Berkeley USD Board Meeting - June 9 2021

001i would like to provide a brief overview of tonight's meeting after a few procedural items the board will hear approximately 30 minutes we'll hear 30 minutes of public comments at the end of the meeting there will be another and final opportunity for additional public comments so if you do not get to speak at the beginning of the meeting we encourage you to stay at the end to request to participate in public comment please raise your hand now by clicking on the participants button at the bottom of your screen and selecting the raise your hand button to comment by phone you will be prompted to raise your hand by pressing star 9. if you want to raise your hand if you wait to raise your hand until the public comment period starts you will not get

002to speak and you will have to wait until the second public comment period when called upon you will be promoted to a panelist which means that you will appear on screen if you do not want to appear on camera please be sure to disable your camera on your end the board president will usually call our students first so if you are a student who wishes to speak tonight please indicate so by writing student at the end of your name the board president will determine whether to set tonight's speaking time at one two or three minutes per speaker and on an individual basis has a discretion to allow for extra time for those who need translation or have other speech needs when your time has elapsed you will see vice president brown holding a sign letting

003you know you have 15 seconds left if you are still speaking please finish your sentence but try not to speak beyond your time thank you so much a is i'm going to welcome everybody to the june 9th meeting of the berkeley school board thank you for being here we have a smaller crowd tonight but we're thrilled that everybody is here we for the record we opened the meeting at five o'clock and recessed to closed session um and called the open session of the meeting to order at seven o'clock um mrs can you please call the roll i director babbitt here director julie sinai here vice president khadijah brown she's coming okay and presidential present thank you um okay um now we need to prove the meeting agenda um are there any proposed changes to the

004meeting agenda um can i have a motion move to approve the agenda for today's meeting thank you uh mercenary director babbitt is there second second second by director rossy dev uh miss charles uh director vasudev yes director babbitt yes director sinai yes vice president brown is she in yet not yet but there she is president yes and yes vice president brown did you vote to approve the agenda yes thank you welcome um now um we're going to we're going to have a miss travis are you promoting where are you chairs are you promoting the students yes okay um we're going to have a presentation in a minute if this is the time to raise your hand if you'd like to give public comment so we can see how many people raise your hand so we're

005gonna do public comment in a few minutes but now is the time to raise your hand if you would like to get public comment um the first um before we get to public comment though tonight we have um uh two um two presentations the first is a presentation from three of our students um with an update on the vote 16 initiative to allow 16 and 17 year olds to vote in the school board elections um miss chairs i'm just stalling and there they are miss love and i believe we have two other students right miss merman and miss walker sylvia are you starting um uh yes okay let's make sure that yeah if we just wait one second sorry sure just for the board's benefit this is um just a presentation i mean not just

006a presentation but is a presentation where um um and if there's questions or or comments you can direct them to the superintendent afterwards but we're really thrilled to have um three students who've been leading this initiative with us tonight and we're excited to hear from them so i'll turn it over to you the three of you and to introduce yourselves and um and start the presentation thank you um hi my name is sylvie love i'm adev walker and i'm adrian merman and we were all leaders of berkeley vote 16 this past year and we're here to give an update on our organization and the progress of measure y1 because we are graduating and passing the organization on to new student leaders for next year in 2016 the voters of berkeley understood why allowing 16 and

00717 year olds to vote in school board elections was important they saw the lack of representation of student voices in the decisions that affected them they understood that voting while in high school would create lifelong voting habits and when over 70 percent of them cast their ballots in favor of measure y1 to lower the voting age in school board elections they expected the measure to be implemented five years of hard work on the part of student leaders school board members and lawyers have passed but 16 and 17 year olds still have never voted in a school board election the covid19 pandemic has brought many unexpected challenges for the school board and for everyone working on vote 16 implementation understandably slowing down the process as energy was redirected to student safety and online learning as vaccines

008increase and students return to campus we are excited about reigniting the community's interests and enthusiasm in the implementation of measure y1 berkeley students have always been outspoken and engaged and this past year has revealed how important it is that the school board hears the voices of the students it serves right now busd lawyer margaret prinzing and the alameda county registrar of voters are working with run back which is the election services company for california to make tech changes to allow youth voting on their voting machines this includes altering the current system to allow machines to process multiple different ballots and recognize birth dates less than 18 years ago one major change that measure why one would make to berkeley elections would be to add a new ballot for 16 and 17 year olds to vote

009solely for school board directors the registrar of voters and runbeck have also met with the california secretary of state's office to begin collaboration on the implementation process these meetings have brought up a lot of unknowns such as the legality of disclosing names of minors who are voting but future meetings have been planned to address these issues meanwhile in november 2020 oakland passed measure qq which also lowers the voting age for school board elections we're optimistic that this development will mean increased collaboration with oakland organizers and more success in working with the alameda county registrar of voters berkeley and oakland are planning to use the pre-registration system already in place to determine who is eligible to vote when y1 and qq are implemented this means that vote 16's efforts to pre-register berkeley high students will be

010increasingly vital to ensure that 16 and 17 year olds are able to access their right to vote our current goal is to implement measure y1 by november of 2022 and the registrar of voters is committed to working with us towards that goal looking ahead we would like the school board to continue to work with the registrar of voters and secretary of state to determine whether it is technologically feasible to implement measure y1 in berkeley and alameda county once it is ruled as technologically feasible the city council can pass an ordinance to authorize youth voting in addition to working on the implementation of measure y1 we have recruited an enthusiastic group of high school students working to increase increase youth civic engagement through various projects for the november 2020 election we worked to create a comprehensive

011voter guide geared towards youth voting we made sure it was simple to follow factually accurate and gave a good overview of every measuring candidate on the ballot in berkeley alameda county and california we distributed this guide to the community virtually and plan to create similar guides in the future this spring unable to hold our normal in-class voter registration drives we created a video explaining how to register to vote online this video included clips of influential bay area figures such as andy sandberg berkeley city council member rigel robinson and various berkeley high teachers this video reached hundreds of students and community members berkeley was the first city in the western united states to support the idea that youth are capable and deserving of a voice in our local politics when measure y1 is implemented the city

012of berkeley will have expanded voting rights and opened a new chapter of our city's history we envisioned school board candidate forums in the berkeley high auditorium how to vote presentations and classes a berkeley high school polling place run by students on campus and a new generation of even more engaged and empowered berkeley high youth we are so grateful to berkeley voters the berkeley community and the busd school board for their continued support of our efforts to implement measure y1 and we can't wait to watch the progress unfold over the coming months and years if you have any questions you can reach out to us at vote16 burke gmail.com which we'll also put in the chat and thank you guys so much for letting us share with you all thank you all so much and um

013congratulations on your graduation um and thank you not only for the presentation but for your persistence in um following through with this incredible bureaucratic process that um that will hopefully conclude as you said with with the ability to vote um for 16 and 17 year olds in november 2022 but your leadership is really appreciated um and it's inspiring and thank you for being here thank you and congratulations again on graduation all right now i'll turn it over to you dr stevens um to introduce the um the recognition that we're about to do yeah thank you very much president halper i'm going to turn this over to a teacher on special assignment who works with berkeley unified school district her name is gloria munoz gloria welcome to you we're really happy to have you here and

014could you help members of the public know what we're celebrating tonight sure thank you i've prepared a little something to give an overview of tonight's presentation my name is and what i've shared is that my name is gloria munoz i am the district teacher on special assignment that supports english language development tk through 12th grade it is my great pleasure to present to you tonight 210 student scholars that we would like to recognize tonight we would like to celebrate two groups of students 103 state seal of bi-literacy recipients and 107 students receiving reclassification recognition this year as we did last year tonight we're bringing our groups together to celebrate bilingualism both groups of student scholars have met rigorous state criteria in order to display academic success in two languages and in some cases more than

015two we as a district see this as a great achievement and we're humbled to have supported this journey in some small way it is important to also recognize the families and caregivers that not only cheered our student scholars every step of the way but valued the importance of nurturing bilingual children tonight we honor our students for maintaining their commitment to not only be outstanding scholars but outstanding bilingual scholars if you allow me to um share my screen um i would like to share with you as a short presentation that captures all of the students names and and gives them a moment of recognition [Music] so [Music] if that concludes our presentation and our student recognition congratulations to all the families and the students and thank you for allowing me to be a part of that

016celebration ms munoz thank you so much and i'd love to acknowledge your work as well i know that for you this is such an area of interest and love and so thank you for all of the dedication that you've showed over many years to support our english language learners across all of our schools thank you so much um all right um every we're gonna give people two minutes tonight for for public speaking um i'm about to ask vice president brown to report back from closed session um but before she does that i just want to let anybody who wants to speak in public comment to raise your hand now once we start public comment if you raise your hand you can speak at the end of the meeting please adjust your comments to be two

017minutes long and vice president brown will keep the time um when we get to that but vice president brown can i ask you to please report from closed session absolutely um for closed session all school board directors were present for item 3.1 the board discussed and provided direction and that is the very short update from closed uh closed session all right but but well done um all right now we will um move to public comment um so again vice president brown is going to keep the time two minutes each um and we will start with um paz melendez canales followed by deborah nelson hi can you hear me yep go ahead pause okay uh good evening uh to everyone my name is paz melendez canales and i have kids at longfellow and berkeley high i'm

018also part of latinos unidos and i'm here tonight in support of the following latinos university berkeley would like to see the following items prioritized in the funding decisions fully for example fully funding english language development teachers at each site and include coaching and collaboration time with classroom teachers we want a fully funded ell master plan with the support from cave if your new cup goal is to provide high quality classroom instruction and curriculum that promotes college and career readiness and racial predictability and ensures that all systems are culturally and linguistically responsive to students to student needs then show us that you are serious about closing the opportunity gaps that now that have persisted for too long for our ell students as you may know our aol students face significant significant gaps in college readiness math

019performance and classification rates we need to ensure that we are supporting our ell families with a comprehensive comprehensive and fully funded ell master plan we also we are also asking that you fund a full-time offi bilingual office specialist dedicated to district wide um support for parent engagement and leadership development this need has been expressed in various meetings now by love and delac our district population of latinx students is 22 and even if students speak english many of their parents do not by the way this data came from the data book given to the elect in the fall of 2020. at the last board meeting director babbitt mentioned that only six percent of families needed services in spanish i would like to know where that number came from and respectfully ask that in the future anyone

020making comments at board meetings also mentioned where you are quoting the data from in case anyone wants to follow up on it we would also like to ask that the district fully fund an office specialist at each school site from preschools to high school and include b-tech regarding l-cup funds we want to see funds spent on supplementing services for ell students and not supplanting this means for example that funding for eold teachers needs to come out of the general fund us baseline and supplement with el cup funds to offer a sustainable model and program that serves the need to our students thank you so much for joining us um thank you next we have um deborah nelson followed by rudy chippelland hi can you hear me hi i'm deborah i'm a parent at berkeley high

021i want to thank principal ragosa and superintendent stevens for their decision to pause consideration of the block schedule for berkeley high i think this was the right call especially since there would have been so little time to plan principal ragosa's message today suggested that the block schedule may be considered for next year 22-23 if so i have a few suggestions number one any consideration should be informed by data we know that block schedules sometimes work and sometimes don't we should study other schools and other districts where it's worked where it hasn't what are the factors that lead to success or failure is this the right system for berkeley high what is the problem that we're trying to solve and how do we determine if this is the right solution number two i would urge you

022to come up with a plan that does not cut 22 hours of instruction per class per year flex time might be the best thing since sliced bread but how are teachers supposed to make up 22 hours of lost instructional time with their students number three all teachers should be included in the decision making process i understand that a few teacher reps were involved over the last few weeks but my student heard from several of her teachers that her teachers had serious concerns about the block schedule and didn't support it number four serious thought needs to be given to how to support teachers to re-engineer their lesson plans 100-minute classes a couple of days a week are very different from 50-minute classes every day and without a lot of training and support we'll be setting up

023our teachers for failure in closing we know that u9 took two and a half years to plan shifting to a blocked schedule would be an enormous undertaking with huge implications if we do go down this road we must be informed by data we must seek feedback from all stakeholders and we must spend the time and money necessary to ensure that teachers can be successful thank you miss nelson thank you so much next we have rudy chippelland followed by sarah bowles good evening this is val chip alone i am a bhs parent i would like to commend the young women for the y1 presentation and thank them for their effort that was truly amazing and also offer my congratulations to the bilingual scholars and their families like deborah nelson i am relieved that the proposed block

024schedule for bhs has been set aside for now and urge you to keep it on the sidelines until it can be planned for and funded appropriately a large public high school like bhs typically would prepare for such an experiment in block scheduling over a multi-year period involving detailed discussions with shareholders including teacher leaders students parents and administrators teachers would be given the support they need to reimagine their curriculum and the training they need to guarantee the program's success revisiting the block schedule at all during the 2021-22 school year when all resources should be focused on ensuring a successful return for the bhs community is as misguided and irresponsible as it was for bhs to have spent precious time this spring on such a plan when time could have been spent on making april's return to

025campus more meaningful and the fall as seamless as possible i urge the board and bhs leaders to focus on stability predictability and recovery during the entire 2021-22 school year thank you thank you so much mr palone and next we have sarah bowles followed by council member terry tapler um are you there can you hear me now yeah we can hear you now go ahead okay great uh so i'm a parent of kids with ieps and i wanted to express my concerns about the caseload assessment and class size caps for special education in the proposed bft contract so caseload and assessment for special ed were not mentioned in the initial sunshine documents nor are they mentioned in any update to the board and as the tentative agreement is dated may 26 it doesn't appear the obligation

026for timely public disclosure of new terms within 24 hours under the rhoda act has been met so i want the board to be mindful of that in meeting the public's right to know so before approving this contract i need the board to inquire about the impact of caps on kids with ieps actually getting the assessment and ultimately the support services they need in a timely fashion what adequate staffing would need to be to address kids needs under these new caps and if we will in fact be adequately staffed so if not how many new staff would need to be hired uh in order to meet our obligation to kids and if there's a significant gap between staffing and student needs what's the the financial trade-off going to be between just hiring the staff we need

027and the probable legal expenses you'll expand on parents who probably end up suing you because we continue the delays that have plagued the district over the past couple of years so i'm hoping we can have a informative public you know discussion uh about how you're you know kind of repairing special ed and more generally i'm curious why given the recruitment challenges for special education staff why we're not offering stipends or bonuses for special ed staff in the same way that we are for um spanish language uh teachers that we're trying to recruit thank you miss boze um next we have um council member taplin um followed by aliska herrera de salvation for my capacity as individual in the usc alum speaking in support of funding key positions and work that support multilingual learners and their

028families as a member of the african-american community and public servant it's important that our public institutions reflect the cultural ethnic and linguistic diversity of our city as a monolingual english speaker i've never had to worry about accessing spaces where my home language is spoken however this is not the case for everyone in berkeley i saw this firsthand while serving as an instructional assistant at berkeley city college i commend the board for passing the latinx resolution and believe that funding these positions will be essential in the resolutions implementation i support a well-funded english language learner master plan to help close the opportunity gaps for english language learners in berkeley i also support the funding of an office of family engagement equity specialist who can work with spanish-speaking families in busc thank you very much and go

029jackets thank you so much councilmember um next we have elisa herrera de salvatierra followed by angela gallegos castillo yes yes we can hear you can you hear us yes go ahead hello good evening my name is elisa i have a third grader at silvia mendes and i'm also one of the dilag rep of the school i want to express my gratitude and strong support for the latinx resolution because there's been an urgent need to excel the academic performance of english learners in the last years the master plan had not been revised in eight years the low mass performance of our students the low reclassification rates and the increase in the achievement gap of latinx students in relation to other groups are symptoms that show that the educational plan was not elevating our students so with

