001i would like to provide a brief overview of tonight's meeting after a few procedural items the board will hear 30 minutes of public comment at the end of the meeting there will be another and final opportunity for additional public comment so if you do not get to speak at the beginning of the meeting you can stay and speak at the end to request to participate in public comment click on the participants button at the bottom of your screen and select the raise your hand button to request to speak when calls upon you will be unmuted to comment by phone you will be prompted to raise your hand by pressing nine to request to speak during public comment when called upon you will be unmuted the board president will call our students first if you are
002a student who wishes to speak please add an s at the end of your name if there are a lot of people who want to make public comment not everyone who raises their hand will get to speak you are encouraged to stay in the end of the meeting the board president will determine whether to set tonight's speaker on an individual basis she also has his discretion apologies vice president he also 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 hear your time is up if you are still speaking you are allowed to finish your sentence but please try not to speak beyond your time they are really important issues that the community feels very passionate about but in order
003to be fair to all and so we can hear as many speakers as possible the board president will ask that you please stop once your time has elapsed and we'll ask if the speaker is that the speaker being muted if necessary um [Music] thank you miss pacheco um president paul is feeling a little under the weather tonight so she asked me to facilitate tonight's meeting so please bear with me as i um as i try to do that um tonight so welcome everybody to the july 29th meeting of the berkeley school board our open um session began at 5 30 we recessed a closed session and the open session that we just started was called to order it 703 pm um miss pacheco can you please call the role yes director leyva cutler [Music] say
004it again director director brown president director miller president vice president helper president president appel here okay um before i before i ask for a motion to approve the meeting agenda i wanted to let our many attendees we have almost um almost 450 people online tonight which is wonderful if you if you plan to raise your hand to speak in public comment now would be the time to raise your hand um there'll be a few preliminary things we're going to do but if you if you want to speak please raise your hand now so we have a sense of how many people um plan to speak and how many we'll be able to in the time that we've allotted and if you're a student just put an s at the end change your zoom name to
005put an s at the end so that we know that you're a student so we're going to now move to approve the agenda um president bell correct me if i'm wrong but i think we're we're switching and dr stevens we're switching action items two and one around so that we will discuss um and take action on the approval of the fall 2020 distance learning plan first and then we will take action on the budget items is that right dr stevens and president that's correct okay and then we also have to pull out um because director sinai has to recuse herself from two of the items that are on the consent calendar so items eleven point two director sonic tell me if i get this right it's it's one item it's 11.2 but it's number 13
006is a lifelong contract and i can't vote on that number 13 of number two of 11.2 okay well we'll just pull 11.2 all together okay as a separate action item and we just need to remember to do okay remember that you need to recuse and the rest of us need to vote on it okay so with those changes is there a motion to approve the agenda i'll make a motion to approve the agenda motioned by director levi kelly you're a little quiet your volume is a little low directory a second second by director brown can i make a suggestion yeah of course amendment my suggestion would be and i think it's the same thing but i think this is how we would do it so in the action items we would move 11.2 as action
007item one and then action item two will be the distance learning piece and action item three will be the budget because 11.2 is a part of consent and you can't like kind of have kind of so we'll do we'll do that consent item first and then distance learning and then the budget is that okay director will you make the motion for that will you accept that amendment or whatever okay okay direct motion by directly of color second by director brown miss pacheco can you call the world for us ms pacheco i'll call the world director sinai yes director brown yes dr miller yes director of cutler yes myself yes president appel yes okay so we have the agenda um thank you all now i'm going to report from our closed session in item 3.1.1 case
008number 20202 there was a motion by president appel second by director sinai to approve the staff recommendation um the motion passed five to zero in item 3.2.1 collective bargaining with bcce the board heard an update and gave direction and an item 3.2.2 collective bargaining berkeley federation of teachers the board heard an update and gave direction that concludes the report from closed session um someone please stop me from forgetting anything okay the um a very brief overview so if you're i see 11 people who have their hands up now is the time to put your hand up if you want to speak in public comment a very brief overview of the meeting tonight is that we will we're about to start the public comment period um then we'll hear board member comments and comments from the
009superintendent then we will consider our consent calendar then we'll hear that one consent item that we just pulled um very that will be very brief then we'll have a presentation which i assume most of the people who are here are here for which is a presentation on the distance learning plan for the fall of 2020 the board will take action on that and then we will conclude with several budget related action items um before we begin public comment um i just wanted to mention a couple things one is that um we will be having um town hall several town hall meetings i'm sure dr stevens will mention this too but we'll be having several town hall meetings to discuss the distance learning um plans for the fall those will be next week tonight will be
010the the first time the public will be seeing a lot of information about the fall planning but not all of the details um you're welcome to ask questions in the public comment but this is this meeting is not a town hall meeting so it may be that you don't get all of your questions answered the brown act state law doesn't allow us to answer your questions in public comment so just know that if you have questions and you certainly will if you're a community member those there'll be opportunities in the town halls next week and in the written communications the district sends out to get those questions answered it might be the case that all of your questions are not answered tonight um we're going to so we so i see 12 people so we're
011gonna give two minutes per public comment um students will go first if there are any um at the last meeting one of our public commenters had the great suggestion that i think he said maybe the city council has been using um to hold up a sign to let people know when their time is up so president appel um and i talked earlier and came up with these fancy signs this one says 15 is it backwards or is it can you read it okay when i see it as backwards but just 15 seconds and then times up okay um so so that everybody can speak um please don't go past the two minutes um that way everybody who speaks will hopefully get a chance to if you don't get a chance to speak there will be
012another public comment session at the end of the meeting um and we um and again if we won't be answering questions in real time staff will be collecting questions that people have if you if you put a question in the q a box um it won't necessarily be answered tonight it probably will not be answered tonight um but staff reviews those and can incorporate them into the town hall is that me no um okay i guess enough stalling on my part um there the people i had i have nine people raising their hands the last one is michael chang um this is first i know i know jay but i'm just saying the last one right now is michael chang so if this is your last chance to raise your hand so you can get
013on the list um and we'll start with aaron mcginnis for two minutes and i'll keep the time thank you thank you for your attention from joining recent calls i know we share common values of fostering a diverse equitable learning environment in which our young people feel safe supported and challenged to grow my request is for the board to look deeply into the impacts of systemic racism on our learning environment and school districts safety protocols may we collectively use this moment of crisis and school closures to rethink and hold space for listening to community input and how we co-create an equitable and safe learning environment excuse me for black and brown students before their return to campus my understanding is the board agreed to consider the removal of the sro officer from berkeley high even the
014presence of one uniformed law enforcement officer contributes to an inequitable learning environment for our black and brown youth the systemic pattern of violence law enforcement perpetuates on black people may create a ptsd response in our youth of color a response that may not be mirrored in our white youth trauma researchers explain if someone enters a fight flight freeze response their prefrontal cortex and the learning part of the brain goes offline i imagine that a police officer standing in a hallway let alone pulling a student aggressively out of class affects white and black students differently if a black student enters fight flight freeze and they are no longer able to learn until their nervous system re-regulates which may be hours or days their white cohort is less likely to enter a trauma response from police presence
015because white communities are not targeted by law enforcement state-sanctioned violence this difference in lived experience and nervous system response creates an inequitable learning environment as a white student with a regulated nervous system goes about their day cognitively safe and open to learning while their fellow black students may not be in their full cognitive capacity for some time this is just one of the many reasons we must look closely at safety systems and protocols in the school district thank you thank you guinness um i can't turn my thing off okay um allison krause now followed by the schoenbergs good evening i'm alison krasnow i have two sons in busd i'm a math teacher at willard and our district's former instructional technology coordinator i'd like to use my time to address busd families there is a rush
016to create distance learning which normalizes school but that school isn't here anymore instead let's deeply listen to teachers we should ask ourselves what do students need to heal and feel connected to one another as a parent of two children in busd i beg each of you to pause next time you feel the emotion rising in your chest remember that whoever you feel ready to critique is just as overwhelmed scared and angry as you are partner with your children their teachers and principals because none of us signed up for this we can't know the needs of other families children without deeply listening to one another frankly we're being asked to do the impossible and by we i certainly don't just mean teachers i mean every staff member in our district every parent and caregiver i mean
017every one of us together and only together will we get through this these partnerships are my lifeline right now partnering is the berkeley public schools fund which gave a huge grant to my king colleague gita makija and i to run a four-day math institute on improving distance learning and middle school math partnering is edhub the collaborative response between busd and berkeley public schools fund staffed by volunteers to support students and family needs partnering is the outgoing pd coordinator miss reed and the new director of schools miss dean who listened to middle school math teachers who said that the current curriculum was not adequate for distance learning and supported us to have richer based ways to use technology to model mathematics partnering is malcolm x fuse a group of families committed to anti-racism who not only
018have done tremendous work this spring and summer but who have reached out to me as a willard teacher about having distance learning room parents in middle school looking through an anti-racist lens to support families during this time this is partnering and this is why i and so many of my colleagues haven't stopped working because this is what makes our schools truly beautiful so i ask of families for us all to remember that we're in this together let's move ahead together as a community as that is the source of our strength thank you miss kresser um the schoenberg's followed by tatiana thank you vice president elper and thank you to the previous commenter about partnerships really appreciate those comments my name is melanie schoenberg i have a kindergartner and third grader at sylvia mendez i want
019to state that my comments are specific to elementary schools they're amounting evidence that kids under the age of 10 are at low risk of catching and spreading kovid this is in stark difference from ages 14 to 40. to meet my kids academic and social and emotional needs were forming in-person pods but i have two siblings and my kindergartner can't do distance learning literally without an adult supervising and sitting with them the entire time but the other parents also want to tutor for our third grader pod because their academics have fallen behind over the past six months so with all this to make this fall work my family's risk for covid when i do the math between all the people i'm incorporating my life across two pods and tutors in their households and everybody else's households
020and the fact that they may be visiting their their parents or aunt is actually not less than just going to school additionally i will add we have 56 city parks that already have use agreements with the district this means at least all kindergartener and first graders for parents that want in-person learning and even kindergarten through third grade could meet with teachers outdoors at our parks with bathrooms this falls under the local county guidance for camps which still stands regardless of the governor's orders let me be clear in order to avoid my eight-year-old daughter from falling back into clinical depression she experienced after closing the schools and to enable literally any learning at all for my son we are establishing pods which are just slightly lessening the risk of covet spread but not by much uh
021really not much than just reopening the elementary schools for those that need in person like my kids do i'm again petitioning everyone to think about an elementary school specific strategy that utilizes our parks thank you so much thank you um next we have um tatiana patojovic followed by john mills hi i'm tatiana pedowitch and a parent of an incoming first grader at cragman elementary thank you for giving me the chance to voice my opinion with the drastic measures of keeping schools closed in order to provide safety for teachers staff and students i would like everyone at the busd board to please start considering stronger parents in this situation and to work with us to ensure the best schooling of our children distance learning as many have in mind has been shown in the spring to
022simply not work for very young children and even with improved versions it is safe to say that our kids cannot spend four to five hours in front of the screen lacking any social components in their education and development not to talk about what they should do in the after school when parents are still at work parents have not been asked and we are all getting very tired of hearing the same sentence from the county of alameda the city of berkeley our governor our principals our superintendents and anyone else involved in this decision making every email every address to parents starts with we understand how difficult this is for parents but what follows this statement are mostly decisions that are not aligned with understanding the difficulty of this situation i want to urge busd officials in
023our county to truly start listening to parents and working with them together to create solutions that can work and that will help students and parents many parents have started forming social pods because they're forced to in order to ensure a more normal and safe teaching environment for our children and we now hear from many sides pure criticism against parents creative solutions i would like to know if usd will support the social pods and try to accommodate those in the classrooms oakland unified school district has just demonstrated an outrageous act against parents by refusing to accommodate the children of already formed pots to be placed with the same teachers parents need to work and children need to be taught please work with us together thank you um i should say if anybody knows somebody who's trying
024to get in we're we've apparently reached our limit of attendees the meeting is being recorded and we will see if we can somehow expand that capacity um i wanted to say if you if you have not yet raised your hand then there will be an opportunity to speak at the end of the meeting um we have john john mills aura abarcio gina morris aaron fowler michael chang cory allen kyla rose and then miss rose will be the last public speaker during this session so mr mills thank you vice president alper i guess i would just uh reiterate the concerns raised by other parents with regards to having kids who are young and uh the pos they expanded possibilities for in-person learning experiences for uh children you know ages 10 and under i'd also encourage the
