05/19/2022 NUSD Board Of Education Mtg

001good evening and welcome to the may 19th newark unified school district board of education meeting i call this meeting to order at 601 pm in regards to meeting practices we are holding in-person board meetings at our district board room and are following the state's and alameda county safety guidelines in public for public gatherings please refrain for attend from attending in-person meetings if you have covid related symptoms if you are not able to attend the meeting in person you may observe the meeting via the nusd youtube channel live stream transmission on comcast channel 26 and we do have spanish translation is available via zoom in regards to public comment the public will have the opportunity to address the board regarding non-agendized matters and agendaized items with a live audio only comment via zoom with advanced notice

002requested by email at publiccomment newarkunified.org or a written comment by submitting a speaker card via email at publiccomment newarkunified.org or with live in-person comments by submitting a speaker card with our executive assistant miss gutierrez roll call please ms gutierrez remember john here remember marquez here remember hill here remember here uh president wood here all present thank you um before we move to approval agenda i believe there is an emergency um amendment that we would like to make uh superintendent triplet yes thank you president wen and good evening to board members and um well there's no one here in the public but uh viewers what we're looking watching at home and staff so we do have um one um time sensitive um agenda item that we wanted to add um this is uh we realized it

003is uh very irregular but we do have a field trip that would was not able to make it onto the agenda that was posted on monday and so we wanted to bring it forth it's a trip for kennedy to go to great america and um if the board saw fit to prove it that the trip would be tomorrow okay so at this time um how will we go about making the motion to add you've got a question from member hill oh i'm sorry yeah i i don't think we can add that we have to give 72 hours notice so this would be an urgent item there are protocols policies that do allow for urgent items to be added to the agenda with board approval and the motion would be to approve the agenda with the

004addition of the field trip item okay and then it would be i'd add it to um consent non-personnel items so it would be it would be added to um it would be item 15.11. okay so can we cite those protocols um it is legal recommendation i don't i don't have a protocol or a policy in place right now but it was recommended from legal okay and then um in order to put the emergency item on the agenda what is the approval rate i mean we have to approve with we do have a super majority that is required to approve so at this point it would need four out of the five members okay all right um at this time i'll move approval of the agenda the future will be paid by the parent donation rather

005than the district right that's correct yes member hill yeah so um i'd also like us to pull one i have a question about the agenda and i'd like us to pull one item i'd like us to pull on 15.10 which are the minutes um and it's because that's been mislabeled it says minutes for 519 which is today but if you look at the minutes it's it's from the last meeting um so i'd like us to pull that and then bring it back to the in a subsequent meeting um and then but then connected to those minutes as i looked at him that reminded me that in our last board meeting uh we talked about the bond survey and we talked about how the survey was going to be brought back to the board in the

006next meeting and i'm just curious um why we don't have that on the agenda since that was committed to so in regards to the uh minutes if it is just the correction of the date the correct um a an amendment could be requested to amend the the or make the correction and prove it as is if the board so wishes or it could be removed and brought back to a later meeting okay um if i may president um with regard to the um the bond we will be uh discussing it in the superintendent report thank you so i guess if further question during a consent vote you can pull that one right now for further discussion on the minute that's generally if there's issue with the minute you don't vote with the consent you just

007pull that out and then do it individually and asking for change okay okay so at this it sounds like at this moment the motion is to approve the agenda with the added item of a 15.11 regarding the kennedy field trip that's what i was going to say okay thank you i'll second that how do you yes remember remember jean how do you vote yes remember marquez yes member hill no remember brendell yes i'm also a yes four four eyes and one no thank you okay on to um closed session items we will be discussing 3.2 public employee discipline dismissal release 3.3 conference with labor negotiators nta and csea 3.4 conference with labor negotiates negotiators numa and 3.5 conference with legal counsel anticipated litigation 3.6 student expulsion thank you we will recess to closed session okay

008thank you and welcome welcome back welcome everyone um we are back from closed session and there is no there isn't anything to report out from closed session okay on to um item 5.1 pledge of allegiance dr triplett oh please rise is ours oh okay please begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you okay [Music] before we move on to employee organizations i have a clarification and statement that i would like to make in regards to whether or not we have adopted parliamentary rules and procedures csba clearly states that no particular set of rules is required for school or county boards edcode35010 states the governing board of each school district

009shall prescribe and enforce rules not inconsistent with law or with the rules prescribed by the state board of education for its own government meaning local boards are free to adopt a set of rules that works for them which we as a board have our governance handbook and thank you um on to item 6.1 no thank you item 6.1 yes we do have um pneuma virtually ms vicente ditto you may begin good evening president nguyen board of trustees and exec executive cabinet members may is asian pacific american heritage month a celebration of asians and pacific islanders in the united states aapi encompasses all of the asian continent and the pacific islands of melanesia micronesia and polynesia many members of the newark community identify as asian america i'm sorry asian american and pacific islander students get to

010see themselves reflected in the adults that support them from campus monitors cse members teachers and leaders like a little girl who is first generation american whose entire paternal side of her family came to the tri-city area from the mountainous northern region of luzon in the philippines through the efforts of her family and the welcoming arms of the tri-city area her family was able to become established and thrived that is when this adorable little girl with the roundest cheeks you would have wanted to squeeze came to be her first language was tagalog and she didn't see many people at school that looked like her or sounded like her family still she was supported and school was an amazing place for her it was because she experienced the magic of public education that she became a lifelong

011learner who never wanted to leave school she went on to graduate from high school get her bachelor's degree in education become a teacher go back to school to seek her master's degree and ultimately became the principal and pneuma president addressing you tonight as leaders and managers it is important to remember that our students deserve to have their heritage celebrated and recognized as pneuma president making the last address of the 22-23 school year i want all of us to remember our nusd resolution to reaffirm its commitment to foster a culture that values diversity equity and inclusion that we are charged with ensuring that all aapi students staff and community members feel safe welcomed and valued from my personal experience we are holding strong to this resolution on behalf of pneuma i'd like to thank all of

012the community members watching tonight or watching in the future for supporting students and educators this 21-22 school year thank you and there were no requests from nta or cse but i don't know if there's any nta present here no one else thank you okay on to item 7.1 public comment on non-agenda items we do have one speaker this up yes we do have one virtual okay um let's go with the virtual one first okay thank you public comment is for mr eric tam you may begin hello hi hi uh let's get straight to it um thank you uh everybody this is super short i just wanted to um give some shout outs i wanted to thank you mr cabuto for a couple of meetings ago that he gave a update for hvac um you know

013i appreciate you know him trying to be more detailed and trying to provide more information i wanted to say congratulations to miss palomino i think she's uh being officially um accepted as the full-time principal um you know thank you for her and um i want to say thank you to them as uh gallagher i think it was a couple of sessions ago that she also presented a metric based um kind of evaluation of baseline versus kind of progress and i just really appreciate that work um so in terms of um just requests uh thank you to lucia i think we were emailing earlier she's going to help me with some cpra and also some open emails that i have emailed the board and also dr triplett so hopefully that can get resolved and then i

014think my final kind of little topic was related to apex so i'm gonna like ignore the the the personal stuff um i i was just really curious to ask this member marquez if she was able to dig into the data that um ms pearce said that she would review with her um i think you know reviewing this just trying to be objective i was just curious about miss pierce why we didn't provide that data if that was data was available in the system you know i think you know member mark has raised some really good points in terms of the metric about like um you know exam repetition how many were taken kind of the duration of the course you know these are all kind of um possible metric flags that you can uh evaluate

015to understand if you know if the accusations are true or not so just wanted to ask if that was done or not and thank you thank you mr town miss lisa martinez you have the floor welcome hello can i take this off to speak i haven't been here in a while um good evening uh hello uh board president nguyen um board superintendent triplett and the exec team um thank you for everything that you do can't believe it's another year um my name is elisa martinez and i am a parent of two newark unified students a high schooler and a junior higher and i'm taking deep breaths because i've been thinking about how do i speak today without sounding angry but i'm actually really ticked off i'm angry i'm angry because i listen to the last

016meeting and this is not the first time that i hear all these accusations that our students are cheaters i can't believe i'm the only one that's ticked off by that there is a process that is followed if there is suspicion that somebody is cheating but the fact that we are permitting people to get up here and just throw those accusations and worse yet or member hill that you just sit here and amplify those accusations without following process do we do you even understand i listened to the meeting there were so many points that you're out of line do you even understand what your role is have you gone to training so i have to believe that if you went to one session of training you would understand that you were completely completely out of line

017i wonder and i mean i am here really to speak to member hill because i understand that most of you are asking the right questions and want to get to the bottom of this i'm not naive do some people some kids cheat probably right but to go ahead and do this general accusation it is just completely unconscionable to me member hill i'm not sure why you ran for the seat i'm not sure what you think the role of a board member is but i encourage you to go to training because it's clearly not coming here every meeting after meeting and spewing out negativity instead of coming here to pull to help problem solve of any issue this is something to come and problem solve with your years of project management experience come here and problem

018solve not accuse baselessly and as i watch the clock i encourage the board to consider making uh training for uh governance um masters in governance to make it mandatory within the first year i think that will do this board a huge service and most importantly to my kids because i don't understand why anybody so readily believes that that kids are cheating but i'm wondering if it's because my the kids look like me okay so makes me really doubt what's at the core of all these accusations thank you for your time thank you miss martinez okay on to item 8.1 superintendent report dr triplett thank you president nguyen and good evening again to the board members and staff and community that are here this evening as miss miss gutierrez is putting up the deck great so

019this is the um this is the superintendent's report for this evening oh there we go uh number one i i did want to appreciate um the the words of um uh principal ditto and newman president and um acknowledge asian american and pacific islander heritage month this month um as you all will recall the board passed a resolution last year and um and so this is um i think important to just revisit and um and both celebrate and acknowledge the importance of all of the contributions of our asian american and pacific islander people in this country next slide please and so i wasn't going to read out the whole resolution but i did did just want to read just the first part of what was passed last year by this board the newark unified school district