030this resolution as parent we have hope and we expect the district to take uh the necessary actions to make the health and the latinx resolution goals a reality for this purpose it is imperative to fully fund eld and rti math teachers at serbia mendes and any other school that requested to fully fund the english learners master plan with the support from cavett to make it the best plan and for the students and to strengthen parent engagement with fully bilingual offi positions at this site so please take in mind that the learning laws that as a result of the pandemic just have increased the educational needs our students had and now than ever it is the time to fully support at long term or english learners to avoid that any unexpected problem in the future can

031put at risk the academic performance of our students thank you so much i really appreciate the resolution and please take the commitment ongoing thank you thank you so much um thanks for being here um next we have angela gallegos castillo followed by martin de mucho flores who will be our last public speaker good evening everyone can you hear me yeah yeah we can go ahead good evening board of directors superintendent for brent stevens this is angela gallegos castillo parent of a current sophomore at berkeley high school a daughter who graduated through the system and a berkeley resident on behalf of latinos unidos at berkeley i'm here to also advocate for the needs of our spanish-speaking families as well as other families as well big picture point i encourage the board to make decisions that move

032us away from patchwork and reactionary decisions to long-term sustainability um one great way to do that is to support the ofi uh district level liaison that not only can work with the school sites but can work with the central office and the district leadership to ensure that the infrastructure is there for the needs of all our families but specifically that can help with the twi infrastructure that i know that the current principals have been working on both um veronica and paco have been trying to bolster the infrastructure of the twi program they would also be able to help with the outreach and the marketing and the education to parents to let them know that they have a twi program to register their children in there needs to be an educational element to getting more families

033involved in the twi program 11 of our spanish-speaking families speak spanish at home of our latino families speak spanish at home so i urge the district and this uh school board to continue supporting multilingual learners eld coaches and teachers at each school because we know that they are they're needing it at each school and i definitely uh want to also support uh the investment and expansion of ethnic studies we know how important identity is thank you so much thank you okay our last speaker will be um martin de mucha flores i think you muted yourself and totally people on the mute card thank you um you know buenos aires martin de mucho flores parent of soledad uh sophomore now at berkeley independent studies and then martin civital third grade fourth grader now at silvia mendez

034you know my comments more about um i wanted to say express my gratitude and appreciation to the board um 2021 has been amazing for you all to both do the african-american success framework and commit to the latinx resolution like that's a huge lift uh in california that not a lot of districts and people are being committed to now the next part becomes funding these priorities with budgets right and i just want to name that the office of family engagement and equity the name equity is in that name and we need people and the staffing to support that and so i'm calling like with my other um colleagues community family members to really ask for that support right invest in those places because it matters um i also wanted to just share some data from uh

035edgov that was pulled that when we see a trend in both our african-american and latinx community as a decrease in enrollment over the last four years and these roles are key to being connected with families uh and engage with families and so it just becomes another resource to be considered and the other thing that just again is a high level context is that um you know our educational systems have structural inequities in our fabric right and we constantly try to do these things to perform and the work that you all are doing is transformative and so it's going to be hard it's going to be difficult but if we continue to work in this lens of solidarity in terms of the way that we got these resolutions through and fund the priorities that focus on

036these groups um i'm confident that the usd's and continue to show up for most marginalized students and these trends that we see in decreasing enrollments particularly amongst our black and latino students will stop and hopefully reverse because we're investing in where it matters in engagement and in equity and showing up in a culturally responsive way both linguistically and for the people in our community thank you thank you so much really appreciate it all right next we'll turn to our union um comments i believe miss chiras i think with um if there's any union leadership here to speak right this would be the time to raise your hand um all right i see um president um frank hernandez from our berkeley council of classified employees so why don't we go to mr hernandez and then um

037we have a video from our berkeley federation of teachers president can you hear me yeah we can go ahead mr hernandez thank you thank you good evening school board members and superintendent stevens berkeley unified school district has rightfully prided itself on its commitment to racial and economic justice for our students and their families as you know many of our classified staff are also low-income families of color we too have been impacted by covid and some of us in our families and households and some by job losses of partners or by eviction some classified staff have struggled to make rent have struggled to pay bills and has struggled to put food on the table that's why we have been advocating for the school reopening stipend for classified staff who have been on the front lines every

038day ensuring that our campuses are clean and safe that our buses are running and our students and their families don't go hungry we are proud of that work and we are happy that the district is working with us to negotiate a fair school reopening stipend for classified staff this money will go a long way for each and every one of our members who stepped up showed up and ensured that our schools could open in the coming days we look forward to ratifying this agreement and moving forward and negotiating our contract please remember the commitment we have made to our school community during this difficult year we also hope that you keep in mind the district commitment to racial and economic justice which needs to include our classified employees thank you for your time we look

039forward to continuing to work with the district to reach a fair contract in the coming months thank you thank you president hernandez um miss travis let's go to berkeley federation teachers president matt meyer hello dr stevens in the berkeley unified school i am happy to report that our membership overwhelmingly rather we appreciate the board listening to our teacher testimonials about the work that we are passionate about i know that with your support we can start off this next year complete focus this will allow sites to plan for the upcoming school year and create an advisory program specific to their school and there will be curriculum developed for this time we know our students will need all kinds of support that may fall outside of the traditional academic classes healthcare costs have been increasing steadily over

040the last 20 years unlike some neighboring districts busd and employees share the cost of health benefits which gets very expensive as family members are added this new contract splits any health care increase 50 50 which we believe is a fair way to cover an unknown increase we all must fight for universal health care as it is the only real way to resolve this issue but in the meantime sharing increases is a fair approach and we are glad the district agrees for many years we have heard from our bilingual educators that being fluent in two languages allows them to be better teachers they can communicate with families and students in ways that english-only teachers cannot they also can make sure that families receive important information and directions in their home languages this also means that our

041bilingual teachers and support providers have more work and are often leaned on to be these communicators our district could not operate without them and the stipend we agreed on is an important financial recognition of the extra work these teachers do there has been discussion about bft's compensation package i would like to provide some context bft and the district have agreed to a one percent raise and three and a half percent bonus only the raise is coming out of ongoing dollars this is a relatively small raise considering the current inflation rate and the unprecedented new ongoing dollars coming from the state bonuses come from one time dollars which have many sources including unspent end of year balances bonuses are not a new concept and our members often accept a combination of raise and bonus in any

042given year it is common for a district to offer a larger bonus instead of a larger raise because it is much cheaper for the district in the long run a bonus does not completely replace a raise does not get built into the salary schedule does not make us more competitive for hiring and it disappears after one year our ability to hire qualified teachers is directly related to how much we are willing to pay them especially compared to neighboring districts i just found out last week that we lost out on two african-american veteran teachers because our compensation and health care coverage would mean they would take a pay cut to come to our district one works in oakland where employee healthcare is completely covered the other in new york which offers much higher salaries if we

043are serious about hiring teachers of color in our district we must continue to offer salary increases that make it affordable to work in our district qualified teachers provide the most direct services to students their daily education we are proud of this contract as it balances many needs both the district and the union worked hard on a tight schedule to make it happen before our current contract expired with this behind us our teachers are already preparing for the upcoming year and working over the summer to make sure our classrooms and curriculum is ready for the students in august there'll be they will need to be lots of extra work to make sure our students are fully supported as they transition back to campus thank you president meyer um now we will move to um committee comments

044i know we have a comment from the parent advisory committee um ms chaires it's berkeley high school ptsa is mimi pulitz i believe yeah there she is and the committees have five minutes also you might be on mute still um sph can you are you muted you know she's actually listed in the audience twice i wonder if she has a phone and a computer up there it is i just tried the second second name hello this is sandra oh hi sandra how are you guys doing hey mimi's actually going to be making the comment today wait is she um can you hear me now yeah oh there she is there she goes okay okay all right sorry that's okay um okay i shall begin god okay well this is mimi pulitz it's my last year

045in busd serving on the pack and i'm delivering the comments tonight this year as has been the case with the pac every year dedicated parent and guardian volunteers have gathered monthly with the intent to learn about busd programs and student outcomes unlike other committees the pac's focus is on the academic success and emotional well-being of berkeley's prioritized students every year the pac has provided comments to help the usd better serve all of its students but especially the traditionally underserved prioritized students as they are the ones who most need the pacs advocacy at the district level the pac comments delivered in the past four board meetings are the culmination of this commitment everyone knows that this has been a year unlike any other so it goes without saying that this year's pack has been unlike any

046other by the end of our march meeting new members only knew about a handful of the supplementally funded programs that the pac has focused on for the past five years and much of the information about them came from fellow pac members involvement in their schools our january april and may meetings were consumed with wide-ranging budget overviews that raised more questions than answers at the tail end of our may meeting the pack and dlac were given a link to a draft of the new three-year lcap plan the next day we received a survey link for us to provide comments on programs in the new plan many of these programs were never discussed in this year or in any past year and the bridge was omitted tonight june 9th we cannot give you detailed feedback on the

047new lcap plan other than to say that it does not exhibit any new or compelling strategies to elevate math and literacy proficiency and many of the changes in it amount to new funding sources for the same programs and services that have yet to improve student outcomes how adding codewood relief funds to our budget will make a tangible difference is unclear and then in summary thus far we have not seen any clear paths to better serve our prioritized students but again this has been a different year unlike any other whereas past pacs have submitted comments on numerous programs and budget proposals this year's comments are limited to four top priority program areas which we presented at the last board meetings given the pandemic incurred looming learning losses ahead the pack urges the superintendent and the board

048to recognize these areas as more critical now than ever before and invest appropriately as follows scale up the office of family engagement and equity and berkeley highs bridge program operating for years now with bare-bones resources ophie and bridge have consistently achieved outcomes that positively transform the experiences of prioritized students and their families now is the time to build on their success and equip them to do more at a bare minimum every school needs its own opie specialist the pac has been saying this for years and bridge needs to be sufficiently staffed to serve its current cohorts and additional funding can put 20 more 25 more 9th graders on a promising path to a college education retool math instruction for years busd has been in a math crisis now pandemic learning losses are almost certain to

049result in further plummets we can't keep doing the same things that don't work now is the time for innovation our budgeted programs in lcap plan must reflect strategies to improve tier one math instruction ones that build and reinforce foundational and prerequisite skills so that our students math achievements progress as they move up the k-12 ladder expand mental health services and support the pandemic has exacerbated many of our students emotional challenges until we acknowledge and address the impact of this trauma we can expect it to impede learning throughout the district there's code relief money for this purpose we need to maximize our use of it especially for our prioritized students by the june 12 16 special board meeting we expect to have a chance to review and analyze later drafts of the budget and three year

050lcap plan at that time we can provide more comments questions and suggestions based on additional and more refined information at the june 23 meeting we have some strong recommendations on how the district can improve its development of the lcap plan and better work with the pac in the future berkeley schools have the potential to help all of their students to achieve excellence but to do so our district needs to expand the programs that best service prioritize students and invest in new strategies to address their greatest areas of need we urge you to incorporate the pac's recommendations for ovie bridge tier one math instruction and emotional health services in the next year's budget and the new three-year lcap plan thank you thank you um all right i don't think that um we have any other committee

051comments um so that means we will move to a board member and superintendent comments um is there a board member like to go first anyone all right i'm gonna call on somebody i'm gonna call you director sinai i was trying not to go first evening everybody okay thanks um i want to congratulate all of the students and graduates um who uh you know graduated on last week um it was really an honor to be able to participate in the berkeley adult school graduation albeit it was virtual it was spirited it was dynamic and it was really inspiring to see the adult students who have made it through a pandemic to get their high school diploma and their families were on the zoom screen and it was just very exciting i also got to go to

052the berkeley high academic choice um director babbitt i think i did a through oh or and uh the academy for medicine and public service and the bridge program all of which were just truly inspiring i want to thank all the teachers and staff who really worked tirelessly to create wonderful experiences for our students and their families to see people in person and the joy of seeing how much some people grew some of the teachers talked about kids being taller than them now because they just see them on zoom screens um and just to see the passion and the heartfelt um sincerity of so many of the student speakers who talked about the challenges that they experienced over the year and to see the power of love in the community on the bleachers of their family

053members and friends who were there to support them so it was a wonderful um round of graduations in some ways you know the intimacy of being in the small groups versus the thousands you know at the greek or the haas pavilion created a whole different dynamic and um i think uh from the feedback i got from students and families it was really enjoyable and so fortunate and and um powerful that we got to do it in person so uh dr stevens and all of the staff i just want to applaud you for making it happen um and it was really a great experience i also want to thank the berkeley high leadership and staff for doing the presentation last week opening the door to what the planning was looking for in the block schedule and

054hearing the feedback from students and families and board members that well the idea of doing that kind of planning and moving forward is a welcomed opportunity trying to do it in the coming year seem to too too fast um so i look forward to hearing the ongoing discussions that the staff have at berkeley high and how we can really engage a genuine authentic dialogue with the families and the students so that whatever change comes about is really well thought through and prepared for so that we serve our students the best and lastly i want to thank the students for the vote 16 and i really want to thank the attorney margaret prince prince who has really dogged this issue throughout the pandemic i'm the board rep who's the liaison with this project and she has

055kept us informed she has um i was going to say harangued she has been very persistent with the county um in keeping this ball rolling and it definitely does give momentum that oakland has passed it um and our our former colleague josh daniels has been active in the in the oakland unified effort so i look forward to and i think our students can count on the board continuing to champion this effort and hopefully 2022 will become the first election where our 16 and 17 year olds can vote for school board so thank you very much thank you director sinai um director baba you want to go next no director vasudev i'm sure i also just want to thank everyone for coming tonight and for your public comments i really appreciate the time that you're taking

056to join our board meeting you know the school year is over so very appreciative of those of you that are here um with us throughout these last final board meetings it was i also want to echo what my colleague director sinai said it was great to hear from the vote 16 group and thank you so much for your advocacy to lift up student voices i mean we're here to serve you and just like my colleague i'm waiting for 2022 to make sure that we can make uh the implementation of measure y1 a reality so thank you i also want to congratulate all the class of 2021 graduates i was honored to attend the api student graduation the latin x student graduation at berkeley high and the multilingual program graduation and i will say that the

057highlight of all of these ceremonies for me these small intimate ceremonies was really hearing the students speeches i remember this one moment at the multilingual graduation where one of our students she went up and she said she was so proud because she was the first woman in her family the first girl in her family to graduate high school and i was the first girl in my family to to graduate from college and to go to grad school so that moment was particularly touching to me and it was just really beautiful to hear how resilient our students are this year was what i can't even imagine being a senior this year and just how resilient you you all were and the hard work and the effort that that our students in our families and our educators

058put in to making sure that our seniors had a wonderful graduation thank you so much to to all the bhs community and to our students in particular i also want to say congratulations to all our newly recal reclassified students and to miss claudia munoz for all of her efforts to support our english language learners this year is um i also just really quickly will say in english what i just said but thanks to everyone who gave comments about our budget that this process can be a little clunky a little complicated um you know in the final treks uh of the school year but i really appreciate everyone who comes and who gives public comments and who writes to us and all our different committees for their efforts um to the pack for your comments tonight