025board to provide as much clarity as possible um as soon as possible with regards to the timing and other logistical details of the upcoming semester um it's an incredibly challenging time for all of us and the uncertainty uh with regards to start times with regards to whether our kids can uh stay in this school they're in if they decide to sit out a year etc um makes the time uh all the more anxiety producing so um knowing sooner rather than later would be helpful and having in-person experiences for learning for young kids sooner rather than later also seems within what is safe and reasonable um in light of the science such as this thank you mr mills um next we have aura aparicio followed by gina morris hello thank you so much for the opportunity
026to speak my name is aura parisio and i'm a parent of a child of two children at malcolm x and one entering willard um i volunteer with our english learner advisory committee and i'm very concerned about our english learner families with whom we've been doing calls throughout the semester and the summer although our families find themselves in survival mode there is a strong desire from them to be involved in their kids education i want to ask what the district is doing to support parents not just the children in accessing technology our english learner families want to be involved in their education but need the support in learning how to use technology i.e zoom and google classroom thank you thank you gina morris followed by ms fauer hi can you hear me hello i'm gina morris
027i'm the parent of a rising second grader at malcolm x elementary school uh thank you for the time this evening um i am making a request if that's if it's not part of what is going to be shared later in the meeting in terms of what the plan is for distance learning to please make classroom placement at least for elementary school students who many people have stated have uh varying degrees of difficulty with distance learning based on the needs socially emotionally and developmentally of younger children so we know where our students are going to be placed and in what classroom students in the same class with the same teacher and the same pedagogical approach to instruction are going to be best served in pods um which is why it's very important to know where they're
028going to be located so we can reach out to each other there are teachers there are parents in this community like myself who is a former educator with deep experience who would like to make sure we open our homes our resources and support families in our community by doing some supplemental education of whatever the distance learning plan is and if we do not get information about where our children will be placed and who they will be with until the run-up to the start of the school year it makes it very difficult to plan and there are many of us in the community who have the skills to do so there may be a lot that you cannot do right now based on directives from the governor uh the cdc in the state of the country
029but there are things you can do and as parents we expect an innovative approach and to get as much information as possible and to not have to wait for simple information like where our students will be placed thank you thank you miss morris um miss fower followed by michael chang and then our last speaker will be kyla rose hi school board my name is erin fower and i'm a high school teacher who also has two children at malcolm x in second and fifth grade i'm honestly really excited to go back to school and teach even virtually i've spent the summer teaching a creative writing class and i've learned a lot of tools i'm excited to put to good use i'm here to speak on behalf of a later start time for the high school than
030the elementary school one of the biggest challenges we face is how to help teachers who are also parenting be able to meet both their children's needs and their students needs so one of the main proposals for elementary include synchronous learning starting at 9 00 am and if the high school begins at the same time i will be between a rock and a hard place and i'm not alone many teachers have children who they will have to supervise during distance learning we already know that much research supports a later start time for adolescents due to their sleep cycles we already have struggled with attendance during first and second period at the high school during in-person classes a later start time avoid some of these issues it would also allow older students to support their younger siblings
031without compromising their own education for my own family starting high school learning at 9am at the same time as the elementary school could be the straw that breaks the camel's back i'm already trying to arrange child care not a pod not a tutor and i will have to pay 900 a month for this since i'm part-time this will be equivalent to my take-home pay but i'm going to do this because i'm committed to serving my students i'm asking that the school board support a later start time so i can provide the supervision and support my own children's needs without sacrificing a high quality education for my students thank you thank you miss power michael chang followed by kyla rose mr chang hi school board uh thank you for listening um i'm a parent of three
032children in the berkeley unified school district uh one of them is adolescent and i have two teenagers as well and as a lecturer at cal i had the recent immediate experience of shifting online with my teaching so i really sympathize with both the teachers and the students and the parents involved in this process is quite challenging i'm also a commissioner on the police review commission at berkeley um and i'm an attorney at the u.s department of education's office for civil rights so a lot of this stuff falls squarely in the realm of equity issues the shelter in place has not only revealed many of the societal inequities but they've also to a large degree exacerbated this um i'm i'm interested in how the school board can look at innovative ways to to address this rather
033unique and exigent circumstance for example the recent police defunding of 50 percent how would the board be able to work with city council to shift a substantial portion of those funds towards education for example bolstering classified employees to support students in areas of counselors for example for restorative justice shifting away from over overbalance of sros to reduce racial inequity in school discipline and out of classroom instruction consequences uh caregiver networks i think for our teachers who and parents who are interested in how to work but also take care of their own young kids but also stay healthy innovative thinking such as caregiver networks that can mitigate some of the class exacerbations associated with pods that a lot of families and tutors are attempting and using uh in many ways rightfully so to support their students
034but some kind of district-led initiative in that sense thanks very much thank you mr cheng um it said that kylo rose was going to be our last speaker two more people raised their hands and i know there's been some trouble getting online so i'll let shannon davis and then nathan francis and mr francis will be the last speaker um and i'll stick to that anybody after mr francis can speak at the second uh public comment session so um thank you so much i actually um just wanted to thank everybody for taking the time to listen um i am a parent of four children four in busd and i also am a teacher i teach elementary school in busd and i can relate to both sides which puts me i feel in a very unique space
035to be empathetic to both sides um i wanted to say quickly before i i mentioned what i came here for is that dr fauci someone who i personally respect and hold science to be true recently spoke to the national teachers association what he said is that we do not in fact know if children's ages 0 to 9 spread covid we don't know yet we don't have the tests and if we send kids into the classrooms that will be the test so i want to thank you guys for putting the teacher's health and the health of our families um as something that's relevant important and not just sending us into the battlefield i appreciate that and i know it's hard because i would rather have my kids in school with their friends and their community and
036i'm concerned about their social emotional health but if their teacher were to die that would be really hard for them to um i also want to say that kids ages 9 through 19 do spread it in the same way as adults according to dr fauci um so what i was actually on here originally to say was is that i really hope that we can continue to work on creating better communication between families and um the schools because it feels like there's a lot of emotions and i feel like the more people know about how much we're working and how much we're actually teachers are volunteering their time all summer unpaid to take classes to do professional development it would be really great if we had better communication i also want to advocate that when we
037do get back to school and teachers are back on contract that we are given time to plan not just professional development but time to plan thank you so much thank you miss rose um shannon davis and then nathan francis is going to be our last speaker of this public comment session shannon davis hi thank you so much um i hadn't planned to speak um we are a new family to berkeley i have a incoming middle schooler and a new kiddo at the high school so that's a really tough transition we're new from missouri i'm also a school psychologist um but i raised my hand because i wanted to piggyback on what erin follower said i hope i said her name right she was the teacher who spoke about the late start team late start time
038for middle and high school students even without cobid we know that um later start times are better for middle and high school kids um i have a researcher at washu at st louis who could talk your ears off about it but um it's actually really brilliant when we had to stay home in march um at first i wanted a lot of structure for my kids my middle and high schooler but what i realized is we just went on their kind of natural adolescent cycle and they did stay up late and study and then they didn't really start school until noon in the house and it worked brilliantly for them and so i got up early um i was working in schools and i did my job and then around noon they started their class time
039and yeah they do stay up late and they did they did better once i let them kind of adjust to their own schedule so when i think about just the context of developmentally where they are as adolescents and put that overlay that with the teacher responsibility it's actually a brilliant idea so i just wanted to raise aaron's message for that and i was also really grateful what kylo just said about we don't know enough about covet and really young kids mostly because we all stayed home in march going forward but in cities like in states like florida where um kids are um engaging more um we're seeing a rise of cases so um i just wanted to um thank mrs rose for saying that and thank you for your time thank you ms davis and
040welcome to berkeley thank you um mr francis you've got the last public comment hi this is actually caroline francis sorry about that oh no that's okay we didn't change our name um uh i i'm the mother of a rising first grader at malcolm x um a lot of other parents made really excellent comments that i don't want to waste your time by repeating but i did just want to say that given a lot of the points raised about both the difficulties that younger children have with distance learning and especially with video conferences and some of the scheduling points that were raised by a couple of parents about older children i wanted to urge the board to consider um taking a flexible approach to how attendance is recorded during periods of distance learning this fall and
041thinking about how to offer both synchronous and asynchronous options such as completing assignments that might better accommodate families whose children don't want to do zoom who have a shortage of computers in the house or who have other difficulties getting their children to participate in um an extended video conference or something at a specific time thank you thank you miss francis and um thanks to everybody who spoke and if you're if you're still on the list to speak we'll have another public comment period at the end of the meeting um and just to let folks know there's over 500 people who have logged on tonight so thank you all for being here next we'll go to um union member union comment um are there any miss allman are you i i'm gonna assume that are you
042speaking for bft um how do we talk jay can you let cynthia almond speak mrs allman are you speaking on behalf of bft i am yes matt has a family engagement tonight great before you before you do um i don't see anybody from any of the other unions um if if there's anybody here from bcce yuba or local 21 just raise your hand um ms allman you have five minutes thank you um good evening board members and dr stevens i'm cynthia allman i'm the treasurer of the berkeley federation of teachers and a long time kindergarten teacher at malcolm x our comments tonight will be brief as our union is completely focused on the formidable task of negotiating how our new learning environment will look when we resume instruction in less than three short weeks we
043continue to meet with district administrators for many hours every week the conversations have been productive and we have agreed on several concepts but we have not yet reached the point where we can sign a memorandum of understanding on the entire set of issues the complexity is staggering we're attempting to completely rethink the schedules of all students at all levels we're holding in mind that developmental needs of different age groups the best use of technology and the new legal requirements for distance learning we're staying focused on trying to meet the needs of our most vulnerable students and families while humbly acknowledging that even our best efforts may not be able to solve all of the pressing challenges that our community faces meanwhile teachers have begun planning and preparing for a new school year like no other
044they're learning new skills and upgrading their technology tools they're attending professional development both within the usd and also with teachers from all over the state and country they're trying to create a welcoming online environment for the first days and weeks of school and revamping entire courses to match the new pacing that will be required just like so many of our students caregivers teachers are scrambling to find child care for their own children and to figure out how they can do their best work for their students while also helping their children navigate distance learning one idea that we are pursuing and we hope you will consider is the idea of staggered start times for different levels with a later start for middle school and berkeley high school we think this idea allows older students to help
045younger ones with their morning school work which will help some of our families it helps secondary teachers who must care for their own young children and may prevent them from having to take fmla leave and keep them available to serve their students a later start may also alleviate some stress on overburdened internet connections we hope our community will seriously consider this innovative approach we're aware of the pressing nature of these negotiations for our members and our entire community we're fully engaged and committed to continuing to work with busd to resolve the remaining issues as soon as we possibly can thank you thank you miss allman um and thank you for all your work um it's not seeing any other union um leadership comments are there any other are there any busd committee comments if you
046if you if you're speaking on mafia bsd committee maybe change your name on zoom to committee i don't see any so i'm going to assume that there are none okay now we'll move to um board member comments um if you know anybody who's trying to get into the meeting i know if you if you're trying to get in you can't hear this but if you if anybody's texting you that they're trying to get in um suggest that they get in through the phone instructions because some people have gotten in that way and we will figure out um how to accommodate the more than more than 500 people this meeting is being recorded and will be posted online for anybody who didn't get a chance to watch it and again there will be town hall meetings
047next week where the superintendent and his staff will share um all the details related to the fall planning and the program for the fall um but we apologize that some people have not been able to get on the meeting tonight okay um now it's time for board member comments and the superintendent um is there anybody who would like to go first um i'll just call on i'll call him director leave a cutler no comments no comments right good time okay okay director sinai um i just want to thank all the family and staff who have come to the zoo meeting this evening i did want to thank somebody posted on the q a that there is a link where you can live stream um and it's called twitch.tv backslash perplexes so again if you can
048text folks there's a way to to live stream it it's not interactive but you can watch it and i'm really looking forward to this evening's presentation i hope that it will give more depth and knowledge and information to the families that are desperately seeking uh information so that they can plan for their students for their children and i appreciate all of the work that our district staff our teachers our classified staff have put into um really working to make this the most robust distance learning opportunity for our students there's still a lot of work to be done but i think we're moving forward and you know the ultimate goal is to provide a really good quality education for our students and keep our staff and our families safe so i really want to appreciate the
049superintendent and all the staff and the family members and community members who have come up with creative ideas and solutions to really look at how we can work together because i really do believe um as uh teacher allison krasnow said it's as we're in this mess together um and we can come out of it and get some really good solutions going for our kids but we definitely have to work together to do it and not see ourselves as competing against each other but really working together and that includes our city partners i really hope that our city of berkeley and our community-based agencies can come forward and collaborate together so um thank you all for coming and i look forward to hearing the presentation thank you director sinai and um miss berry or or ms
