tremendous and to you brent working with you this year side by side has taught me a lot and it's been really wonderful to sort of the ups and downs of leading a district um you know there's no playbook for how we do this in a pandemic and we've been doing it for two and a half two and a half years right it's just super challenging so that's enough i think i'll close out with that i wanted to just make a comment um i shared at the beginning before everyone got on but i had to go back and khadija knows this and brent but i had to go back to see
240when i received this phone call from julie and ty and i'm so appreciative of that call i can't thank you enough it was june 6th and you know when i think about this year and what we've all been through um and and just about each of you as people and the staff at berkeley and the students and this wonderful community that is so unique compared to other communities it's a wonderful place but i wanted to leave you with one of my favorite quotes and you all know it but it's how i felt at the end of tonight and it's with maya angelou and i didn't know if i would share it or not because i didn't know if i would believe it but i do so here it is i've learned that people will forget
241what you said people will forget what you did but people will never forget how you made them feel and for all of you as a team beginning to really feel mutual respect and to hear each other and to push back a little bit um it's your future and and this is a great gift that you gave one another and and just thank you for that to you khadijah well i think that is all that needs to be said thank you all so much for a great evening uh and we look forward to doing this again in our phase two so have a good evening everyone could we just announced that um director babbitt laura oh we got an emergency during the meeting which is why she had to drop off i just didn't want to
242thank people for people to think that she just vanished um but she had an emergency that she had to attend to so she's going to go back and and watch the video thank you so much director sinai that's all thanks guys have a good night enjoy your vacation ty have a blast go have a mai tai