059too just to help guide us through this really challenging process and you know we're all here to make the best decisions that we can for our students and for next year and so i really value all of your efforts in giving us all this wonderful feedback thank you i'm sorry thanks i'm director professor dev um director batman listeners i'll go with director um once a couple seconds because my my comments are super super short but thank you all so much for joining us this evening um thank you to our vote 16 um presenters um so proud of your advocacy i'm so proud of your mobilization efforts to ensure that we make sure that we prioritize our young people having the opportunity to vote also while ensuring that the students who are eligible eligible to vote

060now have the ability to do so by registering them to vote your efforts are incredible and so thank you so much for for that and for your presentation tonight also congratulations to our graduates i know i said it last week but congratulations to our graduates i had the pleasure of attending black graduation with director babbitt and it was just an amazing and incredible event um i've attended i don't know how many black graduations at berkeley high including my own um but this one was absolutely special the resilience the um go-getter attitudes the just brilliance that was exemplified in that place brought me to tears we talked about it in a closed session today definitely brought me to tears but i'm so proud of all of our graduates and proud to know that many of them

061majority of them are continuing their education at two-year and four-year colleges i'm also happy to see superintendent stevens um there as well to offer support but congratulations to our all of our amazing amazing graduates across the district i want to say congratulations also to our students who reclassified which is a major educational goals so congratulations to those students and to our students who received um the seal of bi-literacy um i know that our one of our past or former school board directors were was very um helpful in ensuring that we have that as a possibility for a student of ust so it's wonderful to see how many names continue to be added to the list year after year so um congratulations to to those students um and finally um thank you to those who came

062out tonight for public comments specifically around your advocacy around the budget um and to those who whose voices weren't elevated tonight in public but have taken the opportunity to email us um about um our priorities and um your and for your advocacy around those priorities so thank you so much for doing that and finally i'm having a bit of an eyes issue so if you see my camera off i'm not disengaged just working on my my allergies and sinuses thanks to the wonderful wind that came through berkeley today that's all thank you thank you very much dr bobbin okay i'll go i wanted to go close to last so that i could just firmly echo all of my colleagues wonderful comments and just really close with saying what a year congratulations again to all of

063us just for making it this far during my first 175 days on the school board so much has happened some of the major areas of focus that i set out to work on have all seen progress from the safe reopening of schools to increased staffing for special education students to improved benefits and share of cost progress is being made slowly but surely all of us working together to wholeheartedly support each other is what will continue to make progress possible as we move forward into summer break i think of next year i want to encourage all of us to take time to rest relax and forgive forgive those who hurt you forgive those who said or did things which were offensive to you in pursuit of advocacy for our students or faculty because if we allow

064unforgiveness to take root within our community the progress we all desire for the next generation of leaders taxpayers inventors activists and so forth will continue to be delayed and our kids can't wait focus on beget forgiveness because you are needed the best part of you is needed and holding on to unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die release it forgive us your school board directors and administrators who you feel may have let you down union leaders those within your family those who sat on committees or in parent groups with you co-workers whoever has harmed you that may never say sorry forgive it's not worth losing focus on meeting the needs of our kids or your pursuit of peace and happiness this is my message today because i want the joy

065i felt over this past weekend at the graduation celebrations i attended to be continuous in our community we the adults of this community must create the social emotional support needed for our students by also doing what is needed for ourselves let this summer be your moment and remember that forgiveness is continuous it may take forgiving the same people for the same issue until you reach that point in the emotional toolbox where you can just toss it in the trash and keep moving my daughter who was on her way to college is the result of the busd community working together she and many others are a representation of the possibilities created when we work together when i first became a parent advocate and saw the disproportionate outcomes in busd i asked what are the other families

066doing to get better results the answer was supplementing whether where they could and advocating where they couldn't i want to thank all the busd staff and administrators who helped ensure they received high quality instruction the support programs provided through the after school programs the peralta colleges uc berkeley through stem steps cal scholars mosaic camp oafi city summer day and overnight camps field trips pta and berkeley public schools fund grants many caregivers share this gratitude with our busd village i will continue to advocate advocate so that programs like these are available to more busd families at every point in my child's educational journey i can point to a supplemental direct service that supported positive future outcomes busd didn't provide all of these services i had to go out and find them and even funding for them

067then i began to advocate for them to become a part of busd lifting as we climb i am because you are so let's rest relax forgive and release because the work ahead of us is just as great as the work we have overcome thank you thank you so much director babbitt um i really appreciate those comments i and and i echo them and i echo my colleagues comments and congratulations i was reading about a school board meeting in virginia last night that some of you may have read about um in which hundreds of community members showed up to protest the teaching of critical race theory in k-12 schools in that county never mind that as the superintendent in that district repeatedly told the crowd critical race therapy theory is not being taught in k-12 schools

068i appreciated one comment on twitter that said isn't critical race theory a law school class if it's being taught in high school those kids must be hella smart and it is taught in in in the law school i teach in um but of course the debate about around the country about critical race theory isn't about critical race theory it's about the late latest racist boogeyman that fox news has ginned up and it's about the fears of white people who believe that an acknowledgement of white supremacy and its continued stranglehold on so many of our institutions is a threat to them and their children and in in reading those reading about these debates going on around the country it's hard not to feel appreciation for our community which is far from perfect certainly not free from

069racism overt or systemic but as a board and as a community i think we actually start from the premise that an acknowledgement of the role that white supremacy played in the founding of our country and its continued role in the structure of so many of our institutions is necessary we start from that premise that this acknowledgement is not a threat to anyone but rather a prerequisite for dismantling the institutional barriers that lead to inequity and not any unequal opportunity for children entering our public schools some of the inequity along the lines of what my colleague just mentioned we're we're close to finalizing our budget for next year and we find ourselves in the rare position of having some limited but real resources to put towards new initiatives that will help us achieve our equity goals

070um in my experience in my six and a half years on the board it's a rare it's a rare moment in a state that perpetually underfunds public education usually we're wrestling over what critical programs and services to cut i'm much more used to those discussions and and they can be fraught discussions tense discussions um very difficult decisions that we have to make about reductions but i also think sometimes discussions about what new programs and services to use our limited available resources on can also be fraught there's so much pent-up need in this district especially as we emerge from the pandemic and it's heartbreaking to have some resources but not be able to meet all the need that we know exists in our community we know that we have some additional funds we also know we

071can't do everything we want to do and we have to make hard decisions the superintendent and his staff with the input of the community um has developed a budget that as i mentioned before we're close to finalizing um director bossy dev mentioned this but i know that people watching our budget process it can be confusing so just to be clear we're just discussing it tonight we're not taking any action tonight um if there's tinkering that the board wants to suggest or give direction about tonight is the night um next wednesday the superintendent and you can correct me if i'm wrong about any of this dr stevens but next wednesday the superintendent will present for a first reading which is essentially the final budget informed by tonight's discussion and further input from our stakeholder groups and

072then on june 23rd we'll have our final meeting of the school year where we will formally vote to approve the budget um and as we all know we talk about budgets are an expression of values but also priorities and i feel really fortunate to be a part of a district in the school board that shares the values of equity of social justice a rejection of white supremacy and i really believe that we all share these values and that they inspired all of us to seek the positions that we're in and within the context of those values our priorities can sometimes differ and we can disagree about priorities and in fact i hope we do because that's the sign i think of a healthy governing board um and and i i just want to say that

073i hope that nobody watching this meeting um or participating in it for that matter mistakes disagreement about priorities in our budget with with divergent values we've had our disagreements about priorities we'll continue to have them but never once have i doubted our commitment to our shared values and i and and in light of what i was what i read about last night in virginia but just in general i don't take that for granted at all i feel so fortunate to be a part of this community and this governing team and i'm looking forward to our presentation and discussion about the budget tonight and with that i'll turn it over to you dr stevens for your comments uh thank you very much president alper um i am preceded by many eloquent remarks this evening and i

074appreciate all of them i'm going to offer just a few words of thanks to a great many people who've been working over the last few weeks to pull off what many have described as a very joyous and celebratory final week of the school year so to all of the folks at berkeley high school on the administrative team all of the teachers the teacher leaders and then to call out a few groups who worked tirelessly to pull this off all of our maintenance and operations workers our custodial staff who worked all weekend long and our school safety officers every single one of whom worked three straight 12-hour days in a row to be able to provide a safe and welcoming environment for our graduation ceremonies thank you to all of you and then this is for

075you assistant superintendent pauline follinsby um tammy rose wanted me to pass along that you were awesome through this whole thing you and your team were so helpful in getting all the contracts in place to be able to provide services for these graduations so so kudos to you thank you um i also um want to just um sort of send a special shout out to our principals most of our teachers now are either gone for the summer or cleaning up their classrooms uh principals are just finishing up their work as well and then heading off to what director babbitt described as a much-needed period of rest and healing so i just want to offer a very special thank you to all of our principals on your final days of work for this year please know that

076we all have seen your extraordinary efforts over the course of this pandemic to take care of your communities and to resolve a really daunting set of sort of perplexing challenges over the course of these 12 months so to our principles thank you very much for folks who are watching this evening i'd also like to draw your attention to an item that's included as information for a second board meeting in a row and this is a draft policy about the enrollment of our students in the two-way immersion program we will be having uh i anticipate a vote on this in the coming board meeting but do want to draw your attention to the presence of that draft policy included as an informational item here this is a very interesting policy i think we are we will

077be one of very few districts who are attempting to remake enrollment into a two-way immersion program uh using a variety of different categories and we're very thankful for the creativity both of our community members our staff teachers principals and board in crafting this really innovative enrollment policy for two-way immersion and then i have just a quick birthday message so you may have noticed that assistant superintendent samantha tobias espinosa is not here one guess why she's not she's celebrating her birthday tonight and so we've given her special dispensation from her duties uh so that she can be with her family and enjoy a birthday dinner so sam uh happy birthday to you uh we miss you this evening so with that president opera i'm going to turn it right back to you um thank you and

078happy birthday um sam um okay uh where are we oh the consent calendar is where we are can i have a motion to approve the consent calendar um is there a second i can't second by director vice versa brown ms chaires director vasudeva yes director babbitt yes director yes vice president brown yes president yes um okay um thank you all um now we'll move okay so we have two um no wait what time is it that's 8 17. okay um we have two discussion items we're going to have to have a very quick it'll just be a minute long probably public hearing um on on item 14.1 but let's move but it's not nine o'clock yet so we will move to um the first of our two discussion items and dr stevens um the first

079one is the draft local control and accountability plan um if it's possible to if there if there's natural breaks along the way that it would make sense to stop and pause for questions let's do that so that we um so that we don't have to build up our questions until the end of the whole presentation does that make sense uh it does and i appreciate your help with that if if there seems to be a point that which um i may have missed a natural pause plea please do let me know okay great i will and we've we've allocated an hour for this item if we need it great so we'll jump in um i want to um preface this uh by saying that it would um in previous presentations on the lcap and we've

080been joined by director of state federal and special projects michelle sinclair um last day of michelle sinclair's contractual work year came this week and so i am stepping in in her stead and so we'll do my very best to answer questions this evening uh it's really been michelle sinclair leading the drafting of the yell cap both through her facilitation of the parent advisory committee work with the dlac as well as her presence in community meetings as well as her review of lots and lots of community input so we're going to walk through a slide presentation that will essentially sort of shorten and show in different ways the full 70 page lcap that is currently attached to this evening's board agenda we do encourage members of the public to check out our lcap we'll be posting

081it on our website after tonight's meeting along with another electronics survey where members of the community can comment on any aspect of the draft lcap plan i'll also walk through the process in june that will lead to the eventual approval of the local control accountability plan and we'll try as best i can over multiple slides to illustrate the connection between the conversation about the lcap plan to the budget and so there will be sort of multiple connections between this presentation and the second presentation this evening a number of people as well to thank especially want to call out natasha biry who's been so helpful in many of these conversations and keeping track of the details so thank you to natasha jumping in for folks who are not familiar the local control accountability plan is both

082an annual and three-year strategic planning template created by the state of california it's required for all public school districts here in the state schools must submit and then submit both approve it through a board formal board vote and then submit it to the local county office of education for eventual approval the goal of the lcap is essentially to tell the story of the district to identify a district's strengths and its weaknesses to share with the public exactly what actions and goals it is setting and then to demonstrate to the community through a series of metrics the district's progress towards those goals as we've created our draft lcat we've drawn from the data that's available to us which admittedly this year is less than in previous years because of the pandemic tonight we'll walk through some

083of that data we'll share draft goals metrics and actions and then we'll dig deeper into a number of important focus areas uh we've had a sort of effort over the last couple of weeks to try and dissect the lcap plan and sort of put it back together in a variety of different ways and we hope that this slide deck has succeeded in representing the draft el cap again just as a reminder for folks who are viewing from home the lcap is designed as a three-year strategic plan it describes goals actions services and expenditures and it is meant overall to support positive outcomes for all students including prioritized students it is meant to tell our particular story and it's also meant to represent multiple components of our overall spending on student achievement that includes the general

084fund that includes what is called the supplemental budget often referred to here in berkeley as the lcap budget and then we also include in our local control accountability plan other revenue sources such as bera and bset we have drawn from a number of data sources to identify both strengths and weaknesses of berkeley unified that includes the california school dashboard we will compare in this presentation some of our successes in the aggregate both to the state and other districts we'll highlight our challenges which as the board and public well know have to do with the disaggregation of this data and our ongoing struggle to provide adequate supports for students who we describe as prioritized i'll describe those groups very shortly and then we'll also review stakeholder feedback and more specifically feedback we've received from true important

085parent advisory groups the parent advisory committee and the district district english language advisory committee so let's jump into a high level overview of some of berkeley's data this is a comparison of berkeley unified 250 very similar districts here in california we went and found districts that have an enrollment of about 6 000 students within our own so somewhere between 4 000 and 14 000 students or 16 000 students and then look for districts that have a similar unduplicated student rate as ours and then we're able to develop these comparative measures for district for our district versus others in the state which you can see here are rankings on a scale of one to fifty where one is the highest ranked of our 50 comparable peer districts you can see in the rating of college and

086career readiness that berkeley is in the lead is first in the sort of pack of 50 districts and then reading across these indicators where green is a positive marking where blue is the most positive yellow is in the middle and red and orange not represented here you can see the rankings of berkeley versus these these other districts there's a lot to be proud of here and i think the community is right to hold up berkeley unified as in the aggregate producing many positive results for our students here is another representative sort of sample of success data in the first portion of the slide you can see berkeley unified versus the state of california and here again we're looking at the aggregate student achievement that means all of our students collected together so we're looking at

087averages across all of our populations you can see that compared to the state of california that we are typically more than a double digit percentage points above our peer districts in california in england's arts in math college and career readiness a through g rates this is the csu and uc eligibility rate and that we are below our district peers in california with respect to chronic absenteeism and with respect to suspensions we also have a lot to be proud of in the aggregate about growth over time you can see that ela achievement has grown over time for four of the last five years math also a plus eight percent increase for four of the last five years this is using the states test which was not administered last year and then you can see a very

088respectable growth in the um graduation rate of african american students here in berkeley over the last three years also strong growth in the indicator called college and career readiness what we are also obliged to do both ethically and because of the template is to look to see which student populations in berkeley are not performing at these sort of higher average rates and this is an ongoing persistent story here in berkeley as it is in many other school districts when we look at a number of our student groups including african american students english learners students with disabilities latin ex students and others who are socioeconomically disadvantaged we begin to see gaps and some of these gaps are quite troubling as they have been for some time so if we just focus in on black and african