050mcdermott if you're if you're listening maybe you can tweet out the link that director sign i mentioned to perplexes twitch tv which i've never heard of but but i just tried and it does seem to work so um so that people who are having trouble getting on can at least view the meeting um director brown oh i'm sorry oh or president appel do you want to go well i just i'm i'm since i get to go not last i'm sorry go for it so i want to thank everybody for coming out tonight and those who had the desire and the opportunity to share your thoughts with us and also just like just all of you the 500 plus of you who are spending your evening king into this conversation and i know for many of
051you most of you it's because you know your kids this this is obviously a super impactful decision for your families and your kids and it's also true of the teachers especially the teachers who are parents you know this is a really complicated time and you know there's very little experience um in how to do this and so you know in some ways technology helps because we're able to actually access lessons and stuff but as somebody mentioned earlier the amount of time our kids spend online on their phones is also or on computers is also a concern for many of us so you know i just i think trying to find the balance and how to make it make it as active and interesting as possible i just really think is work that our district is
052really taking seriously and for that i really want to thank um but i mean folks downtown folks oh they're not actually downtown they're at their own homes but folks at the in the administration teachers teacher leaders principals classified staff you know i i think very many people are contributing their ideas and their offers to volunteer or to help and um i think our district is really figuring out ways to hear that information and i hope is i mean i think from what i know about what's gonna what's gonna come before you soon is re tonight is really working on coming up with the most i think the most kind of impact like kind of engaging experience for our students and it's it's tough you know but but you know all we can do is our
053best and i really appreciate the um i really appreciate the conversations about working together because that is really key there's a lot of resources in berkeley and you know we really do need to bring them in bringing them together um i think france is going to i mean superintendent stevens is going to mention this later but we started talking with the city a little bit about how to combine um energies on possible child care or something some way of of of working together to try to create as much opportunity as possible um you know particularly for um the the people who are supposed to be teaching or the teachers our teachers um and our hope is just that really we can all come together together with the community together with providers and figure out a
054system that's never been done before that's going to work as well as possible to address a lot of the concerns that people um mentioned tonight so i just want to thank all of you and you know keep keep keep plugging in because we um i think the vast majority of people are actually really positive and i think that is um that's just you know it's not that you're not expressing your concerns but i think people recognize that people are really um working on on doing our best so i just want to thank all of you and i also want to thank assistant director follonsweet assistant superintendent i mean followingsby because she is with us tonight even though she's on vacation and so i just want to thank her for that and thank all of you
055and i really you know keep telling us what you think because we really want your ideas and um [Music] and your contributions so enjoy your kids at least you're getting lots of time with them right now all right thank you um director um how about director miller i've been having some audio problems i think so if i sound a little quiet just uh let me know okay thank you so first i just want to address the high school starting at later times obviously as 17 year old that does sound a little appealing but um i also want to point to the psychology factors that does really work berkeley high already has late start or usually would have a late start monday and on those days students are have the most energy and are most ready
056to get to learning so i definitely think there are many many positive outcomes for that um and also i wanted to address one of the comments that talked about um our work towards systemic fighting systemic racism in our educational system there are many students student leaders getting on top of that and i'm very proud to say that um and i did the last thing i wanted to say is the unity is really important in this situation and to any students who didn't get a chance to speak the schools are meant to serve you like we are here trying to make sure that your learning experience is the best it can be and so like like what president obama said if you have any like suggestions like we like we need to know like it's not
057like we want to know like we have to like you can't like hold anything in or else that means like we're doing our job is incomplete so that's a lot to say for that thank you director miller um director brown you know it's always terrible going at the towards the end because you start to sound like a broken record um my comments tonight are just like my my fellow colleagues um in the forms of appreciations first uh to president or vice president albert for uh stepping up today doing a really great job so far um even though you called on me last and secondly to um our superintendent to our staff um thank you for all of the work that you've put in uh to get us here to get us to this point um
058i think last meeting it was mentioned that this uh the spring was really emergency learning not a real distance learning plan um but responsive learning to responsive teaching rather to to ensure that our students needs were met um in the middle of an emergency um so i'm really appreciative that you took the time to come up with um a distance learning plan in in conjunction with our um representatives from our faculty and staff and other stakeholders who offered information and offer feedback so i'm so appreciative that tonight our community gets the opportunity to see what that distance plan looks like to inform how the rest of their uh their summer is going to go for their students so just really really want to offer my appreciation and to our families who have been a really
059patient and and and also collaborative with us uh all of your emails all of your your messages have not gone um in vain and so i want to take this opportunity to say thank you so much for your participation and your feedback to help us get to this point and i won't belabor anymore but we'll use the rest of the time uh to make sure that our community gets to hear this awesome plan um that our staff has so thank you again thank you dr brown and i'll turn over to you dr stevens just i just want to reiterate something i said at the beginning of the meeting which is just to remind everybody that well actually i'll let you say dr stevens cause he'll talk about the town halls are you going to be
060talking about well okay i'll then i'll just turn it over to you great thank you very much uh good evening to everybody thanks uh to so many of you for tuning in this evening my name is brent stevens i'm the superintendent of berkeley unified um i'll be speaking at length with members of the staff including some of our school administrators in just a few minutes about the details of distance learning as you'll experience it in the coming year before doing all of that i thought i'd take just a couple of minutes to extend a warm welcome to new busd teammates who are joining the district uh over the summer and who are contributing already uh to be uh to the work that we'll share both with you this evening and work will accomplish this year
061so in no particular order i'd like to welcome to the busd central office administrative team the following folks uh debbie dean former principal of willard middle school joining us now is the director of k-8 education here in berkeley michelle sinclair former principal at cragmont elementary school stepping in as the director of state and federal and special projects we welcome adelita martinez as our new k-8 professional development coordinator and mr sean mansinger is joining us as the new executive director of special education congratulations to eileen jacobs who is becoming program supervisor of special ed at the high school and then at the high school we have a number of new administrators these include interim principal juan ragosa welcome to you mr ragosa and you'll see mr regos in just a few minutes as he joins the
062presentation on distance learning we also congratulate kiernan rock who is moving from dean of students position into the assistant principal position and to claudia gonzalez who is taking his place as the new dean of students at our schools middle schools we have a number of new administrators and so we say hello to all of them chris albeck has been the vice principal at willard middle school and is now the interim principal there and paco furlon a long time principal at rosa parks elementary school is back from a year of sabbatical and will become the new principal at longfellow middle school we also welcome two new middle school vice principals that's selita mitchell at longfellow and brian grau joining us at willard middle school at our elementary schools we have several new administrators as well candy
063cannon you know who is the vice principal at malcolm x will assume the principal position at cragmont elementary and uh linda morgan will be uh stepping in candy's place as the new vice principal at malcolm x joining the human resources team we're happy to welcome glendale gasco rios who's joining us as the director of human resources and to liz carram a longtime member of the business services department uh welcome to you in your new role uh as a director of finance so with that all of you are entering into a very interesting moment over the summer we appreciate all the flexibility that you're already exhibiting and we want to welcome you to a really wonderful administrative team here in busd with that i'm going to save the remainder of my remarks and comments for the
064two presentations to follow so thank you very much okay thank you dr stevens and and then what i'm just going to say is that for um for those of you who have put questions in the in the q a or or have questions and you certainly will have questions as you hear the presentation that's about to happen um just know that there will be town hall meetings next week and that um you can put questions in the q a they won't be answered tonight but staff will be collecting them and we'll incorporate them in the written communications and the town hall presentations for next week but this meeting itself is not a town hall meeting um okay i'm going to now move to the consent calendar um with the exception of the item 11.2 which
065we're going to vote on separately do i have a motion to prove the consent calendar [Music] 11.2 yeah okay you're um something's wrong with your microphone um but i heard you uh so the motion by director labor color is their second a second second by director brown miss pacheco are you with us i am can you call the role please of course director leyva cutler yes director sinai yes director brown yes director miller yes vice president alper yes president appel she said yes um okay the consent calendar is approved now um director sinai is going to recuse herself from item 11.2 do i have a motion to approve do you want to explain why you're recusing yourself i i think i have to recuse myself i'm sorry i didn't mean to refuse you for you
066um uh because item number 13 is a contract with uh the organization for which i'm employed item number 13 of item 11.2 of 11.2 so i'll just recues okay do i have a motion to approve item 11.2 another motion by director brown oh second second ride president appel ms pacheco can you call the roll yes director leyva cutler yes director sinai she's recusing herself that's right director brown yes director miller yes vice president hopper yes president appel hi okay that motion passes um now we'll move to i um what what was on the agenda item 12.2 but we're doing it well we are doing it second the approval of the fall 2020 busd distance learning plan so i'll turn this over to dr stevens uh thank you very much vice president alper take just a
067second to load up this presentation here we go um so we're happy to have the opportunity to uh share many more details finally of the distance learning plan for the start of the 2020 school year this evening i'm joined by a number of my colleagues they include bajay tigara who's the associate superintendent for education services debbie dean the director of tk8 schools mr juan ragosa berkeley high school principal and natasha bieri the director of our bcep and community relations programs for folks who are interested in getting this presentation it is available online it's accessible um through the agenda online document uh we'll also be sure to post it on our busd website tomorrow and then please know that we will be emailing a more detailed version of this plan to all of our busd families
068sometime towards the close of tomorrow so all of this information will be readily accessible and emailed out to families tomorrow we'll review the following topics in this presentation as we've always done over the course of the now roughly five months of presenting on topics associated with covid19 we'll provide a very brief update on the state and local context as it relates to the virus we'll then jump into a discussion of the fall 2020 distance learning program including overviews of its key components we will introduce for folks the elementary middle and high school sample schedules which include firm start and end times with one caveat that i'll discuss and then we'll talk as well about student and family supports finally we'll conclude this evening by talking about the coming two weeks of community engagement and then
069some of the many steps that we will continue to work hard on as it relates to reopening our campuses for in-person learning so with this with that rather i'm going to pitch over to uh natasha bieri again the director of bsep and community relations miss berry you didn't know i'm unmuted there you are thank you and good evening i'm just going to quickly uh as we have with every prior meeting since uh the end of february review where we are with respect to covid and the guidance that we are receiving or not um that is um helping us to make the very difficult decisions that we are facing so we have a number of uh agencies that we need to follow and be compliant with including california department of public health our local jurisdiction for
070health berkeley uh public health uh division alameda county uh public health also um aligns alameda county office of education of course um and then uh public health uh partners locally and globally and we're looking at as we try to make a decision about uh whether we can reopen for on-campus learning we have to first look to the state and local orders as well as our own local conditions and then those are externalities if you will um and internally we need to be sure that we are prepared both through our facilities and through our protocols to ensure the safety of our staff and our families and to ensure that our programs are designed uh whether they're hybrid or in distance learning for the needs of our students and attend our family preferences and the availability of
071staff so in the next slide uh we'll show you just quickly one of the most important uh issues that has risen for us uh recently which is the latest um dictation from the state came in on july 17th just two days after this board had voted uh to uh begin the fall in distance learning because of our own assessment of local conditions it turns out that that assessment was in line with uh what the governor decided needed to be attended to um in every jurisdiction so that if a county is on a state monitoring list and that monitoring list is a factor of multiple components having to do with everything from local case rates to increasing uh hospitalizations uh to the availability of of icu beds if if a county is not able to meet
072the various metrics that have been laid out then every school district in that county must begin in distance learning and that was the case for alameda county there were additional components to that plan this um items two three and four have to do with uh again internal preparations and then um the requirement that if we are in distance learning that that program be strong on the next slide um the this is just a quick snapshot of where we are as of today you can always go to the city of berkeley health department which maintains a series of uh dashboards to uh which are updated usually daily uh and we are seeing we get to see both the alameda and the berkeley context unfortunately hospitalizations are rising um however we're sort of teetering on that um
073case monitoring list i expect we will probably um fall off that list we may have actually today while san mateo climbed back on the list and that's probably going to be our reality for the next little while um as we um encounter changes um locally both to our ability uh both with what's happening locally with um cases as well as our ability to uh to test and to uh contact trace as well on the next slide um there's a uh just a summary of what we've been doing and what we continue to do to prepare for the eventual return to on campus um and we're again following um multiple agencies including cal osha guidance to ensure the uh the safety of our staff and our uh and our students and i think this next slide
074is uh yes uh this is one we just dropped in um again referring to the july 17th guidance uh there's a conundrum here in a way that um the governor has laid out a variety of conditions including you know being off that monitoring list but also stated that there should be a regular testing and dedicated contact tracing for schools um however um we have yet to see the the support um the fiscal or operational support for such a level of testing and contact tracing it's something we're in conversation with our local public health officer as well as with university partners for the possibility of some expansion but berkeley is not alone in confronting this challenge other uh barrier jurisdictions are also greatly challenged with being able to um meet the demands for testing and contact