020hereby remains resolved in the following number one honoring may as asian american and pacific islander heritage month and denouncing hate crimes hateful rhetoric and hateful acts against asian americans and pacific islanders and three reaffirming its commitment to foster a culture that values diversity equity and inclusion and it goes on to speak about the month of may set aside to honor the contributions of asian americans and pacific islanders and the fact that the congress in 1990 voted to expand asian american heritage from a week to a month and so um again just wanna just want to call out the importance of us celebrating that all all month next slide please um so uh just to touch upon some some important things as they're um as they're happening in the next couple weeks um you i know

021our teachers and students are well aware of the last day of school being june 1st and so we're quickly approaching that and everyone is working really hard to to wrap up the school year and to really acknowledge all of the hard work that's happened on the part of students and and staff and and teachers next slide please so i i did touch upon this last time the the we have our graduation and promotion ceremonies coming up new york memorial on the 2nd of june bridge point and crossroads on the june 3rd newark high school excuse me new york junior high school on june 1st and then if you go to the next slide please ms gutierrez and then we also have all of our promotion ceremonies for our elementary schools as well as our adult

022education so we'll we'll be posting this on the website and this is also being shared with all of the different school communities so we're really excited to celebrate and um at the end of the year and all of our students achievement i wanted to touch upon a quick update around covet 19 and we have um case rates from last week so um this is the second week in a row where we've seen a significant jump so um last the may 2nd through the 8th it was at 36 and this past week it continued to to be higher than it has been um prior uh prior to spring break so we had 37 cases last week for students and eight cases for uh staff so because of this we um we have made a decision not

023to adjust our parent volunteer policy and and continue to stay with the current policy of not having parents on campus during regular school hours with just a few exceptions and that is um certain um certain end-of-year events and so um any with schools hosting specific end-of-year events we're having the schools submit a plan and making sure that it aligns with all of our coveted safety protocols next slide so um earlier member hill you you mentioned just a question about when we're going to revisit the school bond um survey so um we did have the uh the survey was administered um we received the the um preliminary results uh pretty recently and so we wanted to make sure we had time to analyze them before bringing them to the board so we will be bringing them

024all the results to the board at the upcoming board meeting ms dela cruz i think did you want to say anything else about the bond survey results no okay we'll get into the details at the next board meeting yeah and i believe we'll have our um our consultant consultants come to uh to go through each each one and and to really do a thorough analysis for the for the board next slide um and i think this might be my last slide so we did we touched upon rocketry clubs fantastic achievements at the last board meeting they did they were able to go to washington uh i guess technically virginia had a great trip i think did really really well but we did want to share one final um and what we call sizzle reel that

025was done by the mca and in particular by one of the mca teachers mr um ingham and um and i believe with the with the help and support of some students so thought we'd just roll this quick video [Music] [Applause] [Music] so again just wishing a big congratulations to the rocketry club for all of their achievements this year and we also have coming up another aspect of the star academy that that we're intending to fully roll out next year but we do have a coding presentations that are students who are in the computer science class will be doing i believe it's next week miss gutierrez does that sound right the coding um presentations by i believe so correct yep um and uh would would like to invite the board to uh participate and and and

026come and see the incredible work of uh of our students in um in that class and that is the presentation for tonight thank you so much dr triplett onto item 9.1 staff report 91.1 summer school staff report dr triplett thank you so um i believe miss um kieran's and miss pierce are going to come up or just miss pierce just miss pierce um both of them have done amazing work um preparing for summer school um we uh we wanted to share out and give you an update about where things stand a lot of a lot of work in a very short time to make sure that we have summer school up and running and we have a lot of interest on the part of our families and students in the summer school program this year

027so i'll turn it over to miss pierce and miss karen's if you want to join me you are always welcome to do so um so summer school is here um it has been a long challenging year this this this year you'll notice that we actually moved it up a week after hearing some feedback from families that way families have all of july for vacation as well as staff have all of july with their families as well so we will see how this works out get feedback from staff and make adjustments next year if we want to continue with this we're very excited we have more than um we have space for in all honesty with our elementary program we still have space in our actually in our credit recovery program but very limited and then

028we are also running an esy program so the programs you see here elementary enrichment which will be at lincoln elementary we've got secondary credit recovery housed in newark memorial high school and we've got extended school year that's for our special education students that will be here at music and again feel free to jump in if you want to we do have some guest principles this year with mr rotherhammer joining us for esy and miss ward mikes who was a principal here in newark some years ago who will be supporting our newark memorial high school and then we have miss herrera in-house stepping up to be our elementary enrichment principal who also happens to be in our in our in our audience today yeah um so it will run from june 6th to july 1st there

029will be no school in observance of juneteenth holiday federal holiday we will run our extended school year from 8 30 to 12 as well as our secondary credit recovery elementary enrichment this year due to the elop grant that we've been discussing at length the last couple months will allow us to extend the day for our tk6 families from 12 to 5 30 with enrichment this will be with think together and siwa who will provide opportunities in vapa so visual and performing arts um stem science technology engineering and mathematics and then physical activities in the afternoons in addition to that we will also be extending some of our seal lessons in the summer as you know it's been quite hard and challenging to find substitutes throughout the year and so we are strategically putting some of

030our seal training into our summer school hours this year as a way of preventing pulling teachers out of the classroom during the regular school year and and getting some um targeted language lessons also in summer school so it's sort of a win-win for for everyone that we were able to do this summer school opportunities are open to all applicants like we said registration is closed but if you are interested we are keeping a wait list as you know things shift and change over the summer so if you are interested please reach out to the district office and we will make sure we get you on that wait list we are giving priority placement in tk12 um to youth with eld low-income foster youth designations um per the grant and then priority placement high school credit

031recovery obviously we always start with our seniors and our juniors who require credits to graduate admission has been confirmed via email messages and calls to families and again admitted students will then complete their registration with emergency contact cards and et cetera to hold their spaces in addition to our summer school academic programs we also have our lunch programs continued you can see here on our flyers in both english and spanish that our nutritional services team will be working hard this summer to ensure that any families in need have access to food nutritional cert nutrition sorry both breakfast and lunch we're also going to continue our family support so our two parent partners will continue services for 35 hours a week through june so they will help with things like enrollment support online registration throughout the

032summer they will continue to do food distribution days from schilling on june 1st and june 15th and then they're going to continue to do additionally additional family outreach we were able to receive a couple additional grants for our students that are houseless and so we will be continuing to bring those funds in to provide things like ppe eyeglasses shoes clothes school supplies and personal care items so that come august they are ready to go so we're very excited about that grant and we're excited that our parent partners will continue to get the services to our our families and then we also have a fatherhood summit to any fathers that are interested um this comes through alameda county but it's one of our our partners that we discussed last time when we talked about parent engagement

033i also just want to encourage all of our families to reach out to our principals pay attention to those principal newsletters because we are also these are some of the programs that we are offering in-house but there are many programs offered throughout newark and so if you are interested in other opportunities i i highly encourage you to reach out to your site principal um to get that information and did i miss anything miss karen all right thank you i can answer any questions thank you rajon do you have any comments or questions remember marquez good evening um the one question i did have with regards to ela not necessarily eld but ela if there are any students they're looking for that bridge especially from fifth into the six now making that transition into middle school

034or an eighth grader who's looking for that bridge into high school are we offering anything with regards to ela with the bridge i do know that we were really looking and trying to set up some just bridge programs in general for our transitioning grades middle school in particular at this point it it is looking just just from what we're saying about staffing for summer school that we may not be able to offer that this year um that doesn't mean that we won't be able to offer it in future years but we are again we're kind of beholden to what kinds of stuff we can bring in and what programs we can offer so when you talk about ela specifically with transition right so from elementary into the middle school or from the junior high to

035the high school so you know for any math as well right but if we offered some type of bridge just to help with keeping you know the information or keeping what what they've learned fresh um to be able to offer that to students so right now oh go ahead um we we uh are planning on uh providing a like an orientation bridge um program uh a week or less closer to the start of school for our rising sixth graders um but uh it wouldn't be a part of the whole summer school you know four weeks but more specifically targeted for uh for our sixth graders entering the um the middle school thank you for that member hill remember grintel oh thank you for the the excellent report um that's really great news i'm just very

036happy to see that the the food programs are continuing um and they're associated um and um i'm assuming that we'll be utilizing that program to sign up more people for the free and reduced lunch programs um um because these these lunches are free for all at this point right or are a search cost so again that that's caused us some problems because there's the incentive um to sign up for the program hasn't been there so we've uh i think i think because of that we've kind of seen a fall off of that so um i'm hoping and expecting that that'll be that'll be done um beyond that just i think it's exciting and appreciate um all the work that's being done thank you thank you okay um moving on to item 9.2 letter from alameda

037county office of education regarding the 2021-22 second interim budget report dr triplett thank you i'll turn this one over to ms dela cruz hello thank you um this letter was shared with the board and it's a review from the alameda county office of education the board approved a positive certification of the second interim report on march 3rd and soon after that we submitted our report to the county and after the county reviewed it and analyzed it they concur with the board's approval of positive certification they did acknowledge and mention the multi-year projections and the um four and a half million and 4.7 million deficit that's projected in the next two out years and commends the board for passing a resolution to commit to implementing expenditure reductions to balance the budget they also mention the audit

038finding and acknowledge that it may impact our financial condition based on the potential 600 000 that we may end up having to pay to the state but as you know we talked about filing an appeal and that's still our plan and we're um hoping that will be a positive outcome but um other than that the the letter um does present a a positive and they concur with with the board any questions from the board remember jean can you talk about the main revise and ask related to any change on that i could give you a little bit of information just a couple of highlights the school services workshop is being presented tomorrow and i also have my northern california cbo meeting tomorrow as well so we'll get a little bit more detail on on the

039may revise but it does include a 6.56 percent cola it was uh 5.33 originally and there's also another provision to help us mitigate our declining ada where um they they're allowing us to use our historical attendance a ada ii enrollment attendance ratio precovid to calculate our 2122 ada and then to use that as part of the three-year rolling average so that's really good and eight billion dollars in one-time discretionary funds and that's going to be allocated on a per ada basis one-time money so just a few highlights great thank you um member hill thank you miss i i'm sorry i skipped over remember marquez remember kiss do you have any comments i do thank you um with the 8 billion do we know that's going to be specific as to where it will need to