089american students here in berkeley you'll see a number of startling statistics ones that should alarm all of us for example that african-american students are half as likely to meet ela and math standards as their counterparts you can see some of the percentage points 29 percent versus 67 percent in english language arts 22 versus 62 percent in math these are startling we've been aware of them and yet we should continue to be shocked and called to action uh that this these results admittedly two years old but that these results are the ones we call our own you can see similar gaps with respect to college and career readiness a very troubling gap with respect to college readiness including being able to matriculate into a california state university or university of california campus that one is i

090think especially worrisome you can see chronic absenteeism rates being higher as well as suspension rates if we look at english language learners we see similar disparities in fact many of them are even more stark than we see for african american learners you can see those showing up in ela and math [Music] performance as well as graduation college and career readiness as well as other indicators when we look at the performance the achievement of students with disabilities again we see very comparable gaps ones that are calls for all of us to action and ones that really animate the planning and budgeting process and so it's this backdrop that will i know um sort of inspire comments among advisory committees that has been the sort of impetus for our own planning and i know that is going

091to be part of questions and discussion as we move towards an improved lcap and approved budget for many months now we've been engaged with a variety of our community stakeholders and doing so in a variety of way we have a number of formal committees here in berkeley unified including the parent advisory committee the district english language advisory committee the superintendent's budget advisory committee as well as an educator advisory committee all of these are important aspects of our ability to reach out to members of our community to hear them to listen attentively and to draw in the best thinking from our community in the formation of our plans in addition to these formal advisory committees we have been for a number of months engaged to solicit feedback from the community both about the substance of our

092lcap plan as well as the use of supplemental funding from the state and federal government for the use of covet money so we've been conducting lots and lots of town halls stakeholder sessions family circles school board members have been making themselves available and we've been consulting with staff members such as principals teachers and district office staff in order to develop these plans here in gray sort of call out boxes are a variety of the sort of themes that we've heard very consistently you will hear strong themes related to ophi the office of family engagement and equity support for our bilingual and monolingual spanish-speaking families among others you can also see desire to see improvement in math english language arts english language development and support for african-american latinx students as well as call outs for better

093supports around mental health students with disability and then particularly addressing students isolation and the desire to reintegrate into campuses after a long period of pandemic learning i'm drilling down on more specifically on two of our really important parent advisory committees as you heard a representative say earlier the these committees have been submitting feedback to the board and the central office staff now for a number of months and so we have summarized that feedback here in a more detailed call out for both the parent advisory committee and the district english learner advisory committee and we've sort of sourced each of these points of feedback to the original statement made either to the board or in the context of a meeting so you can see among parent advisory committee feedback the desire for increased family engagement for

094the effective evaluation of our programs for mental health supports a better more comprehensive assessment system and then focusing on our prioritized students both through the use of supplemental funds and other resources from our english language advisory committee we've been hearing very steadily the desire to revise our 2014 el master plan so that it is updated to reflect the most recent set of standards and guidelines from the state as well as current best practice we've been hearing for calls for increased monitoring of reclassified students whom we celebrated earlier in the evening improved family communication and support and then support for eld teaching for english language development teaching on all of our campuses we hope what we've done is to through the lcap process and the budgeting process be able to effectively distribute resources across these many

095priorities and so for folks who are working at home listening from home you'll see that a number of these topics are included both in this presentation and the presentation on the budget to follow to talk just briefly about where we are in our process last week we were together received feedback on our lcap plan we appreciate that we've worked over the course of the week to be able to put this presentation together and to refine budget recommendations our s back came together just last night and that i think was june 8th to both review recommendations from me and staff as well as to place a vote we plan to work with our dlac tomorrow evening we are working right now with our pack co-chairs to be able to pull the pack together before the next

096meeting of the board which is scheduled to take place on june 16th and then president alper referred earlier to the official public hearing on our l-cap taking place just one week from today on june 16th with an anticipated approval by the board of education of june 23rd which permits us to submit to the lcap to the alameda county office of education by the required end of june deadline so i'm going to jump into the elements of the lcap now but um president albert this may be a chance just to press pause see if there's questions about any of the feedback we've received or our process and then i propose to jump into the substance of the lcat plan yeah that's great um director sinai uh comment in a question i want to just highlight under

097the pack comments two of their four letters one was on the sustaining of the bridge program and i didn't see that in your column and the other was what this miss pulitz talked about in relation to math so they they had four testimonies um mental health bridge math and ophi were their top four priorities so two of those weren't included in that column and i just want to make sure that we call them out and then the second is a question for either you or president alper the june 16th public hearing there's still the option because i heard miss pulitz say that they were going to come with more formal recommendations on the 16th and i think i heard president alper say it is is kind of the final budget for public hearing to then

098be approved on the 23rd can you just clarify whether on the 16th we can still make amendments and well not amendments because it hasn't been passed yet but we can still make adaptations and changes on the 16th if people come forward with recommendations that we feel like we need to have reflected in there uh it is still possible um what i would propose is that um from one meeting to the next so let's say from tonight to the 16th to the 23rd that if there are changes from one week to the next that we would share those changes with the board so that the board can be apprised of how we're still listening to feedback both from the board and members of the community by the time we arrive at the approval on the 23rd

099i would consider that at that point uh it's ideal that we're not trying to amend the lcap uh when when we're sort of engaged in approving it so then just to be clear because i think one of the other challenges that both the pack and the dlac have had have been clarity and transparency around dates so i want to be really clear do they need to get feedback to the board and to you before the 16th so that you can potentially reflect that in on the 16th versus waiting until the 16th to do their public i mean it's not like if they if they send it in advance they still can't read it publicly for sure but are we asking them to actually get it to us before the 16th uh we have been i

100have a meeting set up with the two pack chairs tomorrow to just get clarity for all of our pac members about how they aspire to collect feedback from pac members so it would be ideal from our perspective to receive that feedback prior to the meeting on the 16th so that we can both reflect that feedback to the board on the 16 and potentially even suggest amendments based on that feedback again i'll be working with the packed chairs tomorrow to to pull this together and then director sign i appreciate your summary of the the pac feedback um i suspect that we omitted those things because we have a slide version of this but i am going to go back into the lcap document to make sure that the full pack commentary is listed in the lcap

101and and um i might have contributed to the the confusion on the dates because um i didn't i didn't by on june 23rd it's too late to be tinkering um but it but june um what is it 16th the next meeting that i mean it's getting late but it's not um it's not that we can't make that we can't decide to give direction about changes on the 16th um so what i hear you saying dr stevens is it's helpful to it's helpful for staff to get that before the 16th but i think i think in response to your question dr director sinai if we hear it on the 16th and the board wants to do it it's not too late on the 16th the 23rd is when it's really too late is that yeah that

102syncs completely with my with my understanding okay and if i i think i did kind of say something a little different than that so apologies on that um director babbitt i just wanted to add responding to their written comments so the comments that they've submitted um are you going to be responding and writing to their comments by the 16th or the 23rd or after the approval or what it was that timeline yeah i'm so at at the moment and this is why i'd like to sit down with the pack co-chairs tomorrow we don't have any formal feedback from the pack on the lcap itself they have submitted multiple statements to the board and we've been listening in multiple meetings to sort of general feedback but there's no formal feedback on the lcap document itself submitted

103from pac yet so it is a legal requirement that we collect that feedback and respond in writing to pac and we will do that i can't speak to the timing of that written response until i understand with the co-chairs when they anticipate having feedback to us okay and one of the co-chairs is actually away um and so as maybe do maybe julia one of us as the board rep can also be a part of that process it's the request that i'm getting from them so i'm happy to do that thank you thank you um director vasudev um thank you superintendent stevens my question was kind of along the lines of what uh director sinai said and also what my fellow director laura babbitt was saying just as a point of clarity um i know that

104dlac provided comments last week for both the lcap and for covet funding right so i just want clarity what you're presenting now is only the portion that refers to their lcap feedback or is it the whole feedback that they gave last week including their coven uh it's all of the feedback collected together and then like pack has not yet submitted any formal feedback on the lcap plan itself but has been commenting on data presentations uh he's been commenting on various very early drafts and so we've been collecting that feedback and using it as we develop the lcap itself i see and so it fits the feedback that they provided in the letter last week then a couple of their points are missing in this in this short summary around parent engagement in spanish around you

105know the expansion of opi which is very similar to the feedback that the pack gave um so i just want to make sure that we're incorporating what dlac had sent in the letter last week and then in terms of their what's the process to to be able to get their formal alpac comments tomorrow yeah i hope to be able to do that tomorrow so we have a dlac schedule dlac meeting scheduled for tomorrow evening and so yeah and so we'll be walking the dlac through a very similar presentation and soliciting comments from them great and will it be will the presentation be available in spanish tomorrow uh i don't know that it will be entirely it's it's this presentation this evening uh which we've been working on up to the point of this afternoon um

106so we're gonna do our best to turn around a translated version but i'm not i'm not confident that we'll have the entire deck done by tomorrow afternoon got it i i think like at least the main sections would be great i'll be there but you know at least the main section would be good in the previous meeting thank you thank you director babbitt do you have your hand up or no okay um dr stevens why don't you continue on great thank you uh so uh from this point we're going to jump into uh sort of beginning to look at the substance of the lcap what's actually in the plan so again this plan is attached to our board agenda it's about a 70 page long document it asks that districts fill out a number of

107prompts in keeping with a template the template is not ours we're not able to modify the template it's a requirement of the state of california that we fill it out and so many of the sort of this presentation will look a little bit different than the template itself what we've tried to do is take the template and and sort of slice it up in various ways to try and make sense of the sort of logic of the template without having to look through dozens and dozens of pages so um very specifically we'll be looking at the goals we'll be looking at the metrics and that we'll be looking at the actions and services that we're proposing to provide to in the next three years our lcap consists of four goals um just sort of at

108the headline level they consist of a goal related to core classroom instruction that's goal one to the provision of intervention services for students that's goal two to creating a safe welcoming school environment goal three and to program evaluation and the use of metrics for improvement that's goal four so focusing on goal one which has to do with providing high quality classroom instruction for all of our students that ends the racial predictability of academic achievement that we just described by ensuring that systems are culturally and linguistically responsive to the needs of our students we've identified a number of measures that are included in the lcap now each of these slides is pretty dense i may just read a sampling of the contents of each slide but welcome questions about any of them so across the course

109of the sort of pages related to goal 1 we're proposing metrics that have to do with a sufficient standards aligned curriculum that's provided to all students the percent of students enrolled in at least one ap ib cte or dual enrollment course dual enrollment refers to taking a class at community college bcc the percent of 10 10 through 12th graders who took an ap exam for your cohort graduation rate the percent of students who are college and career ready is measured by the dashboard english learner progress redesignation rates of english learners the percent of english learners who are classified as what's called long-term english learners or ltels percentage of high school students who get d's and f's cte completion rate the a through g completion rate which again is the sort of set of prerequisites to

110be able to enroll in either a csu or uc and then the internal assessment participation rate as well continuing to look just at goal 1 again focusing on core academic instruction now the lcap proposes a number of actions some of which are carried forward from the previous lcap and some of which are new again these are fairly dense slides these actions range anywhere from professional development call out the literacy improvement action plan which is a calls for a specific focus on phonological processing and dyslexia intervention in grades k through two we have math training included the ongoing provision of math coaches we have the introduction of the new ethnic studies tsa with the idea of developing a k-12 ethnic studies curriculum ongoing english language development supported all of our schools that includes having tsas there's

111new work included in our budgets for cultural competency training as well as new funding for integrated eld training in the second presentation of the evening we'll talk about funding for the revision of our el master plan all of the work i just mentioned being new the bridge program is also included as an action we'll be discussing um sort of some supplemental funding for the bridge program in the second hour and then as well we include things like instructional technology avid cte rise a whole variety of programs if we move over to goal 2 goal 2 has to do with providing the necessary and timely academic interventions to eliminate barriers to student success we're proposing in the lcap for specific measures the percent of students who don't meet english language arts and math standards at per

112particular grades uh the percent of middle school students who are completing a math support or intervention class who meet those math standards percent of summer school students who earn additional high school credits in the summer before their senior year and then the overall number of students participating in intervention programs broken down by a variety of demographic factors listed in the actions for this goal include our ongoing support of what we call rti the response to intervention and instruction teachers literacy coaches new supports introducing the wilson and slingerland reading programs into our into our intervention programs math support classes technology supports which include the provision of chromebooks on an ongoing basis for students who don't have them at home that's a pandemic related innovation new 504 coordinator at the high school already funded common core standards

113aligned summer school summer school for incoming seniors and then a variety of culturally relevant summer partnerships such as ones this year with stem steps and camp edmo continuing on with goal three again just looking at measures and actions we move into the goal related to providing a are ensuring that all of our sites have safe welcoming inclusive climates for all students and their families these progress measures are the following the percent of teachers who are black and african-american or latinx who returned to bsu busd from the previous year the percent of teachers who are black or african-american average daily attendance suspension rate percent of teachers who are latinx the chronic absentee rate dropout rates and student and family survey results actions in this goal stretch over two slides let me introduce the first batch here

114so they include things like our student welfare and attendance counselor behavioral health services counseling restorative justice coordinators all carried over from the previous lcap restorative justice counselors homeless student counselor coordination of student services and family engagement again carried over from the previous lcap we jump over into a new slide but continuing to list out actions related to interventions uh here we uh sorry actions related to safe and welcoming climate my apologies uh here we include ongoing work with the african-american success project including plans to expand emojia from its current home at longfellow to other middle schools included in the longer plan are references to the black lives matter resolution to our coordinated earlier intervention services plan or csa's plan that that plan focuses on the significant significant disproportionality and identification for special ed services of

115african american students and then a number of elements from the still developing african-american success framework which we hope to bring to the board next week for an update the latinx resolution is included here as is financial support for the development of a puente program both new ongoing support for the leap classes intervention counselors the csace plan called out again significant investments in work being done by the office of civil rights and compliance our own compliance often our own compliance office funding for consent education for high school students expanded mental health supports a teacher and leader of color network as well as specific bara funded recruitment efforts for teachers of color so a whole variety of action items listed here i should note that not every action that the district takes is included in the lcap

116the lcap is not intended to be an encyclopedia but rather calling out highlights of work that the district wishes to hold itself accountable for and that it wishes to associate with the metrics that i've already listed out goal 4 is considerably shorter just as we look at the measures of progress and then the actions this particular goal is sort of upgraded to focus particularly on program evaluation and on building capacity for improvement through the use of evidence through the use of data we have two progressive measures that l-cap supplemental expenditures are completely expended as well as then an annual review of all of our lcap indicators by the board of education and it's this particular metric where we're compiling all of these um sort of it's essentially the compilation of all the previous metrics for

117public presentation to the board that is is essentially holding ourselves accountable both for the completion of these actions and their outcomes actions under this goal include lcap monitoring with specific attention to building multiple levels of capacity among principals teachers central office administrators to collect and use data effectively as well as more formalized program programmatic program evaluation support something that we've been hearing very clearly from all of our advisory committees and from the community and we've called out a specific target of doing a formal evaluation on two focused programs per year uh and i'm gonna propose to pause there president elperf that's okay and then we've got a sort of second batch of sort of representations of the lcap plan yeah thank you i was gonna make the same proposal um so before we get into

118the actual details of our el cap um what questions let's see um do folks have about um sorry questions comments that's the last part presentation director sinai did you have a question i do it's um you know i think it's actually more of a comment um could you go back to the slide on goal one uh keep going up yeah there um so i guess i'd i'd like to understand um again reflecting on um the pat comments about and i first i just want to say that this format just makes a lot more visual sense to me and i want to just acknowledge that i really appreciate the work that staff have done and everybody else who kind of chimed in on how to help make a little bit more um cognitive sense of this