075tracing by depending just on public health uh locally alone we also have i might have been on this one spirit it appears to be the case and we're still attempting to learn more about this the responsibility for both testing and contact tracing may actually shift over to school districts it may be the case in the coming week or so that we'll begin to see written documents that suggest that school districts will need to begin to develop their own capacities both for testing regimens and for contact tracing this is a new line of work for school districts and has not previously been included in guidance for districts so we're watching this one closely as this represents work for which we we claim no particular expertise and have no particular form of support to be able to
076complete right now so we will keep the board updated on this one but it is uh we sort of note this with some concern that this may be part of the new responsibilities that accrue to districts in in the coming weeks indeed i think this is my last slide which is just to reflect um as i did at the beginning that in addition to attending to the uh the the external conditions and to our internal preparations we also of course look to what our family's um preferences are as well as our staff our staff staffing capabilities and uh anyone watching here i would assume has probably participated in one or more of the ways that we've um tried to gather feedback from our community we've had town halls over on the right represented by that
077thought exchange cluster where we've gathered feedback we are scheduling a number of uh further town halls beginning with next monday august 3rd at 6 30 we'll be sending out another invitation to that and inviting uh feedback on the learning the distance learning plan that you'll be taking a look at in more detail this evening we've also conducted surveys of our staff and our families uh the the middle bars uh indicate uh some of the um responses to a june survey where we were asking at the time uh what the comfort level was for on-campus learning these are actually kind of moving right to left backward in time the very last one july uh is the pie chart uh where we had asked families to indicate their preference for either a distance learning or hybrid learning
078um component for their child and overall we had over 6 900 responses about 75 indicated they preferred to have their student on campus at least part of the time we did conduct a survey also in spanish and found slightly different results there that there were larger numbers of uh respondents to the spanish language survey uh 31 who uh preferred distance learning but that's part of our context for what uh superintendent stevens is now now going to introduce which is our plans for distance learning thank you thank you very much miss berry i really appreciate the update so we'll now jump into the section of the presentation that relates specifically to the distance learning plan for fall 2020. i do want to note that we continue to be inactive and engage active communication with our labor
079partners about certain elements of this plan still we share elements that we're feeling a high degree of confidence about right now and then we will continue to update the community on certain sort of details as they continue to be resolved in these conversations with our labor partners so let's jump in um among the central concepts that we have held in the redesign of distance learning is equity we've been well aware both in our district and in other districts across the state of california the distance learning school closures the race to equip families with technology and food and other forms of support had the effect of exacerbating for many families the gaps that already existed in the educational experience we have centered on our efforts on trying to build up in five different categories our support
080for learners and for families and you'll hear in the way we discuss the components of distance learning a strong commitment to improve our effort in each one of these five components we will now begin to talk a little bit about the way we've been thinking about improving distance learning among the core concepts that we've been uh working with are improved and actually scheduled daily and weekly instruction so that families and students experience distance learning in predictable and consistent ways across the course of each day and across the course of a week we've also been talking about the ways that we engage learners online talking about increasing the amount of live interaction between students with their instructors and with each other we'll go back to required attendance for students and we'll also return back to the
081grading and report card systems that we were familiar with prior to school closures in march and then making consistent efforts to communicate with families in the event that challenges arise with any aspect of the distance learning experience so very shortly i'm going to turn this over to baja tiara to talk about two sample elementary schedules but one important element of our elementary schedules will be the introduction of a concept that we're calling family meetings to take place during the week of august 17th through the 28th we're conceiving of these first two weeks as an opportunity to begin online instruction and that will take place at 9 00 a.m each day through the 30 minute virtual class meeting for all students with their teacher we'll also then be signing a variety of helpful assignments including as
082several parents commented earlier what we hope to be helpful how-to videos for families and for students about the most commonly used learning applications in our distance learning environment which will include seesaw particularly at transitional kindergarten through second grade and google classroom in grades three through 12. we'll also then be using this as an opportunity to conduct assessments of students learning progress to understand their needs we'll open up our elementary campuses so that families can come to campus to pick up materials chromebooks complete assessments and then check out and return library books and then the real feature of this two week period has to do with setting up family meetings between teachers and families and their student and their children for the purpose of being able to meet either on person or virtually and then to
083be able to discuss in a private one-on-one setting that particular circumstances that will surround your child's distance learning experience we felt that this kind of interaction as children shift into new classrooms we'll set both children teachers and families up for a far more productive experience over the course of distance learning for however long we need it we'll also during this opening two weeks be issuing to students individualized student schedules to make the distance learning experience far more clear so let's have a look at uh elementary schedule we've prepared two of them as samples and to walk you through the schedule i'd like to turn to associate superintendent baje tiara good evening everyone i hope everyone is remaining happy and healthy during these times i would like to review and go over some additional features to
084our elementary school program the next two slides represent a sample schedule for the elementary school division you'll notice that students and families will experience a predictable and routine schedule students will start their mornings off with whole class instruction this time will include community building social emotional learning and instruction smaller student clusters will also be created these smaller groups will provide students with more attention and in-depth instruction i'm superintendent slide please as an as an equity strategy students will receive ongoing small group instruction and academic supports for students with ieps english language learners vocal students and enrichment courses including pe vapa garden and library will be offered wednesdays will look slightly different students will still start off their mornings with their home class and there will be opportunities to participate in online synchronous learning electives teachers
085will be engaged on wednesdays and professional development including instructional collaboration curriculum development staff meeting time and parent outreach and now we can i believe um director dean will be reviewing the middle school thank you very much uh let's now jump over to the middle schools and have a look at the distance learning schedule at that level good evening and thank you for inviting me tonight so the middle school students will have a schedule that is targeted to meeting both their academic and social emotional needs students have the option to take zero period music and then we'll move into their day where they will have core classes as well as an elective class students will have both synchronous and asynchronous lessons in six different subject areas like elementary school the coordination of services team will monitor
086the progress of students and create small group instruction for students who are academically struggling additionally our english language learners and focal students will be supported with will be supported with targeted intervention case managers will continue to monitor and support the progress of students with special needs given the new platform of distance learning teachers will have opportunities for ongoing professional development and there will be continued outreach to families thank you and i'm just as i'm looking at this particular schedule i'd like to point out just uh one thing that i'm catching right now and that is um that each of these uh scheduled online periods will last for one hour you can see over on the left i'm just catching that some of the times noted here may be an error so we're going to go
087back after tonight's presentation and clean up this particular slide before we send it out to families but again these middle school live online sessions are slotted to last one hour each and now we'll turn our attention to berkeley high school and joining us this evening is interim principal juan ragosa who will talk briefly about the way the distance learning day is organized for high school students mr english thank you dr stevens good evening everyone the development of the proposed plan i'm discussing started back in may with input from various bhs teachers counselors and administrators and after considering several options such as our current six period schedule a quarter system and a trimester system we've arrived at the current version while trying to answer two guiding questions one what is best for our bhs students two
088how do we avoid some of the challenges we encountered with distance learning in the spring most importantly minimal live instruction conflicts in scheduling where students were choosing between classes inconsistencies and expectations and limited built-in structures for student interventions and parent engagement so at berkeley high we currently have two semesters with two quarters in each semester the plan you see here would involve eight terms that is two terms per quarter uh the quarters la the terms last approximately four to five and a half weeks term 1 3 5 and 7 would involve periods 1 3 5 and 7 on mondays tuesdays thursdays and fridays terms 2 4 6 and 8 would be periods 0 2 4 and 6 on mondays tuesdays thursdays and fridays attendance would be required periods last 1 hour and we are stretching
089passing periods from the current length of 6 minutes to 15 minutes this allows for a longer break from online activity and setup in between online sessions we do not envision one hour-long lectures instead our teachers would rely on instructional best practices to vary the structure within each period in order proactively identify and support students that are struggling we don't want to wait until the grading periods so we've built in equity focused small group instruction on wednesdays for students that need additional support this would be a smaller subset of each class that is targeted and provided with focused instruction we schedule these blocks like classes to avoid conflicts so that students don't have to choose which class they need more support in we've also built in student and parent engagement time which would fall on monday
090and thursday afternoons after period seven as dedicated time in the workday for our staff to be able to reach out to families finally we know we need engagement and professional development and that our teachers need time to plan for their courses so we'll be able to do that on wednesday's afternoon as well as throughout the schedule that you see thank you thank you very much mr rego so i appreciate that we'll now talk a little bit about some additional features to the distance learning plan that we've been working hard on so for particularly for students with ieps we'll be doing a number of things to improve services to special education services so first during the opening two weeks when families are meeting with general education teachers our special education teachers will be engaged in creating
091individualized plans for all of our students who have ieps those plans are something that we're calling contingency learning plans families should be expecting within the first two weeks of the school year to receive that from their special education service provider and that we would begin to begin special education services on week three of the school year the reason that we're sort of delaying instruction in special education has to do with the creation of these individualized plans and then the more regimented schedule at each of the three levels elementary middle and high school will permit for a far more consistent scheduling of special education services over the course of the year for students who have 504 plans a variety of forms of accommodations those plans will continue to be active and honored to the extent they
092can be in this in a distance learning environment and then english language development support will also be scheduled in a way that's consistent with the schedules that we just outlined again the existence of the general education schedule means that these supplemental services are also far more easy to schedule and provide services regularly the same will be true for students who receive intervention services and then as a special message to uh still the amendes and longfellow families who may have heard over the summer rumors about the district's commitment to twi please know that that commitment remains very strong and that we are working actively both with the principle of the school and with teachers to think about how twi teachers can receive support through our current efforts such as curriculum pacing identifying technologies and identifying additional
093materials in spanish and then finally just a note about extracurriculars we do know right now that the competitive sports season has been delayed by the california interscholastic federation cif and that all fall sports are currently delayed and will begin in the winter if that's possible but please know that sports teams and conditioning activities will take place so long as they can remain consistent with current health guidelines and the same will be true about our o period classes family resources will continue to be available much in the way that they were in the previous quarter this includes ongoing support from nutrition services to make available to families meals you can see that we've listed the hours there and we are waiting unfortunately on the usda to renew a particular kind of waiver that will allow us
094to set up very flexible food distribution locations for our families the ed hub will continue to be active just as it was throughout the summer and then during the fourth quarter of last year for your convenience we've listed the ongoing days and hours of the ed hub opening and that takes place at the berkeley adult school on san pablo avenue technology support will continue to be available for our families and families and students who are in need of chromebooks or any form of technology support can take advantage of either of the two emails that are listed here on this slide for families who are concerned about mental health issues we do have mental health service providers available on all of our schools and we encourage you to reach out either to your child's teacher or
095to the principal to learn more about the availability of those mental health services throughout the course of the year and last our ofi team the office of family equity and engagement will continue to stay deeply involved in supporting families who most need it to access all of these resources and others throughout the course of distance learning i'd like now to turn to a couple of other topics that are uh related to distance learning and the decision both locally and at the state level to remain in distance learning the topic of family pods has come up quite forcefully over the last two to three weeks we are actively receiving many requests from families for a variety of forms of support that range anywhere from accommodating particular pods in the formation of class lists to surveying families
096to actually organizing pods on behalf of the school community we're currently studying this issue we do know that it will raise a number of very difficult issues for all school districts and while we don't have an official position yet on the district's involvement in the formation of pods i thought i would for the sake of prompting discussion this evening mention some of the difficult issues that would be that we would be required to resolve in order to step actively into the organization of pods so in no particular order these include issues around accessibility our legal obligations to make sure that all of our efforts are fully accessible that's both from a physical location perspective and an educational perspective we would also then incur certain obligations as they relate to providing special education and english learner