040be allocated or will that be at the discretion of the the school board directly it's a discretion of the school board it's very flexible in terms of allowable uses thank you for that my second question is with regards to the deadline was the deadline specified as to when that potential appeal that we want to place for the 600 000 when that deadline is so the clock starts when we receive our letter from the controller on our audit report we haven't yet received that letter so once we receive that letter we have 60 days to file an appeal from the state controller is that correct from the state controller is that correct yes the there's a letter that comes from the state controller we submit our audit report to the state and then they review it

041and they send us a letter saying you know that they certify our audit report and we're still waiting for that report thank you for the clarification thank you member hill yeah thank you miss de la cruz um yes so the the letter that is coming from um the acl the alameda county office of education it is confirming that um that we're getting a positive certification um but but what it's also saying and again i think that we need to keep this in in the forefront of our minds as we go forward is it says while the district projects a budget surplus of 415 667 to the unrejec unrestricted general fund in 2021-22 it projects deficits of 4.5 million in 2022-23 and 4.7 million in 2023-24 the second interim budget report projects the structural deficit remains

042and the district could again require budget balancing solutions in the near future um and then it goes on to end that paragraph saying because of the compounding effect of reductions on my imyp and usd's proactive efforts to mitigate deficit spending will um minimize the needed reductions required to the out year um so but and then as member marquez was indicating um you know we have an added issue which is the um 657 000 in you know potential clawback um so i guess you know number one i think that we we really need to keep in mind that we have a structural deficit and we really need to be watching every penny and not um not engaging in unnecessary expenditures but um but question for you ms dela cruz let's let's say that we that the

043appeal is not successful what are our plans on addressing the 657 000 in basically unplanned costs it would either come out of our reserves or a carryover okay thank you madam president if i may um i just want to interject and let the audience know if you haven't had the opportunity to read this if there was a crucial there was a crucial line that was left out in the sharing of the document that came from acue and it actually states that acue commends our board for its approval of the resolution um 2021.22.29 committing the district to implementing expenditure reductions it says excuse me a reductions of up to 4.5 million for 2223 and up to 4.7 million for 23.24 so when i read this what i'm what i'm understanding is that acoe is committing because

044we are aware what's going on and that we are preparing ourselves to take care of whatever is coming our way could currently in a concert of a matter right that's when we went through our budget we were maintained that contributorship knowing that in the event we were not to receive the funds this is what we would be up against am i correct that is correct and in fact remember we had a study session where we addressed the deficits and offered uh potential balancing solutions that's correct thank you for the acknowledgement yes member hill yeah and so um so yes i um uh i agree that that um the acl um is commending us for the for the resolutions that we've taken but the thing that i think that shouldn't be lost on everybody is that

045both in the first interim as well as in the second interim they are emphasizing the fact that um although we are you know above water at this point we are in in danger and i and the part that i really want to emphasize with the board is resolutions are words right what we need to focus on is actions and we need to make sure that we actually take the actions that result in in chipping away and hopefully overcoming these deficits so the resolution is a good start but i think that they're expecting and that's why they're warning us to say you know you now need to you need to follow through on what you've committed grendel remember marcus took all of my questions so i'm gonna be done with that same thing you missed yeah

046just one final comment that yeah i think ever since i've gone on before i think we have a pretty decent track record when it comes to cost reduction so ever since i got on the board we have already have three years of consecutive budget surplus so i think we'll be okay thank you remember zhang and i do want to echo that we as a board in the past few years we have been really diligent about making sure that we respect the financials of the district and have made significant um i guess you could say reductions and sacrifices in that sense too to be able to balance the budget and then not only that the multi-year projections that were made that were submitted for the second interim um was made very conservatively without any additional information

047in regards to the main revise so i just wanted to put that out there thank you on to item 10.1 termination of student expulsion case number e2122-08 the recommendation is to terminate the expulsion for the expulsion case make it a motion to approve i move that we approve determinational explosion i second motion made by member jean seconded by member marquez remember jean how do you vote yes remember marquez yes member hill yes remember grindel yes i'm also a yes five eyes on to item 10.1 the recommendation of student expulsion case number e2122-016 the recommendation is to terminate and readmit the student into nusd as it relates to the expulsion case make it a motion to approve i'll move to approve 10.2 motion made by member grindel seconded seconded by member marquette how do you vote

048remember zhang yes remember marquez yes member hill yes remember grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes on item 10.2 um 10.3 readmission of student expulsion case number e2122-07 the recommendation is to terminate and readmit the student into nusd as it relates to the case make it a motion to approve president win yes i'm sorry are we on 10.3 yes we're on 10.3 uh in this case it's uh the recommendation is to readmit the student no termination right there yeah i moved to ray admit the student we had to we had a clarification yes i moved to re-admit the student okay motion made by member zhang my second second by member marquez how do you vote remember sean yes remember marquez yes remember a member hill yes member quintel yes i'm also a yes uh five

049eyes on 10.3 and the last one um item 10.4 in student expulsion is the extension of suspended enforcement of student expulsion case number e2122-14 the recommendation is to extend the suspended enforcement of expulsion and additional academic semester for the expulsion make it a motion to approve my move that we approve a second motion paper member marquez seconded by member zhang member zhang how do you vote yes remember marquez yes member hill yes member grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes on item 10.4 thank you on to public hearing item 11.1 sunshine proposal reopener for newark teachers association nta contract public hearing is now open any there's no comments public hearing is now closed thank you oh oh sorry i apologize um miss villa please come on up thank girls basketball had a championship game oh

050awesome my daughter's on that team so it was a good game and the traffic was tough getting back here did they win you know it was they lost it was close it was ten to nine oh okay i know so it was really close and traffic trying to get here i apologize but thank you for letting me and i didn't turn into paper i apologize um okay so let me get started here yes yes all right um well good evening mr triblet board members um my name is sherry avila and i'm the head negotiator for our nta negotiations team for the upcoming negotiations um our nta negotiations team we have three elementary teachers and three secondary teachers representing general education special education and alternative education classrooms work has already begun on our side as i'm

051sure it is on your side as well to have meaningful and productive negotiations [Music] we are mta members and nusd we're all coming from a place of understanding that students come first so i'm confident that together we're going to begin to heal relationships and build a new path on a different direction to make newark a destination place like like we we all want it to be thank you thank you so much miss villa with that public hearing is now closed okay on to old business item 12.1 elementary report card dr triplett thank you president nguyen so as you recall we have come to the board with updates on the elementary report card progress throughout the year and so we are now bringing this this item back we have some fantastic elementary report card committee members

052here in the audience teachers and um i believe miss pierce is going to lead this and then also we're going to hear from some of the members of the committee we we also do have mr dalawic who's led this process on zoom but he was unable to attend in person today all right um so forgive me yes um we do have him on call in case we do have any questions but i'm going to go ahead and get us started so as you know we had a the board requested that we go back and we look at elementary report cards over the course of this year so the presentation outcomes are to provide the background and history of elementary report card in newark over the past few years to communicate the goals and work of

053the elementary report card committee for the 21 22 school year and to formally receive board approval for the updated grade level report cards for grades tk 5 and nusd first we want to acknowledge the elementary report card committee members that you see here they worked this year and and and really gave us i think this was a board request to really make sure that we involve our teachers in this process and they they were in effect our experts throughout the year on their committee and we have two of them with us today who will talk a little bit more about the process later in this presentation um so again the little background in history following the common course uh state standards nusd k six teachers expressed interest in improving alignment with those standards and the

054report cards um so the main goal was to upgrade report cards to reflect alignment with those common core state standards and really continue kind of the conversation and the movement towards more standards based grading so a report card committee was formed in 2018-19 school year site representatives made contributions to the report card for the 1920 school year and then on february 21st 2019 the report card committee voted for grades k-5 to change from a one to four rubric to a one-to-three rubric three being met two approaching and one not met the report card changes remained internal as part of a pilot and the report card changed to a one to three scale for the 1920 school year at that point there were questions brought i want to say towards the end of last year around

055the three scale and wanted more information around whether we would stick with the three-point scale or go back to a 1.4 and so that became some of the work of the committee this year so a little overview the curriculum and assessment council sort of overviewed projects and the report card committee met six times 81 percent also part of this was getting more staff feedback besides just the committee out of that survey 81 of our tk5 teaching staff did complete that survey which we will show a little bit of the results later on and the report card committee conducted working meetings and then recommended updated drafts and the curriculum council reviewed and approved on april 28 2022 just a little bit more detail again on exact dates with the overview when the survey was sent out

056when the committee returned using the data from the survey to discuss next steps and specifically discuss the one to three or the one to four they then continue to meet to make updates and then uh basically draft and then approve those drafts there was also um on may 10 2022 there's also a report card community engagement as well with families and if mr dollage was here i'm sure he could tell you more about that dr triplett do you have anything to add before i move on okay the goals for the committee throughout this year were to do three main items to update grade level language as necessary to determine if we should bring back the four point scale for for any grades all grades or just the upper grades three five and to formally receive

057board approval again regarding a final tk5 elementary report card in spring um so that we could finally move forward with a more permanent report card there were working groups again the committee met six times this year so one of the working groups goals were to correct errors on grade level report cards so really reviewing the staff feedback for some errors that they may have noted and then recommend changes for any grade level mistakes so if a particular standard had shifted between grade levels making sure that again it really aligned with the common core state standards two to identify themes and patterns patterns of grade level feedback so identify incorporate suggestions for improvement and then again improve grade level standards alignment and three to improve grade level language regarding the standards so coordinate with principles to

058share at staff meetings and then elicit colleague input to improve that grade level specific language to talk a little bit more about this we have brandi wax and lena yep grade one and grade two so i'm going to invite them up at this time um and they're gonna tell a little bit more details um about the process and i'm hoping again mr dollach was here today so hopefully i didn't take too much of what you were going to say okay great hi i'm brandi wex i teach first grade at coyote hills elementary i am happy to say that i was a part of writing the original newark unified elementary common core report cards about 10 years ago when we met from the try copy write your pencil through carbon copy report cards that we did