119so i really want to extend my appreciation for that um you know math has been and miss politch mentioned it tonight has been um a high priority for the pack pretty much year after year after year and the data demonstrates as she mentioned in her statement and the pack mentioned in their letter um the data is just perpetually horrible particularly disaggregated data although really overall data is not that great either so i'm unsure why um looking at our holistic math program isn't in goal one but instead is in an intervention goal i would like us to actually see math while we may not do a whole cloth review of math next year just because we're coming back you know i mean implement you know a complete change we've been talking for years now about kind

120of doing an analysis of our k-12 math program so similarly to the um the wilson you know which is kind of a new way of doing our literacy is there a reason we wouldn't put math in our high quality classroom classroom instruction and curriculum versus an intervention and i'd like us to consider that i appreciate the comment there will be as we go a little bit further into the slide deck we've sort of assembled all of the action items related to math in a particular slide and it may be helpful to sort of put a pin you know in this particular conversation until we get to that slide just as a little bit of i guess backstory before the pandemic we were actually in the process of leading a math task force this was something

121the board had called for i think just prior to my arrival as superintendent that work was underway the task force was formed and meeting regularly uh the pandemic struck and the task force worse task force work really came to a close uh really was not resuscitated in any way over the course of the pandemic given the sheer challenge of navigating the school reopening and distance learning sort of mediums so it is a possibility to reconstitute that task force to add that as another action item into the lcap and would welcome the thinking of the board about the value of that work being expressed here so again just remind i'll just reminding um reminding our viewing audience that this is a three-year plan and so in that context it does seem to me to make sense

122for it to be in goal one that doesn't mean aspects of it can't be also in goal two but to have it omitted from goal one um seems to me to be um a big a gap thank you director babbitt maybe uh do you want to unshare your screen dr stevens yes i'm happy too uh so for me um also in goal one i was curious as to how we're measuring um success around culturally and linguistically responsive needs to our students um for example if you look at cultural competency training right what is the um accountability that's going to be associated with that to make sure that um those systems are actually implemented well it's it's enough to just go to the training how are we going to make that training becomes a practice in

123implementation i don't know that i i have the answer to it although i really appreciate the question usually it's the case in the lcap that the metrics are pretty high level they tend to be things like i've mentioned attendance rates success rates on things like the state exam or even formative assessments one of the i think keys to the success of this lcap has to do with instituting better program evaluation which i sort of see is embedded in goal four um so it has been the case in many districts including our own that when we offer professional development we don't evaluate the effectiveness of that professional development nor do we have a system for going and checking to see whether or not it's implemented and i sort of see that this work moving forward whether

124it's that or some other example needs to have stronger program evaluation and support from brea so that program managers professional development providers can conduct those kind of analyses i don't know that i'm adequately answering your question we can certainly think more about what could go into the lcap on that particular question yeah i'd love to hear more about how we're going to build in implementation measurements of accountability how things are communicated when you're going to be checking in and monitoring for the progress of implementation and i'm saying this because we've had a wonderful plan for the last few years and it's always fallen short when it comes to the actual realization of our goals based on implementation and so really building out that accountability structure so that we're sure that we can get some progress

125right um because most of the business good on paper but it comes down to when we implement it and how we implement it and i think we need to be thinking about that before fall begins as much as possible so thank you thank you it's a really good comment thanks director babbitt um dr vasudeva yeah i just wanted to follow up on uh director babbitt's comment if we're looking at evaluation and i really i'll also want to just before i ask my question say thank you so much the staff because i think that this presentation is much easier to to read um than the previous one so thank you for all that hard work i just wanted to to better understand is like what's the logic behind only like two programs versus you know additional

126programs for evaluation uh we had um the lcap plan specifies this a little bit better what we were thinking of by way of formal evaluations of two sort of focus programs are more on the lines of the kinds of things that we might get from a formal evaluation partnership you know bringing in something like west ed so for example in the conversation to come in the next hour about funding the literacy improvement plan there's a budget line that would actually be for a formal evaluation of our rti program using a research company like a west ed or an sri and so we meant the sort of formal program evaluation being of that sort while also sort of building up our program manager's capacity to evaluate the programs they run themselves so doing things more like

127surveys doing observational protocols as a way of sort of developing data local data sets that help us understand whether or not our actions are making a difference all right so if i'm understanding two of the programs would have kind of that like formal west side kind of partnership but the other it will still conduct evaluation for the other programs but they'll be in-house that's exactly our thinking yeah okay great all right well this is it's great that we're stopping along the way to ask questions but it does also lengthen the um presentation so let's let you move on dr stevens um i just want to point out one more thing and yeah of course um thank you for letting me point out we'll be under go one i see um a through g completion rates

128um but i think it doesn't hit uh k through five success measurements until gold 2 or any of the others so um we need to build in some k through 5 even maybe some middle school measure progress measurements under goal 1. thanks that's all my comment uh thank you and i'll i'll refer into the original plan to make sure that that's not just the function of you know what was presented here in the deck but i appreciate that you you're absolutely right goal one should include k-12 measures okay thanks dr babbitt all right go ahead dr stevens so in the coming set of slides we're trying to represent the lcap in a slightly different way again we're just basically kind of taking the standard format provided to us by the state slicing and dicing it

129kind of coming up with different representations so in the coming slides what you'll see is that we are sort of creating a slide per topic area or focus area for example like english language arts we've then identified the sum of the investments related to that particular area we've then included the metric of performance for that particular topic the student groups in need representing them demographically representing current performance and desired performance at the end of the three-year period representing key or i should say a selection of stakeholder feedback it may not be comprehensive in these slides as well as then the busd actions and services that are aligned to this particular topic along with their cost whether or not they're new so these are also dent slides we hope though that they um sort of represent

130in a different way maybe one that's more comprehensible to um to to us who think about subjects as sort of being helpful so let's first focus in on english language arts and literacy something we know is reading class english language arts classes in middle and high school so in total there are 303.25 million dollars of investments in language arts represented in this local control accountability plan we have metrics throughout the plan that relate to ela performance on the casp in both third fifth sixth eighth and eleventh grade we've represented here our aggregate district-wide performance which has improved over the last five years from 58 percent to 68 proficiency here we're representing what's in the l-cap with respect to prioritized students who are in need including socio-socio-economically disadvantaged students black and african-american students students experiencing homelessness

131students with disabilities and english language learners you can see those disaggregated performance rates there as well as desired outcomes at the end of the three year period we've represented some key stakeholder feedback from bar pack our dlac our educator advisory committee as well as other stakeholders again these are selections of what is a much more comprehensive feedback section in the lcap plan and then we list out the actions as they relate to support for english language arts achievement including our literacy coaches the literacy improvement action plan the selection of a new literacy universal screener called dibbles response to intervention teachers wilson and slingerland reading training as well as summer school investments now i should mark just sort of a couple of these color codes so any of the new actions and new investments taking place

132this coming year are marked in red so you can see for example that the literacy action plan the dibbles universal screener and the introduction of wilson and slingerland are all new to this year's plan and they represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in new investments to be added to our ongoing investments and then i'm also highlighting in yellow an area that will appear in the next presentation on the budget just trying to make it fairly clear to viewers and all of us where we still have some items as yet unfunded and that need to be decided on by the board if it's not marked in yellow that means it's already been decided in a previous budget decision let's jump over to math and director sina i hope this is a helpful representation of the actions

133included in math which is not to say that they are entirely sufficient but this is what's included in the current draft plan we have metrics third fifth sixth eighth and eleventh grade you can see as well that we've improved in the aggregate from fifty four percent proficient to sixty-two again in our l-cap we've disaggregated for a number of critical student groups we represent their current performance levels as of 2019 the last time the state test was administered and the desired outcome levels at the end of this three-year period we've represented some key feedback from pac dlac and eac and then we've clustered together multiple actions as they relate to math whether or not they show up in goal one or goal two and that includes items in black that are carried over from the previous

134lcap including math trainings we have as well math coaches and specific support for math u9 grade six through eight math support classes are included here funded through our supplemental grant as well as rti teachers who also provide math instruction that's why they're listed twice we have summer school also listed twice and then as well culturally relevant partnerships such as stem steps in camp edma listed here so there are new investments in math as well um and this this represents the collected sort of thinking as of right now related to math in our lcap if we move over to support for english language learners similar representation you can see the metrics that we are using in various sections of the lcap including academic achievement college and career readiness graduation rate english learner proficiency we had mentioned

135reclassification rates also included you can see baseline data for ela math graduation rate college career readiness rate as well as el progress on the california school dashboard which itself includes reclassification and then you can see the desired outcomes you can see one of the aspects of dlac's feedback including the revision of the el master plan and then here represented together is the sum of the investments to support english language learners that are represented in the lcap including ongoing support for eld through our eld teachers yield professional development on what's called integrated eld as well as to be considered in the next budget presentation specific set-aside for the revision of the 2014 english learner master plan this next set of slides attempts to capture additional action items as they relate to specific supports for prioritized students

136represented here are action items that mostly fall into goal two and goal three so without reviewing all of these numbers we're representing here key metrics associated with prioritized students that do relate to k-12 achievement on casp you can see up in the top line that's percent proficient represented there you can as well see in the students in need row uh disaggregation of the 2019 performance of a variety of demographic groups on the caaspp assessment as well as desired outcomes target outcomes for the end of the through this three-year period we represent key stakeholder key stakeholder engagement again this is a sampling not a comprehensive representation on this particular slide and then we list out some of the new and ongoing supports that includes rti teachers literacy coaches slinger and will slingerland and wilson showing up

137again math support classes the addition of a 504 coordinator to our high school which is actually new summer school curriculum sorry summer school availability for k-8 students as well as for seniors the culturally relevant summer partnerships and then you can see as well what we're calling the sort of digital divide technology supports this was a tranche of funding provided by the board about a month ago to continue our program of offering chromebooks to students who don't have them for at-home use this is a related set of slides we're moving now to what we're calling socio-economic i'm sorry social emotional learning and cultural supports for prioritized students so sel support this is two slides put together again in the interest of time i'll just go quickly we have metrics the students in need are represented here

138a selection of stakeholder feedback and then it's in this particular category where you start to see a lot of the new work or many new aspects in our lcap which include new set-asides for cultural competency training as well as culturally relevant summer partnerships the african american success manager and emojia program is not new but you will see support for our black studies department which has been approved by the board already the aasp manager position is in yellow because it will show up in the budget presentation in the next hour of our meeting [Music] represented here as well as ethnic studies the african-american success framework which is already funded and approved by both pno and the board at a value of sixty thousand dollars also included in the lcap is the latinx resolution as well as

139the puente program uh funded for forty thousand dollars in this development year and then just to highlight some of the other new work included in the included in the elk cap is the sea space plan that significant disproportionality plan that i mentioned earlier as well as investments in consent education for our high school students these other items in black are carried forward from the previous lcap we've listed out a number of programs this time under attendance so again metrics students in need key stakeholder feedback we've listed ophie here under attendance recognizing that attendance is not the sole function of ofi of liaisons have many different functions but simply as a convention and this presentation put it here recognizing it could have gone in other places as well so we are proposing an increase in funding

140for ofi with a value of 347 thousand dollars that's highlighted in yellow because it will be part of the coming hours budget conversation uh also included here the african-american success manager project and black studies as i mentioned before as well as a variety of sort of attendance related and emotional support related items like the intervention counselors and our dean of attendance we've also represented here college and career readiness supports again the same layout we hope that this sort of eases the sort of reading burden for everybody interested in the lcap and then i'll call out what's in yellow here uh proposal to reinforce funding for the bridge program uh at a value of 110 000. that's highlighted in yellow because we anticipate um speaking about this in the next presentation on the budget so that

141is a very quick very high level overview of our 70 page draft lcap we do invite still feedback from the community and the board about whether or not this collection of activities and metrics and goals is driving busd in the right direction and if this selection of actions is represented in our lcap is supportive of our overall vision and goals so with that i'll stop sharing my screen and welcome more questions and comments all right thank you thank you dr stevens i know from um vice president brown and i had an opportunity to give some feedback on that presentation tonight and make suggestions about what the different colors should mean and how to pull things out and i know there's no perfect way to summarize such a long document but i echoed what director sinai

142and director bossy dove said about that it's a lot easier to to understand this presentation so i appreciate it that's great michelle sinclair who's not with us tonight deserves the lion's share of of that praise yeah thank you very much to her um i'll um okay everybody's raised her hand so i'll let other people go first um director babbitt and then sorry let me do just remind everybody about the budget discussion that we have coming up but this is important so go ahead director thank you i also wanted to say i appreciate this format and specifically that there's the stakeholder feedback section um and so it's saying you know that pac and dlac are requesting consistent and comprehensive assessment systems um and i'm noticing that most of our targets or metrics are based on standardized

143testing and um in the past using those metrics don't help us to inform instruction or inform our practices quickly especially in future years when we need to make recommendations as to what we're going to refund or or cut or you know maybe grow so i'm just hoping that we can and also make sure that we have educator feedback on what some good goals or good assessment measures can be in this plan because we know that many of the teachers in our unions they don't like us you know using standardized testing as our main metric of performance because there are so many other ways in which you know they inform instruction from other testings or assessment screenings so all of that to say please add more measurements that aren't just based on standardized testing and that

144can be used timely thank you thanks for that i am um i'll just say yes to all of that i do believe that the lcap plan you know includes sort of more more um sort of benchmark style metrics like the star assessment um and we have actually just started what i think is a really exciting project being led by our brea coordinator tom reinhart um to sort of look more comprehensively at our k-8 assessment system that work in its first semester produced the decision to adopt the dibbles universal screening essentially replacing the star assessment in ke2 and that work will continue into the coming school year i know that he the professional development coordinator leader martinez and others are committed to just continuing the work of inspecting our overall assessment system in both math and

145english language arts and then recommending further assessments as well and i think just to jump into i think what's implicit maybe or maybe you actually said explicitly director babbitt but in what she said is the importance of having um input from and buy-in from teachers in the classrooms um in terms of developing what assessments they believe because they they all believe in assessments it's a question of which ones they think are most important and most most nimble in the way that i think director babbitt was talking about which i really appreciated that um and then before i go to director bossy devas next just a reminder that this that there is more in the lcap than in this presentation right these slides cover the high level or as much as you could fit into a

146slide without making it completely incomprehensible but it's not everything that's correct the document itself is more than 70 pages long and so this is just an attempt to represent and summarize that very long document okay um director vasudev well i really appreciate the summary superintendent stevens i don't think the public would appreciate 70 pages of a presentation tonight um but i i did want to just ask like for some of those desired outcome percentages they're they're kind of close to the baseline right and so one just look at a high level how did you come to those you know desired outcome percentages and two what happens if like you know in the middle of the elf cap we we hit those numbers do you adjust them you know what happens yeah those um that's great

147um what we tried to do uh is a few things so we've been working with a consultant um just to sort of help us with a number of aspects of this including setting those targets um and we really wrestled with these as i know every district does we would like of course that those targets are higher but we don't want to set targets that are simply unrealistic and fantastical we also don't want to underestimate you know our ability to produce improvement on state tests so we tried to do is set ambitious year-over-year goals somewhere in the three to four to five percent range per year so that we are seeing over time steady growth and there's research that sort of suggests that districts that are able to realize that kind of steady percentage growth each

148year are the ones that are very likely making system change versus districts that tend to see up and down sort of grow growth and then decline over time that's probably more a function just a particular cohorts of students taking the test from one year to the next so we did give it thought we do welcome feedback on those metrics as well and then to answer the second part of your question uh we um revise this lcap as part of a formal classic process every year we're required to report on our progress towards these measures and then we can update the lcap as we see fit it is our plan but that includes the sort of annual update which will come to the board and ultimately be approved by the board so then do we work