097support services we would have concerns that would have to be resolved around injury and covid19 liability in the event that the district became involved in organizing pods we also must be concerned as an organization about our ongoing compliance with the shelter in place order as it's written by the city of berkeley and then finally we take seriously our equity obligations and have much thinking to do about the interplay between the district's involvement and the creation of pods and our commitments to equity we're also working hard on the question of child care and extended day learning during distance learning and it is as much as i've been able to contemplate this complicated set of issues it's my best thinking right now that the district's efforts should be placed far more with far more emphasis on reopening
098campuses for child care and extended day programs as opposed to putting effort into the creation of pods so we are actively working on this idea we've been tentatively referring to this idea as edcamps and our exploratory work so far includes efforts to reopen our bears and learns program we've reached out to our city of berkeley partners to inquire about the availability of resources space and financial support and then we're also reaching out to a variety of private program providers to see if one of those partnerships might yield a way to use some of our campuses to begin to offer some families and on an on-campus learning experience while we're doing distance learning so as next steps um we're this evening uh asking for the board's approval of the distance learning models that we have described
099here graphically in the slides and and and then also in text form our supplemental professional development has actually already started started a week ago and then on august 3rd we're planning sorry it started this week i should say on august 3rd we're planning a town hall in english that's scheduled to take place at 6 30. a town hall in spanish will follow shortly after on august 6th a town hall for families of children with disabilities will take place on monday august 10th and then an affinity-based town hall for african-american families takes place later on august 11th our teachers come back full time on august 13th and we're planning for a professional development intensive for them and then we still plan as as usual to begin the new school year on august 17th so with that
100we will turn it over to a discussion and are ultimately asking this evening that the board take up this action item to approve the fall 2020 distance learning plan outline that includes the elements that you see bulleted here and all of the elements that you saw described earlier in the slides that we've described thank you very much thank you dr stevens and and all of the staff who just presented um i want to say a couple things before we before i turn it over to my colleagues for questions um i wanted to apologize again that the we've we've reached our capacity of 500 participants but the link to watch the meeting on twitch has been posted on twitter and facebook and sent out to the whole community on school messenger um by next meeting we
101will have increased our live streaming capabilities so that we don't run into this problem again but we appreciate everybody's patience and this meeting will be recorded again if you're hearing me you had got in or watching it but tell your friends who are frustrated that they weren't able to log on um you dr stevens i just wanted to reiterate what you said about the town halls and also what i think you said earlier in the presentation about written communication that will go out is that tomorrow yeah so we're uh planning a far more detailed uh document uh version of the slide deck from this evening we're planning uh just to sort of fine-tune that over the course of the work day tomorrow and we anticipate that we'll be able to send it out to all
102of our pusd families by the end of the day okay and i'm sure that for the many people who are watching um that went by very quickly and if you have a student in elementary school you heard the 60-second version of it from our associate superintendent and i'm sure you have a lot of questions same with high school and middle schoo and middle school so just know that more information will be coming that the purpose of my understanding correct me if i'm wrong dr stevens but the purpose of this meeting is to present what you did which was a relatively high level overview of what the plan is and that more details will be coming both from the district and from families principles as the details get worked out um all of that exactly right
103okay um i also just wanted to say and i know that nobody no none of the community members logged on to hear us congratulate ourselves or or thank each other but but it but i am struck by and sort of inspired by um the presentation and the amount of work that went into the plan that you just presented that you and your staff just presented and it just represents such a staggering amount of work over the summer we all know that none of you have gotten any break and that's not just district staff that includes our teacher leaders our union partners our classified leaders who've been working with us literally every day to address first all the ways in which we can get back into school which are themselves um a whole set of really
104vexing problems that we didn't even discuss tonight but we've discussed in past board meetings and that and that we're still working on in in parallel to what you just presented because all of us want to get kids and teachers and classified staff back in school when it's safe to do so so we're working on that at the same time that we're redesigning an entire educational program and it's um it's just a really um really inspiring and impressive amount of work and i know that people have questions people have complaints and criticism which which as my colleagues said we want to hear nobody will be happy with everything but i just wanted to add my appreciation um i'm just going to start with two quick questions and then i'll turn it over to my colleagues so
105raise your hands i see a couple of my colleagues to hands one was dr stevens and if you mention this and i and i'm spaced out just ignore me um if you can address the start time issue that came up and and when you anticipate um having a deliberations and discussion about the start times and then the second question is um some of the some parents asked about when classes will be assigned and if you could address whether there's going to be any change to the time at which you find out when your kids um who's whose class your kids in which is usually the day before school starts yeah um thanks for both those questions um so it is the case that we are um contemplating uh we might call it staggered start time
106for our middle and our high schools um very specifically we're thinking about starting middle school at ten o'clock as opposed to the nine o'clock time that i mentioned uh in the presentation and then we're thinking about an 11 o'clock start time for the high school we didn't as staff feel prepared to propose the idea as part of the plan this evening simply because it's an idea that we've come across mainly this week and our discussions with teachers and wanted an opportunity to learn more from families and students about the impacts both positive and potentially negative before putting that decision uh to uh to to the board so our plan right now is to begin the school year with the start times that we mentioned in the presentation and that we would commit to surveying families
107and students during the closing weeks of august beginning weeks of september and bring our thinking back to the board so that we might potentially change the start times uh around the time of the first trimester of the school year that's roughly around october 9th okay thank you and and do you have any sense of when um families will learn their class assignments in the elementary school yeah not precisely right now and it might be the case that um debbie dean who's the the new director of schools for kate can comment um i don't know if principals have yet had a chance to talk about this many of them are just returning to work this week we would like to be able to provide class lists earlier than they're typically provided but i don't know that
108the principals feel that they right now can articulate a date by which that would happen am i describing that right mistine you're describing that accurately and what i would want to highlight is we're working with the principles so that everything will get released on the same day in the same time so there won't be different schools releasing it at different times that's what we're working on i met with the principals today and we're looking at a couple different dates so when we have that we'll let you know so we are just just to affirm we're hearing very clearly that many families would find a lot of value in getting their classlits earlier and and so we've heard that and are going to do everything we can to to accommodate their request okay thank you so
109why don't we go around and ask a question at a time um so uh director level cutler i have you first um i apologize mostly because this is a borrowed computer my laptop burnt out so my my guess my question is there's a lot i have several questions but um will will this meeting that teachers have with parents include also the overview of the curriculum for the year for these for their students in that classroom so parents have a sense of where we're taking students at least for the first beginning part of the semester i think it would help given you know where parent where we left off where are we going to pick up with our students yeah yeah we envisioned that the family meetings um uh would have many opportunities um for information
110sharing and that's exactly one of them we've got about 80 teachers who have been working over the course of the year to essentially reformulate the curriculum given the changes to the to the learning schedule that we just described so we'll be in a better position to articulate learning goals by grade level and exactly what the curriculum will look like as this group of about 80 educators finishes their work and then we also imagine in these family meetings it's an opportunity to talk about particular learning needs about technology needs about families work schedule learning styles for children and any other factors that might impact students participation and success in a distance learning environment um director sinai and then and then president pal and then director brown and then director miller anybody else no [Laughter] uh thank
111you for the presentation it was a a lot of information um and and pretty high level and so i i'd like if you could maybe go a little bit deeper and explain maybe pull up the elementary schedule again and in relation to the wednesday the questions i have are kind of when it where it comes to the independent learning or the independent i can't remember what you call it but um the time where they're not in front of um in a group with a with the teacher and could you talk a little bit about the the time when students are supposed to be independent work um how that also works with the wednesday schedule um and what does enrichment mean yes well thanks so let's have a closer look at just this sample schedule so
112we're looking right now at a sample schedule for student transitional kindergarten kindergarten or grade one there are a number of different components described in this schedule that includes whole class live instruction we see that at the beginning of the day we are then we'll be dividing classes in half so that a half the class can interact with their teacher and you see that represented in the light blue shaded blocks so for this particular student whose schedule is represented here she would move from a whole class lesson into a smaller group lesson that smaller group lesson would then include some assignments and this student could then move in to complete those assignments uh independently so what we're envisioning here is that teachers would teach a lesson help kids know how to do their work and that
113they could then go off independently and do that work having benefited from live instruction just just moments before this particular student then at 11 o'clock would move into a live enrichment block and we have a variety of enrichment teachers who include visual and performing arts physical education science and art all of our uh elementary schools have a different variety of enrichment teachers but it's during these orange shaded blocks when those teachers would be able to work in regular and scheduled ways with classes of students you can see then that there's a lunch break and then the student comes back for independent work sorry that does more independent work at 12 o'clock followed by the lunch break and then finally this student's day ends on monday with some small group support from her classroom teacher on
114wednesdays these days are just a little bit different in that teachers will be engaged in a variety of activities including family outreach professional development collaboration and faculty meetings so during this day students also get the benefit of a morning meeting to start the day and then all of those enrichment teachers will continue to teach so this particular student has one of those enrichment blocks let's call it science followed by some independent work that had been assigned by the teacher previously and then goes back into a live enrichment block after lunchtime and we might describe that as a library block so each of these schedules will be different what this does is enable each school to create its own master calendar just like we do in the real world so that every student is experiencing a
115coherent instructional day over the course of the week and i'll stop there that that's lots of detail i'm happy to answer more questions about the individual blocks director sinai so we'll do one question at a time we'll go around so direct i mean president appel hi everybody i am not going to go live because i'm actually laying down but um i did want to just maybe maybe express my understanding about the pods and then you can tell me if this is consistent with what the district is thinking but for me like i totally understand parents wanting to get you know to have opportunities for getting their kids and their friends together and kind of like create a education bubble to and then have you know us an outside i think a lot of them well
116they're really different some parents are talking about you know trading them off among the parents some are talking about hiring somebody um and i just want to make sure that people understand a couple things that first of all doing i mean i totally understand that but doing that um does involve a certain level of privilege either time or money or you know just the ability to find somebody or to organize it or have the space whatever and we we actually i feel like unless we can get through and somehow solve or somehow do something without those privilege barrier like the the privilege involved in doing that it just really isn't it just isn't it kind of isn't something that we can or should be involved in we should be focusing our time on our like
117educational programs so i just wanted to say that about the pods um and also president pal i think you muted yourself sorry for those parents who are planning pods and i again i totally understand it but i wouldn't really talk to your kid about the kids that they're friends with in school because they're probably there are there are really diverse kids in their schools and your kids are i mean i mean i think i'm mostly hearing from a certain kind of segment of our community about setting up pods and i just really would would urge parents to really try to be as inclusive as possible and try to see if there's a way to set things up in a way if you are going to do it that it includes and hopefully like reflects the
118kind of diversity we've worked so hard to make sure our students experience at school is that kind of similar to what you guys are thinking or is am i off base superintendent stevens yeah i i appreciate the question you know we haven't as uh staff teams or formulated a consistent view uh on pods um you know my own thinking first and foremost is that i recognize the needs that families are experiencing and that the idea that a family would reach out to other families for the purpose of creating a pod you know consistent with those county health guidelines makes intuitive sense this is about protecting the emotional well-being of young people and providing them some semblance of normal normality in the middle of what is a very difficult time the question though of the district's
119involvement in creating pods the degree to which we can facilitate their creation is just a different question altogether and i tried to outline just some of the liabilities that our organization would have to unpack and resolve in order to be actively involved in the creation of these pods so there are some requests that are relatively simple like providing class lists earlier other requests become more difficult like creating class lists on the basis of families decisions to make pods and then some are even more complex still like surveying families and trying to put the pods together ourselves the district so depending on the request the complexity increases a great deal and the more complex the request i think the more unlikely it is that the district could step in and and fulfill an organizing role in
120the creation of families pods i sort of fundamentally see this as an important private decision but one that's difficult to use public resources to accomplish all set yeah thank you dr students i'm sorry no i just said thank you for for clarifying that i think that that is really true and i think that we like i think like um vice president albert said you and we are doing so much um it's like such an effort to basically recreate what busd looks like and this issue is a little bit you know after we figured that all out we could maybe turn to what limits like what we would be able to do but right now i would encourage the district to de-prioritize this because all these other that's creating a new school structure is really a
121big thing and i think you're doing a great job and i just want to like say that at least for me you have my support in focusing there as you have been i appreciate that if i could just uh quickly note um associate superintendent baje tiara i i just let her go she's actually quite ill this evening and hung in as long as she could but i i asked her just to disengage and get herself into bed so just just so the board members know thank you um director brown and then director miller um thank you uh superintendent stevens for your presentation for your work on this um a while ago we were talking about um ways to of course improve our distance learning plan um especially with equity at the the forefront of this