059when i first started teaching and we i said you know guys we really should have something digital and luckily new standards came in right about that time so i was a part of that committee with some of my colleagues now and so coming into this it was great to get to start to look at how do we continue to take what we've learned over the last decade of being teachers in common core and how do we make a report card that even further reflects the teaching that we're doing the learning that students are doing and how we know now to communicate that with parents and something that i feel strongly about is that our report cards are not only a reporting document to parents but they're also a reporting document between professionals as our students

060move between districts in the state and out of state we want to make sure that this document is something that other professionals understand what a student is learning what a student may need more work on and as well as making sure parents know what their students need work on we are sorry just let me check um so we uh one of the things that we wanted to make sure is that we take this document now and we continue work with it it's not finished it is not a single piece of paper it's not six individual documents it's a the elementary report card is something that is it goes across all of our grades and it is an it encapsulates a student's learning from kindergarten through fifth grade so it's an entire document that is made

061of several different parts and we want to make sure that there's alignment from kindergarten and even through tk all the way up through fifth grade so there are strands of standards that you can follow across the grade levels and watch a student's progression and see where their learning has got has strengthened or maybe where they need focus as you go back through a student's report cards as we continue uh we really noticed that the next thing that we need to do is start building rubrics so that all of our teachers have the same tools that we're scoring students with and it really will bring some validity to what we're scoring and how when we say a student has this score we know that across all of our for instance first grade classrooms that that score

062means the same thing those students were taught the same thing they were assessed in the same way and that score means the same thing across all of the schools so that's a really big job to take on and lean is going to talk a little bit more about how we approached some of the things that we changed as well this year good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is lena yep and i'm a second grade teacher at birch grove primary school so i've been a part of this community for a few years and this year our goal was to really kind of finish out the job that we started i think of this particular sexy about three years ago or three school years ago and so this year we really tried to figure out okay

063what are our goals and what's going through our goals just to figure out what we need to fix on this report card and make it a document that we could finally carry through with as we switched over into standards-based grading and in november december right around the time of the first trimester when teachers had been working with report cards we asked for teacher feedback we heard about from about 80 percent of our teachers regarding what that they liked about the report card changes they wanted to see and um just per grade level what it was that teachers were interested in seeing so once we take took a look at that we found that there were some different focuses in terms of what k to two teachers were looking at and what three through five teachers

064were looking at so within our committee we broke up into grade level groups we kind of took a look at those and crystallized what each grade level was asking for and then we took that information back to our school sites checked back with teachers to see if it kind of aligned with what they thought and were able to just gather new feedback so based on these ideas how do you feel about these changes that we're looking at once we had our grade level information we were able to take that and within our committee as randy said the previous committee spent a lot of time trying to make sure that there was vertical alignment from k through five so we saw similar standards all the way through so now that we knew what grade levels were

065interested in seeing we went through and made sure that we tried to align the language across all six grade levels so that and you're mostly seeing the same type of language from kindergarten all the way up through grade five you know tk standards and language is a little bit different they're a more specialized program so our committee did focus on the k-5 aspect and what we found was espec in third grade through fifth grade students have the skills that at that point they're really reading to learn they're applying the skills that they have gained over the years however in kindergarten through second grade many of the teachers we're working on concrete skills so skills such as identifying letters knowing your letter sounds can you read sight words can you read one two three digit numbers

066do you know your math facts those are very much concrete skills and they're skills that you either know or you don't know there's not really a lot of room to see this deeper understanding and you can really see that in terms of when you take a look at the report card drafts in the reading foundational skills you'll see seven lines in on the k report card whereas there's only one line on the third through fifth grade report card because our goal is to build these skills into our students and once they have all these skills they're able to hit third grade running and really ready to apply their knowledge to learn new things and to grow from there so that's one of the reasons why in terms of talking about the question of the four

067it was really a very different feeling from the k2 teachers versus the three five teachers and some of the reasons for our eventual recommendation were that we felt like for teachers that were in the k2 range the four could be misleading to parents especially the way that it's been done to this point in our district instead of tying it to a rubric-based grade which is what standards-based grading is meant to be it was been tied to percentages and so in terms of if you know your letter sounds well we have 26 letters you should know all 26 if you know 26 you're meeting the standard there's not really a way to exceed the standard because it's concrete however parents especially of younger students when seeing a four would feel that their students might be doing

068advanced level work or they maybe they're ready to go to the next grade level because they have before the other thing once we were seeing the four did not necessarily carry through all the way because a student who knew all their legends sounds they might have more difficulty as the set of skills got a little more more challenging once they hit first grade and second grade so it was causing some distress or frustration among parents and students of how their student was scoring a four and suddenly they're getting a three and or possibly even a two so the students were not falling behind it was just showing how they were meeting standards as they moved on to different and more concrete skill sets so hopefully that's as randy said that's something that we hope to

069address once we switch over to standards-based grading and help teachers parents and the community understand what stanford space grading looks like versus a percentage report by grading thank you both for sharing obviously it comes back so much clearer when you have a teacher come explain it so please stick around in case there are any questions at the end um just to elaborate a little bit on what they both said um again 80 percent of our tk5 uh teachers did take this and as you can see when it's just a straight question should a four be brought back it almost appears split but what you see here by the yellow is we should just stick with a one to three all the way through grades tk5 the light green is okay we can bring back a

070four but really for our upper grades three five at that split that was just mentioned right at the the tk to second grade you're really learning to read starting in third grade you're you're reading to learn and it's quite a bit of a shift there for our students and then um versus teachers who thought all grades tk5 i think what's interesting about what our teachers just said though is they really went and unpacked the feedback that was given as well and saw sort of a shift between our three five teachers versus our key to tk2 and i think that's the powerful part about surveys we can show the chart but they really dived into the feedback that was provided by our teachers um to give to give their recommendations today so again the rationale for

071maintaining a three in the lower grades and at the risk of reiterating here this was a unanimous decision so this really is about teacher advocacy here around the elementary report card um there was some confusing points for parents i think we talked a little bit about that you know if the skill for maybe kindergarten is to know all of your letters you know what is a for then as a for knowing all of your letters and some of your phonics is a for knowing your letters in english and spanish is a for knowing you know it it becomes less clear when you start going beyond a very concrete skill foundational skill and we wanted to make sure it was very clear for for for our entire community and then really it is developmentally more appropriate

072to consider that one to three specifically the lower grades when they're learning how to read for the upper grades it's actually an alignment with with some of our our our neighboring school districts as well i believe both fremont and pleasanton also with the upper grades kind of make that shift as a transition into getting to the older grades and then transitioning through middle school so it's not uncommon to kind of make that shift happen around that third or fourth grade year it also feels more developmentally appropriate as their reading to learn um and then again the majority of the upper grade teaching staff again that full survey with all of our teachers don't don't show this but the majority of our upper grade teaching staff are the ones that started advocating for that bringing in

073that for so some considerations we they also updated our tk report card pe teachers there were no changes made our science resource teachers also made updates to align with standards the committee itself unanimously recommended bringing back one to four for grades three five only i think that united's unanimous vote is quite a strong statement of advocacy they also want to shift for from exceeding too strongly met again they're looking within those grade level standards and so exceeding implies could imply very different things strongly met is sticking within that grade level standard that they're assessing in that moment so rather than um conjecturing about what exceeding could mean let's let's stick within our grade level standards and and get really focused around our instruction there and then ed services held community engagements where parents also reiterated

074some of these feelings and statements that you're hearing tonight here is the pilot recruit report card front and again these are in these were in the notes so i'm not going to take too much the pilot report card back and then our official recommendation to the board tonight it is the recommendation of nusd elementary report card committee and curriculum and assessment council that the nusd board of trustees formally approve the updated grade level report card for grades tk5 as presented and we have teachers we also have mr dalawic on the line and myself if there are any questions thank you miss pierce remember jean do you have any questions or comments uh no question uh based on the survey result that more than half of the teacher i guess initially wanted to bring this back

075to all grades so i will my top top choice will be bringing this one to four scale back to all grades remember marquez thank you um first of all i wanted to congratulate the staff and with all the work that they put in in the time i wanted to recognize the fact that on grade grade five's report card offering that information when it comes to elpac and letting the families know and snakes they can actually see and lay one report card next to the other and see the progression there's a child versus waiting for a report that comes in the summer when the school year is over i think is very impactful um and also in also reviewing i noticed that some of the actual categories if you will when we're testing for elpac is

076in our actual report card overall right the reading the listening so it's just not unique to the el e ell students but overall it's something that's been addressed which i've always asked when i gave selt previously what type of um assessment we could give that would be just as effective as the lpac to eo students as well just to see our full picture so it's very pleasant and rewarding to see that it's overlapping already in this report card and with the english language arts so thank you for that and all your hard work thank you member marquez member hill yeah so thank you for the presentation and thank you both for coming and explaining more and i and i understand on the logic that you're laying out um at the same time i'm i share

077with members young a little bit of of you know nervousness or worry about um moving to a a less or fewer categories um but i understand the um your logic um but i i would personally like to see because it sounds like we did we surveyed the teachers maybe there's some gradation there but um but did i don't it doesn't sound like we we surveyed the parents um and it would be nice to maybe hear the parents viewpoint on this before we as a board make a decision and so i'm i'm recommending that maybe we do that and then bring this back for a final vote remember grindel well first of all i want to thank the committee um and particularly ms weeks miss yup for coming and explaining tonight um you certainly uh made

078uh the logic of the um of the of the proposed change very clear and um i'm i believe that we need to rely upon the trained professionals that are familiar with our students and familiar with the standards having the unanimous approval of the of the committee and and the the logic that you presented i i'm in strong support of the staff recommendation to um to do this it's very important and that we and the board made this clear starting this process and in others we want to hear and have the teachers involved the teachers are the ones who are interacting on a day-to-day basis they're they're the ones who are are teaching our children and we have to really listen to them about um what's the best way to go and in this case it's