149with a consultant on an annual basis or we just kind of see how we are like what you know what happens in between yeah i don't know that we would um the decision to sort of reach out for some help had a little bit to do with some staff transitions taking place on our part as well i think we might have been better equipped to go it alone um with a full compliment in place but that was not the case for the closing months of our school year thank you thank you um vice president brown and then director sinai okay thank you um i want to thank um of course superintendent stevens you for be for doing the presentation but also for uh also an appreciation to michelle sinclair in her absence um for her

150hard and her hard work and her timely work and responding to our needs within like a week so thank you michelle for doing that um superintendent stevens can you take some time to go back to um the page about mathematics uh if you'll give me just one moment thank you and while you're while you're looking for that page i just want to make sure i'm understanding correctly red is what's new and then what's highlighted in yellow is also what is new but we haven't found a place for it yet or uh yeah that's correct red red is new highlighted in yellow it will actually appear in the budget presentation coming up in the next hour okay great um so my first question um i guess is are there any summer school just allocations for um

151grades nine through eleven we see um you know summer school for the incoming seniors and then we see curriculum for k through eight um but is there anything here that addresses our 9th 10th and 11th graders uh there is although it we didn't include it in the lcap um and this is just one of those sort of editorial dilemmas um you know how much do you include in the lcap and and at what risk of making it you know sort of overly unwieldy we do have a lot of summer offerings this summer for high school students that just are not on this list we didn't include them in the lcap although they do exist they include our extended school year program for high school students who have disabilities um we're offering credit recovery across all

152of the grades and then we have a cte bridge program as well that's operating and that's in addition to the um through credit recovery for incoming seniors so it's a bit more of a robust list at the high school level than what is represented on this and what has been included so far in the lcap okay thank you and i know everything can't be included but it's good to know that it is being included for us who may have questions about it um and then if you don't mind going to the social emotional learning and um cultural support slide yes um i wanted to ask about a couple of things um i think the second page is maybe yeah um so i'm a little concerned i mean i'm happy to see all of these cultural

153supports that are happening for our students but i'm a little concerned about our social emotional learning and also addressing the mental health of our students and that i don't see any new um designation or new allocations for that um so can you speak to speak to that superintendent's feelings uh i can why don't i sort of first talk about mental health support um so we've been very actively exploring with a number of organizations potential partnerships to expand mental health support on our campuses we've had conversations now i think with three different potential providers and are looking for more we haven't yet sort of signed on the dotted line with any organization about expanding counseling services on campuses we do have the resources to be able to do that we still have unexpected covid funds we

154have solid leads but don't yet have a contract and so that is sort of work that is solidly in front of us for the summer we're committed to completing it by the time we reopen in august but it has been so far sort of difficult to find the the sort of right mix of capacity and availability with these providers so just because it isn't listed here in our lcap plan or identified in our budget later does not mean that there isn't any more money to um to designate to to making sure that work happens uh that's correct yeah and in the coming budget um discussion in the next hour i'll sort of just sort of give a quick outline i mean the to sort of you know tip our hand we have about 2.5 million

155dollars still in unexpected covid dollars that can be used for things like expanded mental health support tutoring expanded family engagement and education or other board priorities they're not represented in the elk cup as of yet but we do have those resources available to us and we'll just continue our planning over the course of the summer all right director senai oh drenches hannah you're muted yeah thank you um one question um so some things show up in multiple charts like the wilson that so um when the dollar amount is shown on top of the chart is there some duplicate dollars in there or those are dollars unique to that particular category i believe they're duplicated um i can be sure of that i can check in tomorrow on that um we sort of struggled um it's

156just sort of a function of how we've represented things so take for example the rti teachers they showed up in multiple under multiple subject areas math and english language arts that doesn't mean we're spending two million dollars on rti teachers it means we're spending one and i'd have a feeling that the total probably reflects that expenditure in both english language arts and math okay so i just want to make sure for pac members and dlac members who are trying to do work at home to prepare for their feedback and their recommendations that they don't sum all those numbers um because there's duplicates in there so like where they see the el coach the literacy coaches the math coaches you know there's a there's a variety of different places where people show up more than once

157so it's going to take a little teasing out if they're looking at how the funding is being used and maybe that will be more reflective when we talk about the budget but somehow for our committees they need they need to see the crosswalk uh between the plan and the budget um to where they don't have to do a lot of the math at home so that that's one challenge um so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna just hammer it one more time around the math because when you look at your very first slide and and i don't think you need to go there but when you when you talk about growth and we look at the metrics we grew nine points in english language arts in our district-wide aggregate we grew eight points

158in our district-wide aggregate we're number 16 you know with comp comparable districts it's not our it's not our prioritized students who are having that growth and so when i look at the strategies and the budget allocations for literacy coaches math coaches the variety of things that are in there my question is how does that direct to those specific students who need to see the growth in their own outcomes because some of those things are school-wide right so their literacy coaches are for all the teachers to improve and and then for some students so my question is kind of like how are we going to really drive our programs to the students who need them and it's not just through rti it's through classroom instruction and curriculum development and how we're differentiating it to the students

159who really need the support so if we're going to have more ambitious metrics because i view those metrics as as the floor you know to say we're gonna go three four points in three years what that tells me is we're not concentrating our resources on the kids who who need it it means that we're hoping they get it through the you know throughout not through osmosis but you know that they're getting it through a generic you know lift up whereas if you're doing really targeted work that's tailored to the population you would hopefully see more more growth so i'm viewing the metrics while low are a floor and that we hopefully would exceed them uh particularly for the students it's totally unacceptable to have a goal of 30 percent of the population is you know

160at at i can't remember what which you know which indicator is our 50 of our african-american students are meeting the english language arts i mean that's just not okay so um i want to go back to why we need to do a look at our english language arts but even more so a look at our math that's not just interventions because the math isn't working for kids um so i really want to reiterate the importance of it being in goal one as a solid curriculum and instruction strategy and how are we going to get those numbers really up thank you uh we'll we'll come [Music] appreciate having the week to sort of take another look at this and we can come back with a little bit more um information about math and perhaps unpack that

161just a little bit more deeply for next week i'm going to take over for uh president alfred for a moment until you return so uh director babbitt do you want to ask your question yes um thank you director sinai for re-emphasizing focused and differentiated learning strategies being implemented in our classrooms and so i'm just hoping that we can set uh you know in the question do these actions overall support our district vision and goals i believe that they do overall support but i believe that if we don't by like early fall sometime uh have another presentation on our accountability plan our actual measurements how we're going to as director sinai said make sure that these differentiated learning strategies are actually reaching our prioritized students we will fall short of reaching any goal so i don't

162know how we can do that but i'm really hoping that since we don't really have our comprehensive evaluation plan built out that that's something very early in the fall we can come back to and address because this is the overarching strategic plan of our district and that has to include include implementation and real-time monitoring thanks um i'll call on myself for my question so um superintendent stevens one thing that i wanted to mention is that in your presentation you mentioned that we were looking at a couple of different things to identify a couple of different students or to identify groups of students that are in need and so i wanted to ask a little bit about um if you go back to the social emotional learning and cultural supports page i wanted to ask about

163the african american success manager um if you give me just one moment i know i can find it that's okay there we are perfect um and so the yellow means that we don't have um a place for it to go or does that mean that we're um expanding the position uh so that we don't and that's why we don't have a place to go can you yes and help me understand that i i do it's a great question it's it's really the first it doesn't have a funding source for the coming school year uh and that's only uh sort of a function of it's really a budgeting function we have been paying for the african-american success manager position through our supplemental grant through the lcap program we had to trim that grant by one million

164dollars because of declining student enrollment on duplicated student enrollment and so in the coming budget presentation you'll see that we're proposing to place that position on our general fund we'd never had any intention of cutting that position so it's highlighted in yellow just to signal it is coming up in our coming discussion we do and propose to put it on the general fund to maintain it but it doesn't represent an expansion of the position we do have plans to expand umoja from longfellow to other campuses and i understand at this point that it looks like we'll um plan for that expansion this coming year 2122 with an eye to the expansion taking place in 2223. um okay thank you for for responding to that i think i got my hopes up really high but the

165thought that we were expanding on this position especially when we look at the data um for our most vulnerable students i thought that would be a great direction for our district to move in so i'm a little bummed to hear that that's not happening but interested in and how we can address that once again with the remaining um funds that we have um if there are any more questions um we can now go to uh the budget presentation that i think will be um presented by us assistant superintendent pauline collins uh that's right if you can give it just a few seconds and we're gonna we'll do the transition thank you in the meantime while we're waiting for the transition i can turn it back over to president albert do you think we should do

166the public hearing now i was just gonna that's a great idea let's just can we do that public hearing um thank you for taking over vice president brown um action item 14.1 is a public hearing for initial proposals for the successor agreement with bcce um is there anybody here for public comment on that particular item um seeing none do we approve this yes um i'm gonna move to a proof um approve this item for a second a second all right thank you vice versa brown um miss chairs can you call the roll do you wrap your bus today yes director babbitt yes you're at your sideline yes that's president brown yes yes all right thank thank you for reminding me to do that by sergeant brown um assistant superintendent follows me dr stevens are we

167ready on the budget uh i think we are miss follensby you're feeling okay yeah i am thanks here we go so um i can share my screen um dr steven that's great thank you very much so can everybody see um i'll go into present mode so it's a little bit bigger that would be great trying to get it's always interesting trying to get this on my my um laptop hold on remove this i can't get to the button sorry maybe dr stevens can you can you yeah i can i can take over and then and then you can just move it along with the slides okay yeah that's better sorry no problem okay okay so um i'll be taking us through um our budget presentation this evening and um and again we just want to

168reiterate that this has been a pretty complex budget season we have a lot of moving parts a lot of new funding sources um we've also worked extensively with our community um our advisory committee just to um get their input in terms of our planning and decision making and we have accomplished a lot of our goals and tonight we hope to take you through the final 750 thousand dollars of unrestricted general fund expenditures that um we are trying to land the plane as dr stephen says so um let's go to the next slide so um again our general front priorities we're looking at the remaining general fund revenue um we also will be bringing the superintendents and staff's ranking of budget priorities and as mentioned earlier we met with our s back yesterday so we can

169also share their ranking and then we are also looking at the um various items and comparing it to p p to pack and d lag feedback um we'll have a a brief discussion and we're hoping to bring this back for action on the 16th the next board meeting okay so on the next slide so again um 750 000 is a target if you will for the unrestricted general fund and we're actually looking at four categories for this 750 000 so we have identified in the list several positions that were formally staffed by other funding sources um and these positions are actually filled um so we're calling this category existing staffing and mandatory services and we'll take you through the um the detail um on the on further slides but that bucket if you will um

170it's 282 thousand dollars so when we presented this last night to s back we didn't ask them to vote on this bucket this is um this is an um uh uh um staffing and services that are mandatory and we feel that we have to um we have to um fulfill these obligations we didn't lay off anybody and um these were basically positions that were formally staffed by other um funding sources and the other bucket that we looked at is our essential bucket and this um this has to do with positions that were funded by other sources um and this is just what's what's being asked for the general fund um to absorb ten thousand dollars and it also in the following year um it also is looking at ongoing expenses of the 10 000 an

171additional 110 000 and then we have a desirable category these are expenses that we would like to have um and we have put them in this category and then we also have a bucket that we're talking about funding next year and that's our that's 200 000 um and as a reminder we do still have 2.5 million dollars in covet funding we've spent a significant amount but even after all our proposals we still have a balance of 2.5 million dollars and of course um these can be used to fund plans that are still in development including mental health tutoring and expanding family engagement so with that um summary i'm not going to take us through the detail so on the next slide uh you can see these are the um the new investments that are existing

172staffing and mandatory services so they are new in that we're asking for it to be funded by the general fund but these are positions that were formally funded by um other sources as i've said before so this was mentioned in the lcap presentation the african american success manager this is funding the existing position that was formally funded by el cap so we're looking at hundred and fifty three thousand dollars um the two um um bta um positions these were formerly funded by lcap and vsep so these are 0.5 of each position and um where these these two seventy one thousand fifty eight thousand dollars that has to do with um high disposition and a counselor at the at bk um next slide uh we're also looking at um the positions that were funded by the

173low performance block block grant these are various um coaching positions and tsa positions that were funded in prior years by by a funding source that's no um that's now expired and we're proposing to put it on funding source on a um covert funding source for one additional year and um look and re-examining these positions um in the following year so those are the three on this slide and also the others on the other side we can go to the other slide so um the these are um these are more positions here and of course the literacy action plan this is for continued work on dyslexia related services and that's 250 000 so that's what we've called a mandatory service so in looking at this bucket the total 282 thousand dollars ongoing general fund expenditures and

174then 527 thousand 000 in one time um funding and that will be our covet funding um do we have questions here or do you want me to continue so hearing none i'll continue well i guess um uh vice president brown do you have a question oh i didn't see that yeah i i do have i do have a question um associate superintendent um following are you prepared um for us to ask questions just about the structure that you mentioned a little bit ago or um for these specific priorities um i think we could take questions just on this existing staffing and mandatory services bucket before we go on to the other yeah perfect um so my question is around um the existing staffing allocations to be put in uh one-time funding specifically for um for

175for staffing um i know in the past we've always been a little nervous about putting uh staffing positions in one-time funding so can you um kind of speak to to the decision around putting in a one-time funding um did you want to respond to that dr stephen sure i can i can jump in on this um so these this particular half dozen positions or so has been on one time funding for a number of years um it actually has been a bit helpful for us to have just a handful of positions some of these sort of low fte position 0.2 0.3.4 on revenue sources that have been expiring it has frankly just allowed us to sort of use up the final pennies of some grants including the low performing block grant and so it sort

176of had a helpful budget function the employees themselves don't know the difference between the revenue source and so because these particular positions have been on one time funding for a number of years now we sort of feel a bit more comfortable keeping them there they're also relatively low fte generally though vice president brown you're correct we'd far rather have staff positions on ongoing revenue it's just that we've we've sort of found a certain bit of utility and having a small number of them on one time okay well i think my concern is specifically around like the long fellow literacy coach oftentimes you know if we put them on one time funding what happens um and the next time when we we don't have the one-time funding to support that and it doesn't it isn't housed

177in a long-term it doesn't have a long-term home and that makes me nervous um especially just coming out of a pandemic and all of the the learning loss that has happened makes me nervous when i don't see that things like this have a a full home to go to work or ongoing home rather um why don't you keep going assistant superintendent founds me okay so thank you for that suggestion um vice president um so um so we looked at this other category now um we are looking at a balance of 467 thousand dollars in the honor stick to general fund and we've come just under that target and this is where we're now looking at staff recommendations um for new investments and this is where we have the category whether we said they were essential

178or desirable or to be funded next year so the first one that we're looking at is our bridge program and you're you notice that we have a zero score here for ongoing funding and it's categorized as essential by both the superintendent and staff and s back and it's also an area of concern for dlac and and pac which is where we have those check marks there um what the proposal is is that for the first year um it will be funded by elo grant which is a covert funding that was previously approved by the board and in the old years it would be funded by the un unrestricted general fund um for the equivalent of one fde uh which is increasing um each staff's fte by a certain amount to get us to um front