122so i'm really excited to to see this plan and super grateful uh for all of the thought that was put into it specifically around the support block and my my question is will teachers be provided with a district adopted checklist to determine which students will receive extra support during that support block time and or will there be a space where parents or excuse me um guardians or parent or guardian advocates uh to request additional support for their specific students um during that support block block time uh yes is the answer to both of those questions um so we at the elementary level imagine that the coordination of services team at each elementary school would play a hand in this and deciding who would be a recipient of that just that extra equity support and at
123the same time at middle school and high school we'll be providing some guidelines about how teachers should be selecting students for that extra support part of what we've been working on is ensuring that parents are regularly communicated with by teachers and other members of the school staff and so we do want there to be sort of open receptors to families requests that teachers get extra sorry that students get extra support thank you and thank you for answering that it's really that that's a really the tool will be super important i'm imperative in ensuring that we actually make sure that the support block is used for for students who need the additional support and i think this is a great tool to have especially as we move towards not just providing distance learning for our students
124but providing it equitably so thank you thank you director brown director miller hi thank you again dr stevens for that presentation um also quickly before i start just want to um thank you dave hell for bringing that up the issue of equity with these pods it was something that i was thinking about myself as well um my main question is about specialty classes such as art and physical education classes throughout the middle and high school um considering we're going to be at home now and some of these classes have materials in school that students won't have access to how are those teachers um is there plans to help those teachers adjust their curriculums to fit at home needs uh yes and so some some courses um translate more readily to zoom than others and i
125think that it's some of the courses that most rely on specialty spaces can be the ones that sort of least translate into zoom so career technical education programs pe visual arts performing arts all of these things that can be so rich in a physical environment oftentimes don't translate well into a digital environment nevertheless vapa teachers and others have done really heroic work to try and translate these disciplines into zoom and they are forming uh professional networks uh and providing profes and then provided professional development support to be able to think about how to translate their disciplines into a zoom environment so it's challenging to say the least but there are really rich networks of professionals already formed to think about how the best way to do that okay thank you okay do do board members
126have maybe one additional question or comment each some of you have your hands up but i don't know if you mean to direct your life of cutler are you we're going to go to the middle school into the high school well this is just about any any of anything in the presentation just a qui a question regarding um how we can support our parents more with you know i know that we've developed some videos in the past about math of berkeley and that's i think the one biggest obstacle some of especially are in elementary in middle school the parents are more challenged because it's not the math that we learned back in the day and we have new parents coming into our district and so how do how do we plan to support parents in
127understanding and helping them through tutorials perhaps or you know even through the one-on-one with teachers in terms of the math that someone that our students will be having i'm doing yeah i can answer maybe a a a portion of that and then i would welcome if he feels he can comment uh uh juan ray goes to the interim principal at the high school to also talk a little bit about um uh what he's heard from the math department specifically so not specific to the high school part of what we are planning to do to support family engagement with the curriculum is a series of how-to videos that we'll begin distributing in the open to opening two weeks of the school year those will touch on both curriculum components of the learning experience as well as
128technology and so i don't know that it's the case that the high school is thinking about those things but definitely the earlier grades we're thinking about a much more active sort of video based learning experience uh for families and their students to get used to the technologies they'll be using mr rego said i'm going to put you on the spot and it's perfectly fine if you haven't had this conversation with um with high school math teachers do you have any sense right now of particular supports related to math that might exist for families yeah uh so i mean i did have a chance in in my last two years as the vice principal at berkeley high working with the math department they've been working extremely hard all summer um and so a couple of the
129things they've been doing is looking at how they um think about their curriculum next year with with being able to spend less time with students and so definitely when it comes to our mvp curriculum they're looking at essential standards what is most essential for students to learn um we're actually working as we speak to try to revamp our berkeley high website and bring it to current times and make it a lot more interactive for families so on there just like we have our berkeley uh math department website i think we're gonna be linking a lot more resources on the website as we talk to families it's one of the first resources they go to they just google berkeley high and when they find stuff that's outdated they kind of hit a wall so we want
130to make sure the link resources there for the math department also um you know before the shelter in place we had after school tutorials for math specifically math one two or three so we're already working with um one of our student support teachers uh who runs a very effective after school program in our college and career center to see how we would transition math tutorials specifically to an online version okay um i still see people with their hand do they really mean it director brown thanks um i uh have a question but i just wanted to also offer a follow-up question to director levi cutler's a question about parents support or parent education i'm superintendent stevens you mentioned that uh in the first weeks that information will be available to parents will it be um
131on an ongoing basis or will it be available um through the website throughout the entire um distance learning or the entire semester how will parents be able to access it access the information if they forget how to use google classroom they're going to use in october or so a great question so so one of the advantages of all of the professional development and support work that we will be doing is that it can all be recorded and essentially made available as a library of resources so as we create these sort of family oriented how-to videos we'll be able to make them accessible to families and they'll be there and viewable of us or in perpetuity and then depending on the success of this early effort if it appears like there's still demand we'll commit to
132continuing to make those kinds of videos and we can make them in response to questions that we're getting about particular platforms or apps so we'll take it as it comes of course we have to design and do all this work ourselves there's no ready-made bank of how-to videos for families but we are in touch with vendors we're talking about with teachers and are committed to making these resources the idea i should mention for doing these videos came directly from one of our town hall meetings earlier in the year i was just about to ask would it be in our best interest to have an additional town hall meeting say a couple of weeks or so into the school year to see what needs um parents still have in regards to those videos yes and in
133fact part of what i didn't mention is our ongoing commitment to assess our success with this distance learning plan i do know that our teachers are also interested in just keeping the dialogue open about what's working and not working and so as much as we're asking the approval of a start of year plan it may be the case that we'll have to make some modifications based on what we're learning as we go along thank you and i did have another question but i want to respect my other colleagues so i can wait yeah um thank you for for that and we'll come back to you director brown um and i do also want to you know we have time but our staff has also been working really hard and we should try not to go
134too late tonight and we do have the budget items um so director sinai uh it's your turn okay a quick follow-up on just the family and this i do have a follow-up question i'm going to ask but will the family videos are you looking at producing those also in spanish and will the materials that go out tomorrow be in spanish as well uh the materials that go out tomorrow will likely not be in spanish yet although they will all be translated in fact we've been working right down to the wire to prepare tonight's presentation and tomorrow's document and so it will likely be only in final draft a few hours before it goes out and then we'll translate it and get it out as absolutely as quickly as we can okay um yeah hopefully i
135totally understand the capacity question but i also want to make sure our spanish-speaking families are not delayed um longer than you know the gap it contributes to the opportunity gap in a sense um so my my question is around the high school i mean maybe mr ragosa can address this and give you a little bit of a break but if um we could talk just a little bit more about what the schedule at the high school looks like and if you can help um myself as well as i think some of the listeners on what the four to six weeks mean because it looks like it's kind of flexible and i understand from my earlier question that no that's based on some other constraints and how semesters and the like work and then if if
136you were looking at a period one for four to six weeks and then you're getting the the periods two four six eight you know like the next say six weeks for another four to six weeks do you anticipate any um challenge around the continuity of the curriculum um or the continuity and the fact that you're in a class for a semester and how that keeps rolling and what your kind of what your thoughts were around creating the the terms and again i think there's some questions on does wednesday mean no school so if you could again kind of address what wednesdays mean thank you well i'll i'll um sort of share the response with mr regos and why don't i talk a little bit about the terms uh and then i'll ask mr ragosa to
137talk about some of the dialogues that took place with berkeley high school staff about the best way to ensure continuity and why this particular compromise i think felt best to the largest number of staff members at the high school so the terms do vary by length a little bit they're roughly four to six weeks each and the reason that's true is that when we divide the 180 day year into two semesters we typically try to use the winter break as the semester point but it means that the semesters are different lengths which then means that the quarters are different lengths and that then means that the terms are different lengths so rather than divide the school year into eight equal parts we're trying to peg terms to quarters and semester breaks simply for the sake
138of consistency with marking so it does mean that terms vary a little bit uh each one is a little bit longer or shorter than the other but that they roughly correspond to the quarter and semester breaks that are already part of the school calendar so mr rico so would you mind describing just a little bit of the sort of internal dialogue about uh continuity and why this particular proposal sort of edged out some other competitor proposals yeah absolutely um there were challenges in any of the proposals that we looked at um one of the things we knew is that we got significant student feedback about our current six classes if we were to do distance learning with required attendance being very difficult to manage six classes six google classrooms six zoom sessions six different set
139of expectations it would be a lot um to do and that's what students shared with us in the spring when we didn't have as much live instruction as we're proposing for the fall and for this entire next school year so we just imagine it might be even more anxiety producing we looked at a couple other models at different districts there are some districts out there that are doing semester systems so three classes the first semester in three classes the other semester that raises a couple concerns that i have that i haven't received adequate responses such as if you have classes that are singletons offered once um a year what does it mean for a kid that doesn't get it the first semester like they wouldn't be able to take it also you know in specific
140content areas like in world language and in math you have validation where if you do better the second semester you can get credit for the whole year so now if you only take a course one semester you don't have that opportunity a second semester um we looked at the quarter proposal which was to offer three classes for the first quarter the other three classes for the second quarter that would end the semester and then do that again second semester and some of the drawbacks of that were that you would see your kids for about eight to nine ten weeks and then you wouldn't see them and so that would be a large gap for students also if they're learning the content um and then not learning it for nine weeks and then coming back so
141we do anticipate some initial whiplash in between the first and the second term um but we just feel like um being able to see the students more frequently would help also we are considerate of all our students that are taking ap and ib exams potentially in may and if we went to the quarter system we would have students that were on the first and third quarter have nearly twice as much instruction as students that were on the second and fourth quarter since a lot of the fourth quarter would happen at the end of may and by june 4th the last day of school and so that would be a really difficult thing for students to have the same class with the same teacher but on a different quarter so now the teachers will have more
142access to the kids more frequently with this term proposal um as far as wednesday i don't necessarily see it as a day when there's no school i think there's going to be work that needs to be done from monday and tuesday before they see their teachers again on thursday and friday but i also don't see the same group of students uh being targeted for that small group support because i don't think the criteria is going to be simply who has the lowest grade but it could be fluid based on what is going on in that class so it might be a kid who um has a strong grade but is struggling with something in that specific lesson or that unit that week that would come into this class and so we would work with our
143teacher leaders and our teachers to be very thoughtful about who they invite into that class on wednesday so just to clarify then wednesday it's really independent work the expectation is they're doing their schoolwork but not unless you're part of the small group not in front of the teacher or with the teacher yes on wednesday if you're not invited to attend this small group support which would be live uh then you would be doing independent work director that answer your questions okay um it looks like i've got director brown as your hand still up oh wait but i already know i did i already not well let me go to director president pal and then i'll come back to you and then director of color anyway i thought i was going to get you no you
144almost did president appel thank you so much vice president albert you're doing an excellent job oh stop um i wanted to just i guess have an opportunity to welcome you um uh welcome you uh principal rick you're not on my screen but regardless is that yeah ragosa um i think that you know this is obvi obviously not like the the smoothest time to step into a principal position but i really appreciate your thoughtfulness and how well i understand you're working with the district so thank you for all your hard work and good thinking because we actually really need a strong leader there um and then i just wanted to go ahead and make a motion that we accept the distance learning um recommendation i know we don't maybe we're not quite yet ready to vote
145but i think we're getting close to probably we're getting like you said we're getting close to the end of the meeting so i'd like to make the motion and since i'm not facilitating this meeting i can so you cut out there for a second president so i'm i'm making a motion to recommendation for distance learning i know that we're not quite done with discussion but i raised my hand a while ago when oh okay great well i appreciate that so president paul's made a motion we i'll still let people comment and ask questions if they still have them but do is there a second on the motion i'll make the second okay so motion by president of bell second by director levi cutler and let's see what other um last comments or questions people have
146so director miller do you have any last comments i didn't or your hand's not up are you good okay i haven't forgotten director brown but directly color just thank you very much principal rodrigo so this really helps and understanding i just want a clarifying question from my own head in terms of when students are taking the first eight weeks then they won't see their teacher again for the net in the following semester correct will the teacher expect students to be doing other things in between that say they're taking spanish um will their that semester end there or will the teacher be assigning work until we meet again or it ends right there that's a good question i think that the eight week gap um in not seeing a teacher or class would have been if