079very clear that our professionals are telling us to go this way and that's that that's the way i'm going to be voting thank you member grindel so lastly and as a parent initially i was really thinking that yes it would make sense to have one through four across the board so that we go through the whole process understanding at each grade level but after listening to ms yep and her stating the fact that you know percentages really did confuse parents and i was one of those confused parents at the lower grade levels so that definitely changed my perspective coming into the meeting versus after hearing your explanation so um from that perspective and then also looking at all the report cards from kindergarten through second grade and then third through fifth you guys did definitely

080put a lot of thought into it and effort into what is what is needed to be captured and how how it is being relate back to the parents and how the students will be able to improve moving forward so with that said yes please i just want to add on the committee there's a high proportion of the teachers there that are k2k to second teachers so i think that the coming from that committee that it was a unanimous unanimous vote really represented those grade levels but i'm not going to speak for all the schools and all the teachers and saying that the representatives that were chosen as um to be on that committee not everybody is going to love every decision so i'm sure that there's some of that there but i also wanted to

081add that we have a lot of tools to communicate to students and to parents and to other teachers that our students are performing below at or far above grade level so we have a lot of measured assessments that we use and communication tools and rubrics for instance our dra i'm score i'm working with students right now in as i'm assessing students for the end of the year for their reading i'm assessing students in kindergarten levels as well as second grade levels as a first grade teacher and i'm able to communicate that with parents that your student yes they're getting a three on our report card but their ability is far beyond what maybe we expected this student to be able to do and i have tools to communicate that with them what does that look

082like what does the reading material that's appropriate for that student look like and how can that continue and that goes directly to their next teacher to continue then they're not starting back at where all first graders you know we're all second graders will start at the beginning of the year in addition we have rubrics that come with the writing program the lucy hawkins writing program so schools that are using that closely are able to score students for as a first grade teacher i'm able to score student at first grade as their on grade level at kindergarten level below grade level or at a preschool level in addition to a second grade level and not in different items so i'm able to communicate that a student has those skills to their parent to that child and

083also to their next teacher so i just wanted to add that the report card is only one tool that we have and it's a really small way of communicating most teachers will put the most important part of that report card is what you don't see there which is the comments so i think reinforcing that we have a lot of ways that we can communicate that doesn't have to be a grade for a six-year-old um i think that's any other comment i'm happy to answer any more questions if you have them on that no thank you so much but and i am in agreement that yes third through fifth grade definitely should be at one through four and i think because at that point i mean with my own children um you know i wanted them

084when they got the three and the way that it was weighted um at that time you know knowing where she had fallen and stuff like that um i think it gave way to her feeling really confident that she did really well but knowing what the material was she really didn't you know understand and fully craft the material even though she earned the three um so i think that yeah definitely from you know grades three to five that makes a huge difference thank you okay with that said would you like to make the motion remember man and president i knew that the board approved the updated drafts of the elementary report card for grades tk through fifth as presented this evening i'll second that motion motion made by member marquez seconded by member grindel how do

085you vote remember zhong so not my top choice but still better than the current status so i will yes member of marquez yes member hill yes remember kendall yes also yes for me five eyes thank you so much thank you missy up and miss wax thank you [Applause] okay on to item 12.2 eld curriculum adoption amendment dr triplett thank you president nguyen so um as you will recall the board approved the eld curriculum last year um and um the the teachers have been been implementing that curriculum however there was uh certain um parts of the curriculum certain levels that that was not originally adopted and so this is being brought back as an amendment to get approval from the board to adopt these additional eld curriculum levels and i believe miss cairns is here to

086speak on this or add any other information pretty brief but nice to see you all this evening we did a great adoption process however i think the just as we didn't adopt the series formally so i wanted to bring that back to the board and we did do some work with um with our students and teachers to make sure this was still the right stuff so um this is what was adopted in may 2021 for the junior high beginners got i read uh get ready um and intermediates got pathways level three in the high school beginners also got get ready and for intermediates in advance we got edge fundamentals so i think the thing we need to point out here is when this adoption was made i think um maybe the intention was to adopt

087the series but what was on the documents was these these individual textbooks which are just a portion of the series so for pathways level three there's also pathways level four and for edge fundamentals there's also edge a b and c so i'm just going to share a little bit so our suggested revision is to adopt the full sequence of the edge curriculum in order to support all levels of eld courses and to adopt pathways for to support the addition of the advanced eld classes at the junior high so what it will look like in total a little more comprehensive view beginning eld will continue to be get ready at the junior high intermediate eld will be pathways three advanced eld would be pathways four beginning eld again get ready and edge fundamentals so what was

088formally adopted was also a sort of beginning level then the early intermediates would get edge a intermediates edge b and advanced edge c so we did do a pilot process on those additional textbooks um in october um we i met with the teachers to discuss their concerns regarding what was adopted from the previous year that's sort of what came to my attention in november we received pilot materials for edge a through c for the teacher to review a pilot the teacher prepared to pilot materials in semester two they piloted with students in january february then march collected data for the students and their survey responses were also collected and in april um the presentation and approval of the amendment um uh the yeah the modification basically to the to the curriculum council and it was

089approved um i think that is pretty much the gist of it i think that's i have additional data regarding the student surveys but they were all very positive nothing particularly to note there so this is in a sense a continuation what was adopted and merely a correction of what i think was intended to be adopted last year thank you miss kearns are there any questions or comments from the board are we ready to make a motion remember john so i asked this question before the board meeting regarding the lottery funding source can we talk about what kind of uh items the lottery fund can can be paying for the lottery is mostly for instructional materials and any instructional related type salaries and benefits thank you miss stella cruz any other comments or questions remember jean

090remember marquez and then at this time i'm ready to make a motion thank you um member hill so thank you miss karens um and i suspect you probably know what i'm going to say um but um so so as a as a teacher i've had exposure to c engage and they're this you know educational bmoth you know that creates all these materials and um and to be frank the materials that i've been exposed to have been pretty poor um now i can grant that you know and i can acknowledge that there could be you know again different areas where it's stronger weaker i don't have personal knowledge of this but my my question to you is is that the district has a has a history going back decades of adopting new programs new curriculum and

091and then with no real clear goals and no way to measure success and then at some point nothing really works out and then it just quietly kind of dies and and we move on to something else so if if we're going to adopt this what what are our goals what are we hoping to see and why why do we need to be adding this to achieve those goals i think the fundamental one here would be to make sure we're in compliance with having the appropriate curriculum for the provided course level so for example if we are adding an eld course an advanced dld course to the junior high school we need to make sure that we have appropriate materials for that class um so that's sort of i think at the base level that did

092you want to yeah in terms of data eventually we would love to see you know again what we what we always want to see we want to see an increase in reclassification we want to see an increase in our language scores but we do have a legal responsibility to provide eld to students in need um and that is that is our responsibility but this is as at a base level on a grander scale we would want to see an increase in our data right but this is an addition to what we're already providing this is to complete the series of what we're providing so um for instance right we've got different levels of eld and so if we were to only say we're only going to offer beginner eld and then get audited uh that

093would be an audit finding that would be inappropriate to be giving eld one instruction to eld for students let's say and i think i'm using cell numbers there yeah well it shows my age a little bit but um so we have a responsibility to offer at the level that the student's at okay thank you remember qrintel i just want to reiterate and if you can confirm this is really a sort of a technical filling out of what we what we've been doing it's not really a change in course no i think there was a testing of like is this program the right program and i think there was just a sort of a blip on what was actually formally adopted and it should have said the full series and it didn't and i didn't want

094to move forward without your approval thank you thank you for the clarification um with that may we have a motion to approve madam president i mean that we approve the eld curriculum adoption amendment motion made by member marquez seconded by myself um how do you vote remember zhang yes member marquez yes member hill yes member grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes thank you thank you thank you okay on to new business item 13.1 board policy and administration regulation 3551 food service operations cafeteria fund first reading thank you president i'm going to turn this over to miss delacruz the sport policy is an update to the food service operations regulations it needs to be updated updated for the upcoming audit that they're scheduled for are there any questions or comments from the board are there

095any findings in the documentation that needs to be changed or brought back for a second reading are we ready to make a motion to approve madam president motion two proof okay motion made by member marquez may get a second please one second second input member grindel um remember mark remember jean stepped out should we wait for him to vote or can we move forward okay remember marquez yes remember remember zhang we moved to approve yes thank you remember zhang member hill yes remember grindel yes i'm also yes bye bye thank you miss de la cruz on to item 13.2 resolution 2021.22.40 pg e easement for electric vehicle charging stations i will hand it over to you miss de la cruz thank you president nguyen this board item is to approve a resolution that will provide

096pg e easement to the area in our maintenance yard so they can provide the power to the charging stations this is related to um a couple of grants that we received and the board approved related to electric buses that we purchased as well as charging stations that pg e is is helping to pay for so in order for them to start we just need to give them access to our property basically thank you so much any comments or questions remember zhang member marquez none at this time member hill yeah thank you just a quick question so is there any cost impact to the district in voting for this um resolution in this easement so so i believe is for forty five thousand but we're looking for the ground right that was the question answered before

097the football meeting yes so we are um committed as part of our condition to accept the grant with pg e to add three more charging stations and the estimated cost for that is about forty five thousand the first two are um covered by grants that we already received so maybe just a clarification because i know that we made a decision earlier so it sounds like what you're saying is is that the decision that we already made has committed us to an additional 45 000 or whatever if we don't get these grants yes you can look at it so that was that was the prior decision my question is is this resolution in this easement is there any additional cost that we're committing to through this no okay so so the interesting thing i want to

098ask is if each charge is 25 000 then why the additional the additional three will be total forty five thousand that's why initially what on the email i thought is seventy five thousand right so the um the first grant that we receive the 77 will um provide you know the the basic foundation for the for the chargers so that we don't have those costs for the next two remember remember grindel uh yes i just wanted to um just wanted to to compliment staff for this for bringing this item forward and for moving us towards a more sustainable transportation network i also i'm glad to see that there's a quick claim requirement if pg e contract is we don't want to have this entangling us working with another provider so i compliment you on clearly that