179to be spending about 110 000 which is one fte as i mentioned in the out years then we're looking at the communications we are this is the um the general fund share of the communications manager that's predominantly funded by bicep and this ten thousand dollars um is just a small ask um from the general fund for um that position's work with the general fund and other um other areas in the district and that's been scored as essential both by the superintendent and s back and then it comes their escape which is our new enterprise system um which is one time one time on ongoing costs for us to convert from our existing system qss to escape um we have put some of this funding on one time general fund and um covet funding um with

180a hundred thousand dollars going to the general fund um this is the the desirable category by superintendent and staff and essential by s back and um i just want to point out that both the essential and desirable um categories by staff and the superintendent will be um can be absorbed by this 750 the only area that's we're not thinking of funding is the one where we're scoring it to be funded next year um and then the ofi director this is creating um a new director position so we're keeping the existing staff and this would be a new position um it's desirable by the score this is desirable by the superintendent and staff s back um the majority thought it should be funded next year and of course this is an area of interest for both

181dlac and pac on the next slide um these this comes this we have the um two family liaison the ofi family liaisons um we um they they're actually two fte um in one uh the superintendent and staff thought this was desirable s factor one was essentials and desirable like there was a split somewhat there and one um was fun next year uh we do have an asterisk on one of these positions because we're proposing that we split um this position between site and central office and that this would be spanish speaking this information was added after we shared this with s back but we think this is an important distinction to make so we just thought we would um include that information here um and then of course our one-time community engagement projects this will

182be the middle school assignment and the washington school renaming that's on one-time funding and desirable both by the superintendent and staff and s back and the el master plan um this is as a result of um the reduction in the lcap budget so we're now proposing to to fund this a hundred thousand dollars with one-time funding desirable by the superintendent and staff and essential and of course an area of interest by dlac and pac and of course we've all this is a new category we use reusable dishware um we're thinking about a pilot program at two sites um for spending um ten thousand dollars i had a discussion with our nutrition services and our you know one-on-one today and we're going to be fleshing this out in a little bit more detail but we're excited

183to fund ten thousand dollars for this very um important project and um i'm thinking about doing a um a pilot at two sites and it's desirable both by the superintendent and staff and s back um so let's go to the next slide and this is the last page of our recommendations we only have two to go um so this is the area that we thought um both the superintendent and staff um well we thought that these two positions we could think about funding these next year so for special and we've already added significant staffing to the special ed budget uh for positions that were vacant and um and um funded and vacant that will now be funded for some of the asks for special ed and the new position for position control in hr we're

184thinking about we um we looking at this again in the upcoming year so that's the two funding um categories those are two categories that we thought should be funded next year um s back thought this special ed position um was a combination of essential and desirable and the the new position um s back thought it should be desirable an assistant superintendent follows me if i can i might just color in a little bit more uh what we have been able to accomplish by way of increased staffing in special education department for the coming year so between revenue from both bera and found revenue from the general fund we're adding to the special ed department at right now what is 9.5 ftes over our current staffing and it was for that reason really that we staff

185sort of place this last remaining special education position in the fund next year had we not been as successful as we were in identifying additional funding for special ed services we might think differently about it but nonetheless we wanted to represent the difference between our thinking and the rating of s back and so we're providing that for you tonight okay so that's the um that's the summary of our proposals um the new investment totaled 667 000 of which we're asking for for we're thinking of funding this year the 467 and 200 000 will be deferred to next year uh one time 230 in the general fund 376 for total ask um summarized in that last row so um we can go to the next slide again this is just a recap of what i have

186presented in terms of the different buckets the different asks and um the timing of when we're going to be um asking to to spend some of these investments right and then just a quick note about process this evening's presentation is intended just for discussion sake we'll work with board leadership between now and next week to think about bringing this similar package of proposals back to the board for action uh so that they can be presented as part of the final budget okay um direct to babbitt um okay she has her hand raised yeah okay go ahead director about it thank you i just wanted to highlight um the unspent balance of covet one-time funds of 2.5 million dollars i think that's important for the community to be aware of and also can you explain the

187um 120 000 for 22.23 i can't really find what position it's related to um it's related to the bridge position so it's the 10 000 that was ongoing from um for the bicep commission um position and then um in our multi-year i'm gonna have to pick up the hundred and ten thousand for bridge as an ongoing expense so the hundred and ten plus the ten for b step that's a hundred and twenty okay and finally i just wanna um suggest that um you know what we do in many of our school side councils or other organizations is we prioritize carryover have to make you know different priorities um i guess this is what we're saying with this consider funding next year that these are already you know automatic priorities um but i think that would

188be um maybe a good way to just really highlight and target ahead of time that these priorities and hopefully that will keep our families from having to come and advocate year after year yeah if i could um you know we're still we still don't have an approved budget from the state you know there's this sort of typical annual reconciliation process that will happen between now and the end of june it's just one of those or ironies of timing in california that we pass our budget before they do so there are some discussions about some additional funds coming to districts including potentially state funding for rate increases in stirs and pers contributions and it may be by the time all is said and done that some additional general fund revenue will show up for us we'll

189see if that takes place in either case though we have to pass a balanced budget on this information and so that's why we're sort of presenting it now and we may just file those things away we may get to act on those things actually sooner than we think um but it but it is a good it's a it's a um it's an argument for doing some kind of prioritization like director babbitt's talking about something that's right yeah it's a good idea um i will i'm going to jump in and um um talk about bridge for a second um dr stevens and superintendent phones be i um i appreciate that we've um we found funds to um maintain the status quo which which requires an increase of 1.0 fte um to maintain the status quo would

190bridge and um and i i wanted to ask about a suggestion that i made at the last meeting that would that would actually allow us to increase the cohorts with bridge um which is a i think a priority of the pack and also at least a number of us on the board given the success of that program so demonstrated success in that program with the metrics um that that they've generated um and i guess but i'm i want to echo vice president brown's concern about using one-time funds for ongoing positions i think in general that's really something we want to avoid um and and yet we are sitting on a there's the coveted money that um director babbitt just mentioned but there's also the lcap reserve which is really meant to be used when our

191supplemental funds are decreasing because of state you know decrease in state funds whether it's because of our demographics or just reduce funding from the state and so i guess i want to ask you dr stevens if we were going my understanding is that is that to increase the cohort of the bridge program would require or the request from the director of the bridge program is for another 1.0 um that would go towards a counselor that would um be responsible for another cohort of bridge kids and if we if we just i would feel more comfortable using one-time funds if we could allocate an entire four years worth of funds so that it wasn't a question of okay as director vice president brown was saying you know next year okay now where are we going to

192find the money for this priority if it's on one time funds that puts it in jeopardy it's not great fiscal planning but if we have a relatively big chunk of money and we can allocate four years of it then we can say okay you've got four years of funding you don't have to scramble for it every year am i right that that would probably eat up almost half of our of our el cap reserve super 10 phones was that right yeah um so i i wanted to i mentioned this at the last meeting i think it kind of got lost in the shuffle but i i want to throw that out as a possibility to do and and um and see what my colleagues think about it dr stevens do you have an opinion on

193that or um yeah do you have an opinion on that yeah i do um you're absolutely correct in describing the bridge program is successful and that there's need for two cohorts per year i think it could be doubled and we have student demand i myself have been in touch with jesse luxford who directs that program her thinking is that an additional 1.0 probably to be filled by a counselor would permit the expansion you know in the first year of an additional cohort and then for the next four years um the cohort and every year after thereafter you've named the challenge correctly if we sort of begin to use lcap supplemental funding we will have built the program without necessarily a path forward we'll be required to sort of you know engage in some deliberations about

194how to sustain funding for that expanded program um or reduce its size which i imagine just wouldn't be desirable for us so i agree completely with the notion that an expansion is appropriate and and would benefit students and then i think we just have to if we made a decision like that we'd have to do it with clear eyes uh that we have sort of a four-year road in which we'd have to figure out then what's the replacement funding for that expanded bridge program okay yeah and and again like i make the suggestion and think we should do it but i but i really but i recognize that um that's that it's problematic i think the four years nature of it um and the fact that the the students that it's addressing and serving are

195really um you know 100 students that we're trying to prioritize with our supplemental funds so that that's my that's my proposal i i know a lot of thought has gone into this budget i really appreciate it and i'll um step back and turn over to director sinai for her comments um thank you president alper i i support your your concept and your idea and i actually i guess where my where my reservation is would be to say that we're going to add a second cohort every year um i think given the circumstances with covid and the high need i think we can safely say for year 2021-22 we want to use this funds to add a cohort that gets followed for four years i think it's going to take more financial planning if we say

196we're just going to double the program in general so that would be my one caveat um but i definitely would support and i think it's appropriate the whole purpose of the lcap supplemental funds were to deal with you know emergency issues on with the population that we're trying to serve and covet is it so adding a second cohort at least for the next four years i i totally support it and thank you for bringing that up and on that note um i would also like dr stevens maybe you to clarify um with the esser funds the two a chunk of the 2.2 million or is that all of the 2.2 million of the the cova dollars that are remaining that are unaccounted for unspent um i really support a dedication of funds for mental health

197services that has been something that has been um prioritized in every single town hall every single meeting we've had um totally tied to covid so um you know i and i don't know what you're thinking of in the sense of scale but definitely uh you know the 156 000 or whatever we did as elo or whatever pot that was coming out of his is wholly insufficient so um what we can do with those funds for mental health is really important i want to go to ofi um and kind of similar to what i was just saying around bridge i think we're in a high priority crisis moment right now where we really need to support our families um and what the proposal does is um and and this i don't think i'm saying anything that

198we haven't said in previous meetings is by having a director and a program supervisor and now half of an offi person that's at the district we've really only added one and a half boots on the ground um and i feel like with everything again that has been come that has been coming forward from the pack and from the dlac d-lac and the demands and the needs of our families is i would like us to have more um site-based ofi folks and would like us to consider a dedication of some of those uh one-time funds because they go till 2023 that they don't have to all get spent this year and we could commit to having a couple of additional two additional on top of what you're recommending of liaisons working in our schools at this

199moment in the next two or three years where our families really need support um so again i don't know what your thoughts are on that or what my colleagues on the board thought of that but i feel like we've been saying from the get-go that we need more of folks at our school sites and um one and a half to me doesn't doesn't meet that need oh thanks director dr stevens do you have a response to that well first on the met on what director simon said about the mental health um funds i mean you you i think you you talked about mental health earlier but is there anything any response you had to that yeah we um without sort of revealing details that just haven't come to fruition we are in conversation with a

200number of organizations about trying to get to what i would you know our goal of having one full-time counselor on each of our sites um for at least one the one-year period coming up um we think we may have a partner who who's got that kind of capacity um approximate cost of that work would be about a half a million dollars for the year um so we just haven't sort of signed on the dotted line yet we're sort of doing our due diligence on that proposal comparing it to some others but we are sort of actively in this discussion and i think not far from being able to identify that partner so so please know that we are working on that we've heard that loud and clear and then in terms of the the of

201proposal i feel sort of similarly is the bridge proposal um there's just undoubtedly the need right now we hear it from our advisory committees we hear it from our families i think the sort of question from a policy perspective is you know does it make sense for a couple years on one time funding um and you know are we collectively as a governance team sort of willing to have the conversation in a couple years about what will happen when that funding eclipses so it's really it's sort of a matter of making the decision with clear eyes about what will be good about it in the short term and hard about it in the long term okay um director vasudev thank you president albert i just wanted to also support um both the ideas of expanding

202the bridge program because of just the amount of you know coba 19 related challenges that our most vulnerable students have faced this year i think that program serves our targeted population it's really important that um you know we continue to support our students also at the you know the idea of expanding mental health right now is really important to take k to 12 and so i'd love to just you know once you you get more ideas uh dr stevens from other you know from from the providers that you're in contact with what that would cost i'd love to just hear more details and how we can do that um with regards to ophi i just wanted um to echo what what director sinai said i think it's really important that we think of how to

203get more boots on the ground this could be a good time for us to try to you know pilot in a middle school program i know that we've been talking about that for years like expanding ophie into the middle schools and what that would look like to expand into all the middle schools so it could be really an exciting time to help our families particularly as they're coming back and need additional support in the upcoming school year i think it's an opportunity to really do some great work at the middle school level with family engagement so i i support expanding of and getting more boots on the ground i just wanted to clarify though that for that split position the spanish language position that it is providing that that at the district level it's not

204like they're they're managing people they're they're providing direct services to families in spanish monolingual families right and we know from our own district census that 11 of our families identify spanish as our primary home language and so that's a lot it's a lot of people and it's making sure that you know where there are ofi staff members that where there is a gap in language that we're able to fill it and so it is providing direct services it's not like that person is just you know managing folks it's providing direct services to a vulnerable population and by splitting the position you're also adding more boots on the ground because they're able to serve an additional site and so i think this could be a good opportunity for us to expand ophie at the middle school

205level um okay dr babbitt so i'm a little unclear on what we're asking are you all asking if um we as a board want to um support julian ty's proposal which is not which which is what i'm seeing is not in the superintendent's proposal or do you want to give our get our our thoughts our feedback on that or what is the direction needed yeah that that's thank you director babbitt um so yes i mean what so my overall comments is um i'm comfortable with the superintendent's recommendation and i'm in and i'm proposing an additional um expenditure out of the lcap supplemental fund for an additional cohort of bridge um and i'd you know i'd like to you know get the rest of the board's thoughts on that particular proposal director sinai's made a proposal

206if i understand it um of two additional fte of ofi staff liaisons um uh out of also out of one time funds different one-time funds than than the bridge what i'm talking about for bridge it would be helpful to get the board's views on those as a process point i think if for example a majority of the board was in favor of one or both of those proposals the direction would be to um assistant superintendent follows me and dr stevens to incorporate those additional expenses into the version of the budget that is brought to us next week is that i mean it's a process point is that right dr stevens that sounds right to me yes um and then so that's just two two proposals that have come up um of course if anyone has

207thoughts or comments about the rest of the budget presentation you know now is the time to say uh no now it's time to raise them but director babbitt do you have well well while we're talking do you have um uh response to those two proposals i'm in support of both those proposals i just hope that we can um clearly make sure that the parent advisory committee understands that this is coming from the el cap reserve and if there is enough besides the reserve um that we could be considering i'm also open to to hearing that as well because we know that our unduplicated count is continuing to go down um and so we will need to somehow make up for what's already in there with a reduced um population in the future yeah can i

208sorry um two things one is to me it seems like these might be priorities that would in the category that you were talking about earlier director babbitt where if additional ongoing funds become available um you know i i would love for staff to to find to use them for for these um so that we're not using one-time funds or not um what's the opposite of replenishing deplenishing depleting our um l-cap reserve um but my guess i just had a quick question assistant superintendent fonsley am i right that you know the lcap reserve is capped at a million dollars right um my understanding is that we always have a little bit of carryover in lcap in our supplemental funds because we don't spend at all for different personnel related reasons so is that true that we

209can actually expect even with our numbers going down that that reserve if past practices any you know guide might continue to be replenished over the next couple years um i don't think so just because um of the fact that we've had to um to find funding for almost a million dollars to balance that fund so i think um the lcap is pretty maxed out at this point okay um and so i don't think we'll have um an extra reserve if you will to kind of backfill these positions well that was wishful thinking then but it amplifies what director babbitt was saying about making sure that pac knows that that's what we're talking about and that and that um i guess the amendment to my direction would be to try to avoid using that those funds

210if we if we could um even though it is what we should it's the it's the population we should be spending those funds on but the ongoing nature of it is not what that one-time reserve is really for is that fair director babbitt okay um vice president brown um i was actually gonna say that uh associative brenton and follensbee um reminded us a while ago about um being about our lcap reserves and a question that i asked months ago um and so i'm glad to hear that um we were able to find out not or potentially not using um our lcap reserve for that um reason and for the reason that um director babbitt highlighted in regards to our decline in enrollment numbers um and knowing that our funding may be different um next year