147we had gone with the quarter system this is the term system so the first term for example a student would take periods one three and five for four weeks then the next four weeks they would take periods two four and six for four weeks then the quarter three and quarter four are four and a half weeks roughly so they only go um between four and it's really five and a half six weeks between seeing teachers um you know we went to this term proposal because students a significant number of students were telling us that having all six classes would be very stressful and so i don't anticipate um the teacher requiring work during the off term because then it would still be essentially your thing you're taking three classes and doing work for your other
148three classes without being able to interact with the teacher well that's a great that's a great answer because i think a lot of teachers and parents when students would like to know okay am i being expected to still do some work when i'm addressing these three classes that's great thank you very much thank you director liverpool um uh dr stevens your desktop we should like make two persons it's very impressive um it's a little embarrassing that you all are seeing uh yes it's a little window into your life um okay i think our last questioner and then we'll vote is um director brown yeah just quickly um superintendent stevens um i appreciate the comment that um sped and eld um an intervention is going to be scheduled into the daily schedule and additionally enrichment classes
149will be available as well if there are students who are in specific sub groups for intervention and for sped um how do we ensure that they still get the opportunity to uh to participate in the enrichment classes um or get the opportunity to participate in in sped and in intervention it's it's a great question it's exactly the same kind of conflict that exists says when we have school you know running under normal circumstances some students qualify for multiple services and because of the length of the school day it's sometimes unavoidable that there are conflicts in scheduling those services the advantage of having a clearly articulated schedule for general education classes is that it then becomes clear for intervention teachers special ed teachers and the enrichment teachers when students can be available so it really makes
150possible that a school would build a master schedule and try to avoid every conflict as much as it can while recognizing that some students who often qualify for multiple services may experience those conflicts and in some cases the team just has to make difficult decisions about what's best for the for the student often they try to do that in consultation with families but but off but sometimes those conflicts are just unavoidable all right um any other burning comments director brown and president pele you have your hands up so maybe if you could take them down just so i know that you are no longer thank you um thank you both okay thank you so much dr stevens miss pacheco are you with us yes so president appel has made a motion to approve the fall
1512020 busd distance learning plan as presented by the superintendent and his staff and i believe director lava cutler seconded the motion so can you call the role yes director leyva cutler yes director sinai yes director brown yes director miller yes vice president helper yes president appel president appel i said yes oh yes thank you i i think we assumed you were voting for the motion since you made the motion um great thank you and and um congratulations dr stevens on the completion of a lot of hard work and i know that there's still a lot more to go yeah thank you if i if you know i'm going to just thank a couple in particular because they carry particularly large loads um so i'm very thankful first to samantha tobias espinosa who's worked over the
152course of the summer just to try and keep track of many many complicated details um so thank you sam i really appreciate the work that you've done and then there have been a number of folks who joined us on the bargaining team and we've appreciated that they have sacrificed often time just of their own accord sacrificed their summer with us and then our berkeley federation of teacher partners everybody on their bargaining team has also given up a huge amount of time and then there are quite literally hundreds of people who contributed thinking to this plan that includes teachers that includes classified staff parents who voluntarily joined advisory committee meetings and then a huge range of students as well who contributed survey feedback to trying to make these plans so we're all very grateful for the
153just the the large amount of input and wisdom that we receive to get to this point so thank you all right um now we're going to move along um oops and um we're going to go to the our next action items which are budget related there's three or three approvals that the superintendent is going to be requesting and i assume that these will be short presentations dr stevens uh my customary 90 minutes okay 90 minutes each you have we tried to make them as as brief as possible um so before we jump into that i'd like to just thank and excuse a few of my colleagues so mr ragosa thank you debbie dean thanks very much john cleese if you're still on we can let you go miss beery i'm also going to let you
154go as well thanks very much for the evening with us and with that we'll introduce assistant superintendent pauline follinsbee and we'll queue up the next presentation i'm sorry vice president i'm gonna ask you i'm not feeling that oh okay i missed that sorry i i got a leg crap um what did you say president i said i have to go oh okay okay feel better good night go on lucky uh we're ready to start um so at the board meeting on june 24th ward voted to approve uh budget for the 2021 school year um back only a month ago the conditions were actually considerably more tired with the budget the board was forced to adopt a budget that represented a minus 10 cost of living adjustment i was roughly equivalent to 7.5 million dollars in
155reductions um forced because we were required to admit a balanced budget about that point in the school year it was our best estimate about our revenue over the course though of the last month budget situation has improved considerably legislator and governor enacted a new budget which restores many of those cuts and so this particular budget is a bit of a formality it won't come as a surprise to any of the board members in fact back on june 24th we kind of knew that this was coming but we want to introduce the 45-day revision describe what it means to have that cola restored and then describe what it means in terms of the reductions that the board voted on one month ago uh so there are uh four specific uh action items that we're asking for
156this evening that includes approving the 45-day budget revision again that includes the the new enacted budget those new revenue projections and then we'll be asking you to rescind or cancel uh the full set of tier two budget reductions that you uh the board was essentially forced to enact about a month ago uh and then also rescind or cancel a selected set of tier one uh budget reductions and then finally uh we'd like to introduce to you uh the budget for our current professional development uh and ask for your approval for these additional expenses baje tiara would have presented this section but she is now resting because she's ill this evening so with that i'm going to turn the presentation over to assistant superintendent pauline follinsbee so hello everyone um i'll be presenting the 45 day
157revise and as dr stevenson dr stephens mentioned um this is as a result of the governor's enacted budget being significantly different from the may revise so we'll be um showing you the impact through the unrestricted general fund so on the first slide the caller that was at the may revision was a negative 10 and that was a budget that the district and the board approved in june so that was the the unit the berkeley unified adopted budget that was approved the enacted budget had a zero colu and that represents an additional 7.5 million dollars in restored funding there was also no cuts to categoricals in the enacted budget and then we're learning more about the new federal funding called learning loss mitigation funding and that's 5.2 million dollars in additional restricted revenue there are also
158deferrals the way that the state is affording most of this additional revenue is by um implementing significant deferrals and in fact the district will be receiving only 68 of state apportionments um throughout the year and this will be and this is actually um later than usual so on the next slide and what does the enacted budget mean for berkeley so you could see um at the enacted um the may revise um we were getting 80.7 million dollars in base funding and 4.7 in supplemental um with the enacted budget we're getting 87.8 million in base and 5. 5.1 in supplemental that's an increase of the 7.5 million dollars that um um i talked about and with this additional money if this if we had a budget reduction target of 2.5 million dollars we would have essentially
159a balanced budget so new reduction target is actually 2.5 million dollars and on the next slide um this is just a quick overview of our multi-year projections and this is only the impact of the governor's budget so you could see the increased funding in base funding and in supplemental funding and as a result we're showing revenues of 97 million dollars across all three years um the um enacted budget had zero cola in the first year and kept it flat for the second year so there are zero colas in the o errors so the oh ears actually received almost um another 7.5 million dollars in each year so on the next slide um keeping everything essentially the same with the budget reductions that were approved when we adopted the district's budget we would need budget reductions
160possibly in the final year to balance the budget so with the change in fund balance you can see we have a healthy surplus in the first year 6.1 million dollars where deficit spending in 21 and 22 because um all the impacts in the first year with reductions were actually one time and then a further um deficit spending of 4.1 million dollars so we would need additional cuts of a million if the situation was the same um with the increased funding and again this is just the impact on the multi-year projections of the enacted state budget on the next slide this is talks about the learning loss mitigation and it's it's a very involved process there are three different funding sources and the district will be providing additional information as we are made um we get
161more information about this funding uh we know we're getting 5.2 million dollars in funding but as you can see it's pretty involved and um it's actually coming from three different sources so um we will be providing um as we get additional information we're bringing it back to the board and the following slide talks about the um deferrals and you can see this is significant um they're deferring um revenues from february um to november so that's significant deferrals and that was the impact that we're talking about 68 percent and this is only of the state aid apportionments not taxes and not our epa funding so um the next slide kind of looks at the overall impact to berkeley and um well that's a learning cost mitigation but on the following slides that are out of order
162unfortunately oh yeah okay that's fine um this is what goes on with um the learning loss mitigation this is the breakdown of the 5.2 million dollars um so this is the one yeah this is a slide so you could see they um we're projecting to go negative in november and returned her positive balance after receipt of property taxes in december and then we're um estimating an ending cash balance of 8.5 million dollars at june 23 2021. and the next slide um so with that um we're going to take a look at the at the tier 2 reductions that the board previously approved and with the 7.5 million dollars we're requesting um that the entire tier two reductions be eliminated and that would um on the next slide um all reductions are actually part of our
163reductions are actually as a result of the governor's enacted budget where they're actually um their their uh employee protections for certificated unclassified layoffs and in the blue box you can see that we're actually we cannot um apply layoffs to custodial staffs custodial staff transportation and child nutrition so this is partially driving all requests for rescinding some of the uh reductions um on the next slide um and this is just a reminder of the budget cuts that the board approved when when we had the me revised budget and that was 8.6 million dollars and that was in two tiers so tier one was 5.2 million and tier two was 3.4 million so um we're requesting um on the next slide um the reduction of the tier two um of all the territory reductions so um that
164actually totals the 3.4 million dollars and they're listed here we had departmental reductions we were reducing the gardening program and we had one-time transfers from fund 20. and an additional transfer from fund 20 and staff furloughs for the entire district of 3-d and then we're eliminating um the school service assistance so we're requesting that all of these be rescinded the entire 3.4 million dollars be rescinded and um so we are going to this is going to be one of the items that we are asking for the other item would be the research decision of selection ms fonsby can you you you got quiet for a second there oh yeah that's bad i'm sorry my reception is not i mean my um you're now you're good you're good now okay so then we're going to be
165um requesting um to approve selective taiwan reductions and on the next slide um so on the next slide um this is the listing of all the tier one reductions are actually on two slides and that was the five million dollars i'm not going to go through the entire list um but on the the following slide and one more after that right so these are the reductions um that we're asking to be rescinded so it's a gardening program nutrition services that's one of the protected groups um from the enacted budget staff for a low that was um an additional staff furlough for district um on requisite unrepresented managers the berkeley high school maintenance um position we're going to transfer that from the general fund to fund two and we're asking for that to be rescinded also
166the enrollment office that we were laying off of a new position um fund 20 contribution we could either keep that contribution in front 20 or in front one we're asking for it to be returned to fund 20. the math um coaching we had eliminated a position but we're requesting 30 000 be um be be held for math coaching for teachers and so the subtotal that we're asking to be reduced would be the 2.1 million dollars and that would mean that we're asking for 3.1 million dollars to be enacted so what does this mean the bottom line um we mentioned earlier that it would be 2.5 million dollars that the district would actually need to maintain a balance a balanced budget so if we do an additional um if we do the entire amount that we're
167um that we're planning that we're asking for you guys to rescind we will have a cushion of 585 000 and plus we will have 1.5 million dollars being returned to fund 20. so that would be the um the first three items that we're requesting um firstly requesting as well as um dr stevens is going to take us through the lcap virgin yes why don't i'll take it from here thank you very much pauline thank you and so that the following sections would have been presented by baje tierra but again she's out ill now and has um has uh is now resting um so we just wanted to quickly bring the board sort of up to speed on the impact of the restored 400 000 in lcap funding so you can see just down at the
168bottom i'm going to go over this relatively quickly we had plans to enact a number of cuts to the lcap budget in order to account for the lost 400 000 in revenue you can see the ideas written in green and blue and red that we had brought to the board and in fact were approved by the board just as a review they include moving a long fellow literacy coach from the unrestricted general fund into lcap so that's listed as an increase they included eliminating the super science saturday program the after school intervention tutoring which neither of those are likely to happen this coming year they also included the contribution of 000 to an lcap covid equity fund uh and then as well um uh 30 thousand dollars just for a variety of additions and reductions
169to two positions in lcap and then you can see as well we've accounted for some one-time funds that we continue to carry in lcap and all of that together leads us to a 296 thousand dollar amount uh to be carried by um lcap carryover so we right now are sitting on 400 000 of lcap carryover that more than takes care of the 296 thousand dollars that we need to reduce and so we're in good shape with lcap in fact we'll continue to maintain roughly 100 thousand dollars of lcap carryover and all of that is separate from the two hundred thousand dollars uh that the board set aside in its lcap reserves for the for additional equity supports for the coming school year what i'll just note for the board right now is that given that
170we have this new 5.2 million dollars in learning loss mitigation funding and that we don't yet have a solid plan for the expense of all of this money uh that we'll be thinking hard about whether or not we employ the two hundred thousand dollars in lcap reserves or just give it back um sort of set it aside for future use given the learning loss mitigation funding is now available to us and that we didn't know that one month ago as we were contemplating all of these budget reductions and then finally just to move quickly through a new budget for us part of the preparations for this year and moving to distance learning was the creation of a professional development catalog to be implemented between july 27th just this last monday and august 7th so this