099as well thank you thank you um i don't have any other comments my other board members pretty much one last part about the additional calls i guess there's this nominal or minimal cost on that our commitment on maintaining the i guess the maintenance work which is which will be part of our routine maintenance cost right yes that's correct and right now there are no trees or brushes around this area there might be trees on the other side of the fence but it's further away from the property and the area that they're proposing to install the charging station any any other comments members on no ready to make the motion okay would you make the motion i move that we approve resolution 2021.2020 2021.22.40. make it a second please a second motion made by member jean

100seconded by member marquez how do you vote remember yes remember marquez yes member hill remember grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes thank you okay on to item 13.3 newark junior high school paving and striping project dr triplett thank you president nguyen um do we have any uh guests for this um mr chris yes i do have um our representative from rgmk available for uh to answer any questions great so um this item is uh with regard to the um paving and striping at the junior high school we do have considerable areas of the parking lot and the route for student drop-off that are in dire need of repair you will notice on here that um and miss stella cruz will probably speak more on this but that this is for um really for repair

101and not completely overhauling the um the parking lot um and we made that decision um from a frugal standpoint that the cost of doing the complete overhaul would be significantly more expensive however we do welcome board input into whether it's more advisable to to overhaul the entire parking lot rather than just some repairs there's obvious trade-offs but i do think that we're coming forth with the recommendation as it is because we do have so many other significant needs that while it would be nice to completely renovate the um motivate the parking lot we also recognize that there are so many other needs across the district that we're just thinking in that way but i'll turn it over to miss del cruz to add anything yes as uh dr triplett mentioned the condition of the parking

102lot as well as the main drive uh main drive is in really bad condition right now this was part of our deferred maintenance on part of our our list of deferred maintenance projects and um the the striping right now is really faded and the parking spaces in the parking lot are not clearly marked and plus because of the solar project we had to incorporate some ada compliant parking spaces so we had to redo it anyway and the proposed [Music] striping plan right now does provide for a better flow of traffic as well as provides a second drop off area in addition to the main main drive drive through so what we're proposing as dr shipla mentioned is the main drive-through would be completely replaced but in the parking lot we'll be just doing a lot

103of patchwork on the areas that are really badly like damaged in terms of maybe potholes and some alligator type cracks that are that are occurring right now so in order to the estimate for this scope of work is 311 000 but if we were to completely repair and replace the drive through as well as the entire parking lot and we stripe it the estimates about 700 to 800 thousand dollars okay comments or questions remember jean so once we we do this once we complete this third three hundred eleven thousand i mean the the remaining does the remaining really strictly equal to this some hundred fifty thousand minus this amount or is more than that because you are separating the two projects rather than doing it as a whole i'm sorry is it in that so

104i understand the total cost of completely rebound this is 700 to 800 thousand but yeah we approve this 300 111 000 today that means you're we're sort of splitting this into multiple parts so does that really because sometimes when you split something in multiple parts you actually incur additional costs my question is if we do 311 today is the is the remaining cost strictly the difference between 800 000 and this number yeah so um what i might suggest is if you're thinking about considering the total replacement as a possibility then um you can change the recommendations so that it would allow for the board to accept an alternate bids because the way that we bid it is the base would be the repair you know based on the 300 but there's also an ad an

105ad alternate where it would include the total replacement so then we would have a choice to accept just the base bid or the base plus the alternate could i add a little bit i think i understand your question um remember jean so um it's not that we would only be doing for 300 000 half of the job it would be doing that we would be doing repairs versus complete overhaul so in other words um if we do the the the half price one then um in i don't know if it's about four years or so four or five years we'd have to be revisiting maybe doing the complete overhaul or doing more patchwork in some other areas type of thing yeah sure like when you do this it's just every couple of years you do

106the patchwork yeah until you don't want to tolerate that anymore you still end up spending 1.1 million and totally replace that yes that's that's the sort of risk remember marquez thank you my my question was that difference of the 490 000 almost 500 000 with the change that we've just received the budget right have we started the process has anyone started the process to see if any of the funds allocations that may be coming to us has a school district covered this additional cost if we were to go with the full 800 000 so that we would not be maybe one-time monies or we so that we would not be using the reserves or what we already have in place because it's it's almost like i know what i was trying to think of is

107thinking of like a caltrans approach right because you see a pothole on the 880 instead of fixing the entire lane they just go out and do a little remedy and then two weeks later or a month later the bottle is back right so i'm trying to think long term what would be the better investment for for the school district um if we're doing our homework or if we're doing the research to find where we could come up with that other 490 000 now knowing that you know what the budget has just happened within the last week has that process started with the um the may revise so that's not for sure yet okay so we can't really count on that but i mean if it did come through you could use that not that i

108would recommend it because really this is a capital project that you would be better off using the restricted funds fund 40 for capital outlay and it's not that we don't have the funding it's just we're trying to spread it out knowing that there's so many other projects that need to be done because we do have about eight nine million dollars in fund 40 and maybe another 10 million in our developer fee account but the the district is in dire need of so many other projects that we just want to make sure that um we think about the other schools as well okay so from understanding correctly then what we're looking for is to be equitable right to to take care of many needs versus taking care of one and leaving the others waiting is that

109that's right that's that was our thinking okay thank you for that thank you member help yeah thank you miss de la cruz um so i i just have a question about um so this is a construction project um i don't remember the um the competitive bid limits but they're those they're fairly small for a consecutive construction project i think it's like i don't know 15 or 20 000. so obviously this would go out to competitive bid um but then i guess my question is is um and i i didn't really think to ask it before but what is so who's gonna conduct this competitive bid and what's mr caputo's role in this whole process yeah so rgmk is already let it out to bid our kapka limit is 200 so this has to go out

110to formal bid and in order for us to be able in terms of timeline um just to make sure we catch the next two board meetings um we're kind of doing it all at the same time and if the board had rejected it then we would have rejected the bids so it's it's already out because so we're so we're having an outside consultant um manage our bid process in this case yes okay i mean he's done it for other things too um and um and why don't we use staff for this well right now we really don't have the capacity okay um and then and then so he helps us put to put together the rfp you know and they put the bid specs together the front end they conduct all of the mandatory bid

111walks they meet with the the contractors they do our bid openings um there's a lot of work involved in in the whole bid process okay and then um and then we we pay him to manage this project or this process yes for planning and then managing the project yes and and then he also acts as the as the as the manager for all these projects the construction projects yes the ones that we contract for you so um aren't we needing to actually put his services out to bid also um as it starts to achieve certain thresholds well we contracted with rgmk a couple years ago when we contracted for the the bond projects and because i mean it is a professional service it's not anything that's required to go out to bid so the professional

112services limit i think is 99 000. so have we paid him more than 99 000 so far not for professional services not in in that for all of you for like architects and those types of services construction services so for all of these projects we haven't paid in more than 99 000 i didn't say that i said that the rfp and bidding process doesn't apply to like architect services professional construction services it's not um doesn't apply to to those you're saying that there's no there's no competitive bidding limits for that i mean there's there's not a threshold for when you have to put these out to bid not for the professional contracts that's not true that's not well i checked with legal before we did this you can you can get quotes you can get

113you can do the rfp process but it's not mandatory yeah that's not according to head code okay thank you brooke grindell um thank you president um all right couple things uh so if this if this were done in this sort of halfway um we'd end up with three different ages of striping out in the parking lot right we'd have the original which is barely visible now you'd have the stuff that was done for the hand for the for the handicap work due to the um over and then you'd have a brand new striping in in other places is that correct yes um and then i'm sorry sorry to drop but just want to make sure that i'm clear would they all be all different striping would be visible or part of the striping process is

114you um you remove the the original striping so that there's not all these cross oh yeah there wouldn't be any cross as it is i'm referring to the fact that there'll be areas of the parking lot that have have the existing striping that is now because they're not being touched by this project right there there are parts of the parking lot that are not being addressed at all okay so for the striping um the part that we wouldn't touch is the part that was already the new striping that was done um for the solar project so the the entire rest of the parking lot would be re-striped everything else would be restriped um because there's really nothing existing that we could keep other than what was done for this that does raise other concerns of

115trying to stripe in gravel but um the um the so we also have a situation where you're looking at going back and and i i do appreciate staff's desire to try to make our precious dollars go far and across the district however if we have to go back in three or four years and end up redoing all this work then that really causes problems that really causes concerns for me i'd rather spend the money that we have and do it efficiently in a way that gives us a product that's going to have a longer life cycle when you when you start looking at life like a life cycle cost this this three-year fix doesn't really score very well what you know i'm back of envelope right um so i'm concerned about that um i'd rather

116i'd rather spend the money than it takes to get it done properly that's gonna last uh that's gonna last the time um in addition in in what i've experienced um when you have a project like that's a patch kind of project your opera the opportunities for change orders and cost overruns is much much higher than if you do a project um if you do a project in total which you can really bid it out and provide the information is that is that your experience too yes that's that's right yeah because i i'd really rather i'd really like to to get a contract that's done um and then we can hold the contractor to uh accomplishing the clear objective of um but not to be arguing of well i wasn't supposed to fix that pothole um

117that's your problem and um and yeah we striped on gravel but and the wind blew blew it away but that's that that's too bad it wasn't specked so um so i i'd i'd like to see it done really properly i'd rather invest the money now otherwise really this 300 000 this 311 thousand dollars is gone when we go back to do it in three or four years um and maybe this is an emotional thing but that whatever we're all human um we're we're opening a new middle school we're really we're really inaugurating a new era for this facility and it seems just odd to be doing it halfway um i'd like to see us um reach reach down and find a way to fund the whole project i understand the best way to do that

118probably is to add it as an ad alternate into the bid that's into the rfp that's already out um that makes that makes perfect sense but i but i'd be very much in favor assuming that it's in that price range i'd be very much in favor of doing it properly one time with a life cycle of 12 years rather than having to be doing whack-a-mole on um on you know like the caltrans approach of throwing sand in in holes and it disappearing into somewhere so um so so i that's that's where i um that's where i stand on this thank you i'm also in agreement with with um member grindel i think that um we should you know consider redoing the entire job and not piecemeal it and be more efficient with the funding um