211and in the years to come so the kind of caution is from from using those funds however i do support um the recommendation for ongoing support for bridge um as well as um the direct recommendation that director simon present in regards to getting um more more boots on the ground for um of you liaisons i think that that's just something that um the superintendent and the board partner with the superintendent i'm very early in this year to highlight as a priority families have advocated for that over and over again while still understanding the need to have support on on the district level and still needing the support to uh to ensure that uh let us not get confused that on the district level the boots are still on the ground um so we we must

212you know continue to keep that in mind but also um the need for for more liaisons um so i i support the recommendations that have been mentioned we need to get boots that are branded with the ofeed logo that's a perfect use of one time funds boots on the ground um all right director sinai i like that idea um i i was just going to say maybe in relation to the recommendation or the direction to um assistant superintendent fallonsville and dr stevens is that you know what we're saying is that we're encouraging the youth encouraging may not be the right word we are open and would like to see the use of one-time funds going toward an additional cohort of bridge and to additional of and if there's you know whether it comes from esser

213whether it comes from you know part of the lcap um uh reserve you know esther 2.4 you know 2.2 million goes fast but you know we haven't spent it yet and it could be that one or two years of bridge comes out of esser and you know one or two years comes out of el cap so i mean we could defer to you guys to to play with how to do it um with the understanding that we're trying not to deplete the lcap reserve um and if i can piggyback on what director cyanide has said it makes me a little nervous because this just this evening we've talked about three or four things that'll come out of that two million dollar left no money that we'll have left over and um i want us to

214be realistic about what we can fund and how we can fund it um and would encourage you to to find to accurately find ways yeah i can feel direct i mean assistant superintendent follows his blood pressure rising as we're spending this one time money i mean i think i think you're right bryce was in brown it's that because there's also the mental health that we just talked about yeah it sounds like dr stevens a big chunk of that money he was really earmarked for mental health services um the yeah those services hundred thousand dollars i think you say superintendent students uh that's a current quote i mean we're you know these are sort of trained mental health professionals and so we're talking about paying folks you know for their time and that that that adds

215up quickly yeah um director babbitt and then director vasudeva all right that was that was actually my comment about those sr funds and how we were already talked about yeah and for other reasons and needs so yeah we got to be cautious um director vestido yeah i just wanna make sure that when we're talking about mental health services that we're talking about comprehensive services for like elementary middle and high that we're looking at those three different age groups um and it's and are we looking at community mental health or clinical like d any idea doctor any like more a mix actually yes so so um in the conversations we've been having we're talking both about um sort of proactive um sort of mental health education often delivered through teachers who have been trained by a

216provider as well as providing group support and individual support on campus so so it's been sort of like a mixed method approach to being able to provide mental health supports for students got it and do you know it like within that mixed group like kind of what's the recommended priority to like what are you hearing from other districts that they're that they're thinking of doing for next year to help our students overcome yeah i'm hearing districts doing a whole variety of things um including um some districts turning to you know the relatively untested sort of new field of online sort of you know commercial sort of counseling provision there are companies now out there sort of offering app based and sort of you know platform based mental health services for students um we're all we

217haven't really vetted those conversations those companies yet or been more looking at partners we're familiar with who have reputations here in the bay areas being able to provide counseling services um but to more valuing the sort of in-person on campus support versus the the online platform yeah i agree that's that was what i was going to say is can we prioritize what's you know in person for our students as we plan for as normal of a return as we can for the fall um all right um are is there any any last direction folks want to have give um dr dr stevens assistant superintendent follows me if you did you get what you needed from us uh we believe so this has been a really helpful discussion um so our plan is the next step

218will be in touch with board leadership over the course of this week but we'll put together a package much like this one but with some modifications would propose to bring it for approval at the coming board meeting and we'll also be holding the sort of first reading of the general fund budget next week um we will incorporate these sort of elements into that by the time we get to the 23rd you could expect to see the general fund elements of tonight's discussion incorporated into that presentation and and um to request for approval great um i see director sinai and i just want to say to the public um if you want to speak in our extended public comment now is the time to raise your hand oh and director babbitt too okay director sinai um

219i just wanted to put in a request dr stevens that when you meet with the pac um chairs that you try to encourage them to get a pac meeting before the 16th my understanding is the meeting might be set for after the 16th which is too late so if you could get it because we really want their feedback as part of this process that's my thinking and i'm going to make that request of the chairs when i see them tomorrow and dr babbitt i just wanted to ask and maybe um one of my board colleagues can help me understand how we as a board can advocate for increased funding to come from the state level we really just need increased funding to meet our general fund needs and i don't know how to do that

220but i'm definitely on board to to work at advocating in that way so thank you that's a great question that we should we should talk about and and including with our local representatives and assembly in the senate um who are friends to the district and and might be able to give us constructive advice about that thank you for raising that um okay um all right great thank you all so much we're going to move to extended public comment um vice versa brown if you could se set the timer for two minutes each and we have six people um who've raised their hands so this is the time i'm going to give you one last chance to raise your hand um okay we've got cerebelles licen okay we've got now this is no more people after

221right now sarah bowles liza let's go stephanie green berkeley high school ptsa lindsay nophil lilly howell and say sung woo um we'll start with this bowl oh miss chairs are you are you with us yes president okay thank you um just checking um go ahead miss bowles hey uh you didn't actually say whether we had a minute or two minutes sorry two minutes i'm two minutes okay um so yeah after listening to the lcat plan and seeing very little targeted support for special education um one thing's pretty clear to me the district and the board aren't really asking questions about specific needs within special education it's just kind of this amorphous sped category so with the exception of new support for dyslexia which is awesome i'm not seeing special education lcap program goals being driven

222by the specific disabilities um and i think it's important to understand in busd according to the state data that you submitted of like 1156 fed kids you've got 207 with autism 147 with speech or language impairments 441 with specific learning disabilities like dyslexia or math learning challenges and 243 that are classified as other health impairment only 11 are actually classified as having an intellectual disability so you need to be tracking outcomes for kids in special education by their specific learning challenges and the identified program supports for those kids which are going to be highly specialized so as a parent it's really opaque and i want to be benchmarking my kid against progress by the specific challenge not general you know special education as a goal so um yeah when i see that your you know

223your goals are taking kids from say you know 23 to 30 percent it just seems way too low because for the vast majority of these kids we're talking about accommodations to access education not that they like they're fundamentally incapable and i think you just need to do a reset on how you communicate these program specifics thank you thank you that was exactly two minutes um liza lutzker followed by stephanie greene miss let's get um we can't hear you you're not muted but i don't know is it your um sometimes your air pods are earphones or no we'll come back we'll try to try you again in a minute let's go to you stephanie green hi um i'd like to say it's it's been so nice all year seeing you in my living room i hope

224this continues next year on zoom um thank you so much for such a productive discussion um about lcap and also the potential use of the two point two or two and a half million dollars um i'd like to advocate again for um the use of those funds for the ofi positions but also to ask you all to think strategically about that as well so um always already there's been a need for an expansion of the ofi positions but we're in a particular time and to think about the expenditure of those funds in this time of emerging from the stage of the pandemic is important to realize that the unemployment assistance is going to be ending in september the moratorium on rents is ending in june landlords can take people to court beginning in august and

225all of this is going to you know create incredible instability for families and for students which is highly related as well to mental health so to be thinking about mental health and ofi together i think is important as well as to think about a lot of the situations a lot of the problems being um consistent amongst the schools so i'd like to bring an idea that my my friend and sister brazil mcintyre who directs the learns program over at sylvia mendes has proposed and that is to think about how could you have not only have you know not only have boots on the ground site-specific staff but also people who are specialized in certain areas who could be resources across the district maybe there's a specialist in housing a specialist of food a specialist in

226these common areas that could be called down even across the sites so thank you so much um you all are doing a super job and i feel so blessed that you all are there thank you thank you thank you for those comments really appreciate it thank you so much um do we miss let's go did we you think you figured it out um no we'll keep trying we'll come back to you've got about six minutes to figure it out um miss howell lily howell we'll go to you next you can hear me yeah yeah we've got you like go ahead okay um my name is lily howell i'm a family engagement specialist and i just wanted to thank you all for your robust discussion and appreciation for the work of ophi you know it was

227not long ago that the district actually considered cut star department and it's overwhelming to hear the current district and community understanding and appreciation for our work my colleagues and i do this work because we care because it matters because we want to see our black and brown students and families seen heard valued included welcomed and successful a centralized parent engagement specialist who is bilingual in spanish is much needed and will serve our students and families in a meaningful way and while i appreciate the move of creating an offi director as it elevates the respect and shared commitment to equity and family engagement in our district i would like to ask for meaningful expansion that will do more to change the day-to-day experiences for our students and families or boots on the ground and i would

228totally wear those boots by the way mr alper well it will give our department leadership much needed time to dedicate dedicated to outlining strategic plans and designing measurable goals and outcomes having a director it will not change our capacity to do so without meaningful expansion you heard from families and stakeholders that they wanted to see one full-time ophi for school that they want to see meaningful family engagement in our work we help families with the complexity of navigating each school's unique culture and systems being split we have to navigate two cultures two climates two different systems and do not have the time to shift from supporting our parents with crisis navigation to meaningful engagement right now we are serving families who continue to be in crisis and are traumatized by the very real consequences of

229living within a white supremacist society that have been much compounded by the pandemic in order to pivot from crisis case management of these families to a meaningful family engagement model we encourage you to continue the discussion you started tonight to commit to positions that serve students and families at the school sites i understand the various demands that need to be balanced in this budget this was a really robust conversation and i emphasize empathize with the complexity of making these decisions and appreciate you for continuing the conversation i can't see my screen i'm so sorry yeah your time's up but thank you thank you so much thank you we really appreciate it thanks for all you do um berkeley hi ptsa that could either be sandra loving it could be mimi pillage we'll just have to

230find out whoever it is is muted hi can you hear me now there you go yep hi so this is mimi pulitz and um it was four years ago that i first spoke about math at berkeley high to the board and at that time i said that i was just digging into it and it was like pandora's box that the more you look at it the more you discover and so this is one of the last board meetings i'll be speaking on behalf of berkeley high um at but i have been invested in math for four years now and what i want to tell you is that in my opinion a math task force it might be able to uncover the issues in our elementary schools which i believe are the root of the problems

231that we ultimately see at berkeley high but i don't see it being able to scratch the surface of the complexity of the issues at berkeley high and bearing this in mind and the fact that i um had thought about this i have written something called the big picture of math at berkeley high it's on the berkeley high website and um if you were to print it it would probably be about 15 pages i don't know it's long relatively exhaustive and i have um held respect for our teachers in mind in the process of writing it although some might not like everything that's said but i think that um when it comes to our prioritized students there are many strikes against their being successful at berkeley high and i think it has as much to do

232with how integrated math is being taught as it does with anything else so when you're ready for a long read i'll send you all the link and um that's all i have to say thanks thank you miss pitch thank you so much um all right lindsey oh well uh well miss let's hear we'll tell you at the very end um lindsay no felt you're next can you hear me yep okay um my name is lindsay novelt i'm a parent at cragmont elementary i first want to thank you for the much improved deck reviewing the lcap i really appreciate helping us track programs back to goals data drives goals which drives programs and services that's how i love to see it so i really appreciate that hard work to make that happen um i have some

233a list of nitpicky things that i'd just like to really quickly review um i would love to see one tracker the the staff the board asked for a single spreadsheet that might be unwieldy and long but tracks all the funds in one single place and i still think that that is necessary it's essential we need to be able to dig through that and understand what's happening for example we claim that 2.5 million dollars of the coveted funds is unspent but the budget proposal tonight used um 900k and we're saying another 500k for mental health so that's almost all gone already before we said we were deficit spending code funds so let's be transparent about where everything's happening where everything's going um as a public attendee of s back meetings um i witnessed seven people voting

234so when we take into the consideration the input of all of our um advisory committees including sbac let's be clear about are are we having a quorum or or not seven people out of 17 voting members does not an opinion make in in my in my opinion um you'll want to check your presentation for the lcap plan because some of your desired outcomes are lower than current achievement rates [Music] thank you thank you so much um woo hi uh my name is tusan i'm a father of a rising third grader and a rising kindergarten at washington elementary and i wanted also to thank you for the uh presentation this is actually the first time i've actually uh started to learn about the lcap and so i found the presentation extremely accessible and really understandable for

235a real first-timer newbie so kudos to the staff who put that together thank you very much i just wrote some comments and i think i just kind of speak them really quickly um because of the uh the time limit here so i just want to first of all i just wanted to say a degree with director assign his point that we should set higher goals for academic performance of our lowest performing students perhaps the board could consider stretch goals that would be publicized the problem with modest goals is that it signals a diminished sense of urgency with which the board regards students shortfalls for college readiness or overall school engagement to the teachers who are actually doing this work to the entire the community to the students themselves um so that's just one point i

236just i was going to mention really quickly that as a child of chinese immigrants i had trouble with uh school at one point and all these two all these teachers came out of the woodwork to make sure that i was okay and i hate said sweat if i were black i don't think i would have had nearly the same uh resources and this was in florida in the 1970s in an integrated school director cyan also makes the important point that in showing how these various investments are targeted to those students to the greatest need that we need to show that so if we've identified a number of students who for whatever reason is in their situation in society or not meeting their goals that have been established universally for all of our students we should

237be clear about what we're what investments we're making for them in particular not just to broadly define programs such as you know more literacy coaches or this program or other that program but you know specifically for these students what are they getting um quickly uh director babbitt's point that teachers should have in in feedback into metrics i agree with that i think that's a good point also i'm also concerned about how you will deliver a culturally competent training to these teachers making sure that it's effective and my time's up thanks so much thank you so much um and um thanks for he's you left but he's taking over as the president of the berkeley pta council right all right yes so thank you for that service um miss let's go we'll try try you one

238more time okay can you hear me now yes we can okay i change devices okay um so good evening school board members and superintendent um i'm liza letzger i'm the parent of a rising fourth grader at sylvia mendez and a rising sixth grader at longfellow hard to keep track um so i'm here again this week to talk to you about the issue of large class sizes at sylvia mendez and possibly at other fourth grades across the district which uh is kind of directly um not in line with the b step funding that was passed in 2016. um last week i was joined by a number of sylvia mendez parents who discussed the concerns that they have around their children who have ieps with large class sizes i know that some of you have heard from

239teachers and you know tonight i've heard a number of recurring themes one of which is mental health student support concerns around declining enrollment and also concerns for like ongoing funds and continued support and i actually think that this is an opportunity for you all to improve all of those so we know that smaller class sizes increases you know improves mental health increases actual student support and i know that there's a concern for declining enrollment but this is actually something critical that you all need to address um there as you heard there are parents who are considering leaving the district because of this huge jump in class sizes and also you know there's a concern for ongoing funds and this really does fly directly in the face of what voters approved for b b step funding

240um b sub funding is actually separate from the covid funds it's separate from the lcap funds it's what you all not what you are discussing tonight and the specific intended purpose of these funds is to have smaller class sizes starting this year and i'm not really sure where those funds are going right now but i really really encourage you to put those funds where they're needed now before the quality teachers uh run out it's time thank you thank you so much thanks for your patience and for sticking with us all night um really appreciate it all right everybody um thank you so much have a good night thanks um pauline brent everybody take care have a good night