171was a professional development set of offerings that we hadn't budgeted for it was designed over the summer and as we are offering up to seven paid hours per teacher so that they can participate in a whole variety of distance learning oriented professional development as well as a group of about 80 educators who are working over the summer to re-pace the scope and sequence for all of our english language arts math social studies and science classes k through 8. this is a very quick overview of the kinds of professional development that is now being offered to our educators it includes 102 synchronous live zoom sessions delivered over a 10-day period and those 102 sessions are sort of broken out into the categories that you see listed here and include things like overviews of digital tools curriculum
172special education social emotional needs for staff and students as well as shifts in online teaching and digital citizenship as well as english language development uh the budget for this uh professional development that includes both the online professional development for teachers uh and then the re-pacing of our curriculum is a total of two hundred thousand dollars and you can see the breakdown in uh with each of those lines uh for uh for the total of 200 000 so we're requesting uh that the board approved this budget as well um uh in addition to the rescission of the cuts that assistant superintendent founds be outlined earlier and again here are the four action items that we're specifically requesting of the board this evening um so thanks to my colleague pauline fallinsby and uh where uh take questions
173and then look forward to the board vote okay thanks um thank you uh ms fallon's been dr stevens associate superintendent phone space so let's do the let's do these in order um let's get the motions on the table and then if there's questions or comments we can um hear those so oh you just took it away but okay the i'm happy well that's right you leave it like this so we can see each other but is there a motion to approve the 45-day revised budget um vice president albert do we need to approve them one by one or yeah in a package one by one no shortcuts director brown um do i have a motion for the 45-day budget i will approve i will make a motion to approve the 45-day revision um revise budget
174and budget reductions which i'm happy is there a second second the motion second by director brown is there questions or comments dr sinai yeah um i think it belongs here i'm not sure where that's right everything was all presented at once um i'm just trying to get a i know the learning loss mitigation fund is new so we're still in the process of kind of processing that i'm a little unclear on how it relates or if it does to the caveat of the governor's budget or the approved budget by the state that if the stimulus money from the feds does not come in in the way that they budgeted there's going to be the retroactive needs to cut could you talk a little bit about where how this all kind of connects together uh as
175best i can and if if um miss following if you have additional information you're welcome to offer it um so i think at the moment that the learning loss mitigation funding is separate and disconnected from any decision the state may make on the basis of declines in tax revenue to reduce education budgets this year this is as we understand it learning loss mitigation funding is all federal had been received by the state earlier on is finally being dispersed and it's very categorical it relates to very specific activities that are meant to serve students directly so i don't think they're connected but i may be corrected by my colleague pauline follinsbury if she knows otherwise no that's correct so so we in a sense get to keep the 5.2 million that a chunk of that comes
176from the cares act or whatever but that there's still the risk that if the federal stimulus dollars don't come into the state the way or they've got strings attached that we can't comply with which is what the senate bill looks like right now um we still are at risk of the retroactive [Music] and i should an important caveat with the learning loss mitigation funds is that the timeline for their expense is relatively short although we skimmed past a lot of the text in the presentation um the state has defined the expense timeline for those funds as march 2020 through december of 2020. so we can we might be able to apply some expenses retroactively from the spring yes we have general fund dollars we're still waiting for a lot of guidance from the state about
177the acceptable uses of this funding but i'm assuming that that would be true that some of our previously incurred covet related expenses could be charged to this new expense thereby freeing up other revenue correct and just one other comment um if there is an issue with federal funding or if we get additional federal funding it would impact our deferrals so they would um they would mitigate the deferrals that's in the schedule as well um okay and we will be hearing more as you learn more about the learning loss mitigation funds right because that's also represents a huge opportunity to do some of the things that we're trying to do to make sure that kids don't fall through the cracks in this and in fact at the august 19th meeting um we're planning to introduce to
178the board um a new tool um still in draft form coming from the california department of education it also has the l the acronym of lcap it's called now the learning continuity and attendance plan not to be confused with the previous lcap so this is a new document that we believe will be tied directly to the learning loss mitigation funding but again we're still very early in this process as is the state so that that particular plan this new lcap plan will have to be approved by the board by september 30th and so we'll bring that plan for several readings to the board beginning on august 19th okay good to know the acronyms are all the same i had a comment yeah go ahead um director of cutler and then we'll vote on this it
179it seems like if this these are expenses that need to be qualified before december we should already start working on what were the expenses march to june 30th because our audit is will be in process and so we need to ourselves already start to identify those expenses that were made between that period of time at the very least and then moving forward that's you can start doing that but i think that that's probably the the big work right now to do also and you're doing that right dr stevens uh it's midstream okay great ms pacheco can you call the role on the um vote to approve the 45 day budget yes director leyva cutler yes director sinai yes director brown yes director miller yes vice president alper yes and and director palace i mean president
180pal's absent right now um okay now we're going is the next one approval of rescission of the tier two where's the key i'll move that okay is there a second second back in my directory label cutler um any i don't see any comment questions comments all right miss patrick can you read do the role for this one this is just to be clear this is the motion to approve the rescission of tier two reductions it's like three triple negatives [Music] director brown yes director miller yes vice president alper yes thank you miss pacheco now um so we want to move to approve the rescission of the of the selected tier 1 reduction i'll move this one all right motion by director brown oh second second by director sinai um i don't see any hands raised
181miss pacheco director level cutler yes director sinai yes director brown yes director miller yes vice president opera yes last one is the approval of the distance learning professional development expenses is there a motion for that one vice president albert why don't you do that one i'll do that one all right i'll move that one do you want to second it directly with color yes okay is there any questions or comments on the professional development okay miss pacheco director level cutler yes director signing yes director brown yes director miller yes vice president alper yes um that's all for right uh dr stevens yes that's correct okay now we're gonna move to our our final opportunity for alpha i'm sorry just a comment maybe quickly is um the the slides on the professional development are really informative
182um especially as they relate to the earlier conversation we had with um the scheduling and what kind of you know how are we getting beyond the um the uh the i can't even think anymore you know the uh emergency you know education versus a planful one now if there is a way to um include the professional development plan or outline with some of the materials that are going out so people can see the investment we're putting in to the teacher and staff professional development i think that would be really helpful that's great feedback we may not be able to get it into the printed document but could include it as part of the sort of cover letter that's going out to families tomorrow um okay this is our this is the final opportunity for public
183comment if you'd like to make a public comment um raise your hand i see four people with their hands raised so um we'll give you two minutes it's down to three um two minutes each so the first person is um and now there's four uh stuart oh they're changing okay first person i doubt this is the actual name but our sign architecture jay are you asked oh yeah okay go ahead oh stewart bumped off the list but he's on the screen oh there he is stewart are you are you here for public comment can you you're muted do you know can we unmute you or jay what's going on mr nitschke yeah i'm not here for public comment oh okay sorry that's okay um are sitting in architecture are you here for public comment um
184i don't know how to who's doing our technology i am oh i'm jay i am but him and go to the he person and then you go tomorrow as my mood sure you go can you hear me yep great thanks thank you to all of you um i have two comments hopefully if i have time one um is i really appreciate the structures that you're putting into place the small group support blocks to support students i imagine that one way that students might be targeted for participation would be if they became disengaged in the learning process and i imagine that students may disengage because they're struggling and also potentially because they're not challenged or may have already gotten through their work that's been assigned to them independently and i'm just wondering if that support block
185would be able to support students disengage students at both ends of the spectrum so that's one question just recognizing that students may be disengaged especially in this online platform for various reasons some may be needing more support and some may be needing more challenge and so wanted to bring that to your attention and i imagine you're thinking of that already also another thing that i wanted to ask about um i understand that the ed code related to expanded learning so before and after school programs has been revised to allow the aces and the 21st century funding to be used flexibly so that those funds no longer are no longer restricted to just the after school hours in particular and so i'm wondering if you're exploring how after school programs and staff might work together to
186support students and teachers throughout the school day in interesting and innovative ways within the distance learning framework that you've passed tonight thank you so much um next we have we're gonna try again with our scene architecture oh sorry this is elizabeth dylan um i'm on my work one right now okay um go ahead you've got two minutes great um i just have a few quick comments um one is i'm wondering if um you guys have thought about doing the town halls by great like by elementary middle and high school versus trying to do them all together again i think everybody has really specific questions about those three different sections and a lot of times you're sitting through them and thinking i don't fully understand it because i don't have kids in those grades or i
187have very specific questions about the different schedules and i think that may help just as an idea and then one other question i had was is there a second and third grade schedule that you'll be rolling out too because that seemed to be a gap in what was presented tonight thank you thank you and yes is the answer to the last question um um miss denis uh denise diggs right it's good to see your name hello um can you hear me yep okay mike um i was concerned about the type of professional development that's going to be given to the classified staff to assist in opening of the schools in the continuation of maintaining office management under the current circumstances which include attendance and other necessary operations to assist families thank you mistakes right um
188and i've just reminded i didn't say this at the beginning of this public comment period the board can't respond to people's questions um in this form but but staff is taking note of all of them um so thank you for that question mr x-ray and thank you for all that you do for the district um mr james we have j the last two speakers are james schultz and then shaleen stein and then we will adjourn for the evening so mr schultz do you have two minutes i'm did he say he doesn't have a comment i do not have a comment oh okay okay thanks mr schultz um uh shaleen stein do you have a comment uh sure i'd love to share a thought i am the parent of an incoming kindergartner and just looking at
189the schedule that's proposed for tk to first grade i have a lot of concerns about the amount of synchronous learning in a virtual setting i think we experienced some of that in the preschool setting this last year and i can say it was very hard to manage even a 45-minute session um and you know the proposed session has the proposed schedule has two plus hours of synchronous time that's stretched over six hours of the day and that's a lot for a working parent to manage um it's a lot for any parent to manage and it's especially a lot for a kid to manage and so just thinking about you know the importance of physical movement of outside play it's hard to even figure out where to put that into that schedule um i also the
190other part of our experiences last year was that it was really hard for our child to manage zoom sessions with large groups and large groups for like 12 kids you know which is the small group listed in this setting and so just a couple thoughts going through my mind would be whether you'd consider doing you know two days a week in even smaller groups as opposed to children participating every day of the week to allow them a little bit more interaction with the teacher on those small group sessions and maybe for some of the enrichment sessions making those asynchronous you know videos that parents can share with their kids at times of the day that would actually work for their work schedules or projects that parents can do at home as opposed to synchronous sessions
191that they have to manage in a virtual setting thank you it looks like one more person raised her hand so this will be the last speaker rachel deverti yes hello uh my name is rachel diverty and i'm a parent of a rising kindergarten at malcolm x um i do want to thank everyone for all the obvious hard work that you've put into the schedule um but i you know i'm sure i'm not the the first person to to say that the schedule as it's laid out for the kindergarten classes is not very compatible with what will be successful for my child you know we we have tried 15 zoom calls in spring she lasts about 15 minutes even on calls with you know five to six children that she's been in classes with for many
192years and knows very well and um i i echo the request for flexibility and understanding um that the schedule as it's laid out is is simply not compatible with the way that many of our youngest learners can handle themselves especially um all of the mandatory zoom calls and mandatory time slots um additional flexibility i think would be will be key in us you know having a successful kindergarten year and i guess the last comment that i will make is that there's been a lot of chatter about pods and privilege and other things you know we're in a situation where a we are new to the school district and so we don't know anybody um so there is no way for us to ask our child who she likes at school or who she wants to
193hang out with because we literally don't know a single soul uh and have no idea who will be in her classes and then um you know privilege aside uh you know we are a household with two working parents um in order to you know actively manage a full rigid schedule one of us will probably have to find a different job thanks so much thank you mr verdian welcome to the district um oh i see one more person but this is really the last one um ruth crow you've got two minutes and then we will adjourn hi there um i am a momma of a rising seventh grader and a junior at berkeley high i want to thank you all for your time energy effort obviously very heartfelt during these incredibly hard times i want to
194just i've listened very closely tonight i think there's a lot to digest i just wanted to make one quick comment regarding the high school schedule and the feedback that parents gave earlier about a later start time i realize it's very hard to shift plans now when you're just putting schedules in place but a transition in october to a later schedule for high school students is yet another transition and i think that was part of the problem with the crisis plans that we had in place over the spring is that there was constant sort of transition so anything that we can do to minimize transitions will help all of our kids that crosses every line every grade group so just think really long and hard about really starting the year with what we think is the
195best plan that we can put together thank you thank you miss crow and and thanks to everybody for their comments and 130 of you who have stuck around um i guess that's it thanks everybody well the meeting is adjourned at 9 55. oh and wait dr stevens are we not we're not meeting next week right uh no we don't have plans to meet next week and i will be in touch if that changes okay so but um yeah be in touch because i think at the last meeting we talked about whether or not we meet on the 5th or the 12th before school starts versus after school starts so if you're interested in helping i'm really confident president lapel about whether or not there's sort of an adequate agenda to warrant a meeting for the
196coming good night everybody