119that way we don't have to revisit it and make additional fixes or repairs later on i just think that that would be you know using up more district funding unnecessary funding and then also i do have an issue with the current striping as is um i think that although you know we want to make the drop off the the green secondary drop off um you know efficient for parents but i think it would be best if the loop was just made all around and that we have singular striping um for all the parking um going uh you know one direction and then having one exit pathway and instead of having multiple i could see people like trying to run you know and and eliminating that middle um that middle entry right there so anyways those

120are just my two cents but um so yes member hill yeah so i i think and this is kind of to ms de la cruz's earlier point um i think that we could be losing sight of the larger issue which is that we have limited funds but lots of potential needs and so i'm looking at mr caputo's um facilities maintenance plan that he brought forward i don't know if it was the last session or the session before um it basically built on the prior facilities maintenance plan the unfortunate thing is that he's listed outside priorities but you know there's no real sort of order or or um dollar amount that's associated with that for so it's hard for us to see but i think that before we make a decision on one we i i

121would suggest that we get more information about this and we actually maybe get some cost estimates for these things and also maybe have a discussion about priorities because i'm just going to list off a few of them i mean we've got this one for the parking lot we've got asphalt maintenance for playground and quad areas we've got repair water fountains we've got replace hvac units and portables we've got re remove repair old portables we've got a whole variety of things here and i'm just concerned that we could be zeroing in on this because it's on our current agenda item and maybe we're no larger there's definitely a need there i chop off my kids there right but the question is is is it the most pressing need of all of you there's damages to people's

122cars and vehicles okay so that's your opinion i mean i'm just asking to say that i'd like to get more information before we vote on this remember jean do you have any additional comments well i would just say let's go out with the eight hundred thousand bid and and and bring it back next time because we're talking about fund 40 right these capital budget i mean you know i mean how much money are you losing every month in an inflationary environment by letting the funds sit idle that's my question yes remember marquez do you have any other comments i just want to thank my fellow board members for the amount of information that's been offered by each and every one of you because it's enlightened me and it's it's helping me see things differently um

123in my opinion now currently um after previously asking where the money would come from i feel that listening to my fellow board members that it's better to take care of it now if we're able to if we're in that capacity versus patching so thank you for everyone for your information thank you remember grindel any additional comments no i'd like to make a motion i'd like to make a motion when you're ready okay uh go ahead um i'd like to um approve the staff recommendation with the addition of sending out the ad alternate for a complete um repair replacement as indicated as uh in the staff report motion made by member grindel seconded by member zhang how do we vote how do you vote remember zhang yes remember marquez yes member hill no member grindel yes

124i'm also a yes four eyes and one no thank you on to consent item personnel items um 14 make it motion to approve item 14.2 14.3 and 14.4 i'd like to pull 14.4 okay um we will pull 14.4 may get a motion to approve 14.2 and 14.3 i move to approval 14.2 and 14.3 hi second motion made by member jean seconded by member marquez how do you vote member sean yes member marquez yes member hill yes remember grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes on items 4.2 and 4.3 item 4.4 member hill yeah so looking at the pal and looking at the recommendation for basically filling the director of special education i just i have a concern with the approach that we're taking and this dates back to the concerns that i had echoed all

125the way from last year which is that um that again i really believe that it would be helpful to have board if not involvement in the hiring of key positions at least proper uh briefing and we really haven't had either i mean there's very little transparency and and my concern is that we know that we've had significant issues in our special education area we get emails as a board all the time from parents about issues that have come up and then we've also had you know numerous basically decisions that we've had to make to provide separate services because our district hasn't been capable of of providing what's needed and at significant cost and so you know we really need to bring in in my opinion you know a very experienced person to come in and

126do a um you know really kind of a turnaround in this area um and you know with all due respect to the proposed candidate um so again i don't have any detailed knowledge but i'm concerned that we're recruiting from within um and and not looking at all the potential best candidates and as i've described before if we want to go to the super bowl the way you go to the super bowl is with the best players and i want to make sure that we have the best players on our team and i think that we're rushing this and i'm concerned about it so once one comment i want to make is that on that position the proposed candidate actually originally came from special education thank you remember zhang member marquez do you have any questions

127or comments two comments so first and foremost in recent training um when it comes to the hiring and that's why we as a board have our superintendent so when it comes to superintendent having his executive committee we need to we need to remember that this is this is the board as a board this is the superintendent that we chose and so we have our um invested time and decision making when it comes to hoping that he makes the right choice for us when it comes to the hiring finding because would be impossible for us as a board to find ourselves um getting involved when it comes to the hiring because of the processes if you do not have the background of knowing the laws in itself um i was going to hold this item for

128a little bit later but since board member he'll introduce this i just want to go ahead and chime in in looking at our fiscal year february 1st 2022 column step pace gallery for teachers um and seeing the difference between 21 and 22 was roughly 1.5 so i did some homework and i was looking at local school districts and we consider ourselves and we want to consider ourselves competitive so going off of the comment that was made in order for us to be competitive we as a board need to support our hr department as well as our superintendent when it comes to not only negotiating but looking at what the cost of living is it was great news to see that it was actually at 6.56 the cola versus the five i was thinking it was

129gonna be three and here we are double that right so what if we want to be competitive especially with our local in in surrounding areas i took a moment to look at what we have so for example um english dual emerging spanish teacher for 20 22 okay starting off 55 000 to the 98 000 with an annual 10 000 retention bonus plus a 2500 stipend if you hold the b clad this is for spanish dual immersion korean 65 000 starting and that's at the entry of the 30 of the ba plus the 30 with a 2250 stipend for korean and then it goes on to show um a mandarin dual immersion so we as a school district right in order to an order and as a as a board of education in order for us

130to maintain competitive and to retain the employees that we have this is the type of homework that we need to do what does it take for us to retain and to want someone like the current the current candidate we have in place that's willing to step in and apply for the director of special education what is it that's keeping that current employee wanting to stay here and those are the type of questions that i would hope that um our executive board along with um superintendent is actually asking during the process the hiring process so thank you member hill for opening up this conversation because in doing my homework we have to maintain competitive right and i'm hoping that that 6.6 is something that comes into fruition and that that we see it that dream or

131that number actually become a reality all right because we need to maintain and retain excellent staff thank you thank you remember grindelwald um yes um yeah i was i thank you mr hill for pulling this item i wanted to talk about two two issues as well uh the first issue is i want i was hoping the superintendent or um or or other staff could describe the process that you use to fill these very very important positions i do want to first state that i strongly support remember marquez's concept that we hire you to do the to do this work um but i would appreciate if you could explain to the board the process that you use absolutely thank you i'd be happy to although i think miss ingham waters probably can do an even better

132job than me at explaining all of the different levels and layers of the this uh this process so for our principal positions we have after ed join posting and screening for requirements we invite qualified candidates to a performance-based interview and that is a series of role plays and scenarios that principals will face in any given year month week maybe some all in a day and we can really instead of them just talking about what they can do they actually can demonstrate it and show it and so after that process uh district leadership uh debrief and select really the best of the best to go into a pool and then from there we do a panel interview with a parity among the stakeholders so we work collaboratively with our teachers union to have two nta representatives

133we work with csea leadership to have two csea representatives two administrators as well as two parents and we try to have variety there that is more of a traditional panel interview with questions and answers that stay consistent for all of the candidates we have a ranking system and and we debrief we will as an advisory panel they're not the hiring panel their advisory they will recommend a number of candidates to move on to the next round which is with executive cabinet and that's obviously with executive cabinet which have different sets of questions maybe follow-up maybe more information wanting wanting to be known about them from the panel we can personalize the the next level um we also do thorough reference calls um and before we make the offer great well thank you i appreciate that

134um appreciate the explanation um and the the other the other point i was gonna make i was gonna i was gonna pull this for this reason if remember hill hadn't beat me to it um which is really just to congratulate uh these educators for these for their for their interest in and their and their selection for these positions we're really excited to have such high quality people in our um in our district and i i disagree completely with member hill on this and other things um and i believe that if you can grow your own people and and and hire your own people that's a that's a net positive not a negative remember how yeah again um i i know that many people um up here on the dais as well as probably in the

135audience are warriors fans um and i pro and the warriors are in the championships and i promise you that the general manager and the leadership of the warriors are involved in the hiring of key positions and so that not only is that true in professional sports but it's also true across corporate america and across all corporate boards so um i and i think that we if we're going to become a great district that we the board need to get more involved and that we need to really make sure that we're recruiting the best um to to take us to the heights that we want to achieve um i just wanted to add one more detail about the process we also held input sessions i hosted sessions with all interested staff at the site level um

136focusing on what characteristics and attributes uh they they desire for their next principle as well as what are the needs of the school and kind of the vision moving forward we also hosted zoom community engagement nights with the same kind of process and task and so those questions and those feedback were also a data point in creating rigorous questions as well as you know listening to the details in the candidate's answers just wanted to include that as well okay lastly i'm ready to make a motion if there's no other comments but i just wanted to remind ripper hill our gm is the superintendent so we do put all of you know our faith into the superintendent while he makes these decisions with his executive team so i just wanted to appreciate them for all their

137hard work and effort into you know doing all the interviews for the staff so with that i'd like to make a motion to approve the the personnel report make it a second please a second motion made by myself and um seconded by member xiang member zhang how do you vote yes member marquez yes member hill no member rindell yes i'm a yes as well four eyes and one no thank you president and um if we if we may we'd like to introduce um the the two principals and the director of special education and say a few words and so with your permission i'd love to start by inviting miss elba herrera to come up to the uh so um mr if you'd allow me i'm going to say a few words and then i'd love

138to hear from you as well so we're just really really delighted excited that um to to have miss uh herrera become the new principal of schilling i'll say a little bit about her um elba is was born and raised in the east bay and is a product of public school education she currently lives in hayward with her husband and two children one of which i believe is here with us tonight elba herrera has served the newark unified school district for over 25 years working as an elementary school teacher supporting schilling elementary since the beginning of her career she has been dedicated to schilling elementary and student achievement making sure students get a rigorous education these past three years she has been the administrative designee supporting staff and students in the absence of her principal she

139has been a mentor for the nusd induction program for the past seven years supporting and guiding new teachers with challenges they face through their first years of teaching she has assisted schilling elementary to achieve platinum pbis status currently the only school in our district to do so and elba is trained in the sobrato early academic language or seal model which we've spoken to this board about which is used to improve literacy outcomes for monolingual bilingual and tri-lingual students these past two years she has led and supported the development of the dual language immersion program recently implemented at her school and she is what has been one of the teachers in that program elba is passionate about being an advocate for education focused on offering support to all students and staff promoting commitment and sharing a

140sense of responsibility for implementing change as principal at schilling elementary she has high expectations to secure a successful dli program and to ensure that all students are meeting academics success and i will say that i appreciate some of the comments of board members we couldn't be more delighted to be hiring from within and hiring from um candidates who have shown a lifetime of dedication to our district it's tremendous um we have been we we are hiring rock stars and um and future champions and uh i i am proud of our hr department as well because this year um we already had a rigorous process but this this year the process has become even more rigorous so with that i just want to you all could join me again in applause for ms alba herrera [Applause]

141thank you so much good evening dr triplett board members cabinet members and community members it is my pleasure and honor to introduce myself as principal for schilling elementary school i am extremely proud and excited to make my transition from teacher to principal at the very school where i started my career 25 years ago i look forward to working with the staff the students the families and the school community to make sure we focus on student achievement i am dedicated to continuing our student success and will strive to continue the positive relationships rigorous learning and continue to encourage our students to celebrate their unique strengths thank you for your time and support [Applause] next i'd like to call up miss christie palomino [Applause] so christy palomino grew up in newark she's an alumni of russian elementary

142of mcgregor elementary of newark junior high and newark memorial high school mrs palomino attended san francisco state san jose state ohio state and cal state hayward for her teaching credentials and her administrative leadership roles mrs palomino has been a dedicated nusd employee for 27 years well sorry miss herder she's got you and 26 of those years spent serving the snow elementary community before the merger of into coyote hills elementary this year she began teaching at snow in 1995 and served as a teacher literacy coordinator bitsa mentor administrative designee and interim principal at snow elementary and now coyote hills elementary mrs palomino is devoted to the school community and serves and continues to serve as in on several leadership teams and various district level committees such as the curriculum council essential standards committees curriculum adoption committees

143bits of coach mentor committee peer coach teacher you're gonna have to give up some of these mr report card committee induction support provider and core literature units committees throughout the snow and graham merger process mrs palomino has gone above and beyond to advocate for our newly merged community and has served as a teacher leader to promote positive experiences for our staff and students this year she served as an active member of the snow and graham design team last year and has continued to work hard to help build positive relationships amongst our staff students and parents this year mrs palomino has worked collaboratively with others on our staff to problem solve and to support during this challenging school year and as the current interim principal of coyote hills mrs palomino has put into place weekly communication

144with staff and parents with opportunities such as tuesday announcements and weekly community letters to families and the community of coyote hills she makes herself present in classrooms and all the learning taking place at coyote hills and mrs palomino comes to work every day with a positive attitude and spreads joy across our campus mrs palomino is looking forward to continuing to create a caring and safe school where every student feels validated and strives for their personal best each and every day with the support of all coyote hills staff so please join me in welcome we welcoming her well dr triplett and borah thank you so much for believing in me for having the faith to give me this incredible opportunity to give back to the community i was raised in and i became an educator in

145my passion is truly for kids i believe all kids can learn given the right opportunities provided the equity and support they need so making kids feel safe at school is critical this year and i really focused on cell for our kiddos that we've merged these two schools we're building this new community it's been a bumpy road but we've made a lot of growth and progress and i really want to see our vision come to life and continue to grow our coyote hills elementary community so thank you so very much for this opportunity thank you miss palmino and last but certainly not least would like to call up a currently principal rangel but soon are now soon to be director of special education rengel so um i do want to start by olivia has worked in

146newark unified since 2011 which uh that's 11 or 12 years but um i do want to say that in high school years that's probably like 30 36 years so prior to her work in newark she worked as a paraprofessional and inclusion specialist she began her career here as an sdc special education teacher at newark memorial this is where she developed her love for the cougar community and newark over the years she began to take on further leadership roles such as lead teacher and program specialist and then ultimately proudly served and is serving as the principal of our flagship high school newark memorial olivia looks forward to continuing to serve this community in her area of expertise and and also deep passion special education she is ready to support all members that serve the special education

147community with best practices increased inclusion and balanced leadership she looks forward to working with new and familiar families to provide the best education for our most deserving students and i just want to say i i personally feel like one of the most important criteria for district leadership is for someone to have sat in the seat of principle because until you had been principal it's really hard to fully understand how to support principles and so i'm really delighted that olivia is coming back to special education having had that experience in high school as the leader so please join me in welcoming olivia rangel thank you so much thank you dr triplett board and executive cabinet it is i am standing up here with some mixed emotions because i have proudly served the students of newark memorial

148for the last three years [Laughter] [Music] i proudly serve the intelligent respectful driven and compassionate students who've made my job at newark memorial easy i've appreciated working with the staff and long time behind the scene leaders who've motivated and inspired the students to be better all of these students and staff have supported me along the way and were collaborative when i needed them most thus to say this decision to step back into my dream job was not an easy one but ultimately we ask our students to reach for their dreams and today i get to do that in my new role you thank you for the opportunity i'm proud to be able to provide this department with stability improvement compliance and best instructional practices for our most deserving students and our most vulnerable students i

149know it seems like i don't have a lot of experience in this role but i have a lot of experience in this community and this community has developed a lot of trust in me to do this job and do right by our kids and i will continue to do what i've done for the last 11 years for this community so again thank you for this opportunity all right thank you so much um [Music] to all of our wonderful no longer interim principles [Music] palomino and to ms rangel congratulations on getting your dream job and we have huge expectations to say the least but i'm very confident that with your all of your passion and drive that we will see a lot of success through you moving forward in those positions so thank you so much

150okay um on to um consent agenda items we do have public speaker for items 15.10 and 15.11 so we'll pull those and is there any additional items that um board members like to pull remember remember help 15.11. oh we had an amendment to the agenda the 15.11 is for the kennedy field trip thank you so i'd like to pull 15.2 15.6 15.8 and point 15.9 please fifteen point two fifteen point six point six point fifteen point eight and fifteen point nine and given that it's nine twenty um should we um make a motion to extend i will wait a little bit later because we are at the end of our agenda we still have 40 minutes okay okay um we will be pulling items 15.2 15.6 point eight nine ten and eleven make it a

151motion to approve fifteen point three point four point five and point seven so moved okay great um moved by motion made by member grindel and seconded by myself um how do you vote remember jean yes member marquez yes member hill yes remember grindelwald yes i'm also yes five eyes okay um item 15.2 member hill yes thanks thank you thank you so this this is the non-curricular trip for the junior high school um and uh and i i don't fundamentally have a problem with what they're doing but but what i do have a problem with is is the labeling of of what we say we're doing right so if we look at what the the agenda item says so it says um this is uh newark junior heist uh principal and leadership teacher requests permission to

152take students on a non-curricular trip to san jose and it says that what they're going to be doing is participating in team building collaboration problem solving community building and strategizing activities so it's it sounds fairly academic but when when you pull the actual um request it's to go to topgolf um and so again i don't have a problem with students going and especially using asb funds to sort of celebrate the end of the year but um but again i don't want us to be representing the things are going to be going on that are really not going to be going on right it's it's miniature golf yes should i respond or comment president um yeah so um there is the the field trip is labeled as a non-curricular trip and um and so uh that's

153that's actually why it's being brought to the board is because um if this was uh some sort of trip that was academic then um because it's not out of state and it's not overnight it doesn't require board approval but this one is labeled as non-curricular even though um the articulation within is because um there is opportunities for some fun team building collaboration problem solving etc um but uh yeah it isn't curricular and there's there's no attempt to uh claim that it is thank you dr triplett and any other comments or questions by the board remember sean no ready to make the motion okay remember grindel did you have a comment i was just going to thank the superintendent for that description that was something i was going to say that there it's non-curricular but these

154kinds of activities do build teams dude they do they do enhance the educational experience as well thank you okay uh motion made by member zhang may get a second please i second the motion um second by member marquez remember zhang how do you vote yes remember marquez yes member hill yes member grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes on item 15.2 um next item 15.6 remember grindel i mean i'm sorry member hill so 15.6 the think together contracts um so we've talked about this before so we've had a an after-school program we went through some pretty severe cuts a couple of months ago that basically um you know if they're finalized for the most part eliminate that program right there's not going to be enough personnel to run it and and even though we're saying

155that think together is different but it's it seems that we're really using it as a quasi substitute to provide after school services and it's a pretty hefty price tag right so we're talking about 1.6 almost 1.7 million dollars um and the challenge that that i have with this is that it's it's not apples to apples um in a lot of respects not only is it i mean because essentially it's proclaiming that um we're going to be doing you know again some we're going to be including some academic content or some um you know curricular activities as a part of this the challenge though that we face and where i think that we really need to be treading carefully as a district is it's my understanding that think together only provides after-school services it doesn't provide

156basically early drop-off at any of the schools whereas our current after our current um you know essentially quote unquote after school program actually provides both and i think the thing that we should be thinking about is that as we all know we have an enrollment issue and a declining enrollment issue and we're trying to recruit a lot of parents new parents and kids into the school i think that many of the ones that we're trying to recruit are working professionals and being able to have the ability to drop off your kid early is a pretty critical function if we're going to be attracting them and if we get rid of our after-school program and substitute this in its place it's going to be challenging the the second issue that i have with this is that

157this is being funded with grant funds um and so we're um you know we can see that this can can can be funded over the next year maybe maybe two but after that if these funds disappear you know what are we going to do about our um after-school child care program um or before and after school and you know are we going to be in a situation where we're going to then have to try to rebuild and are we going to be even further behind the eight ball um and so you know i i'd appreciate some um feedback from staff in terms of how we're going to address if we eliminate our child care program and we substitute this in as a quasi substitute how we're going to deal with kids that need to be

158dropped off before school starts and then secondly how are we going to fund this important activity that i think it really is a tied to future enrollment after these funds disappear so those are my two questions superintendent sure thank you for those questions member hill um so the that is correct that this is not a uh early drop-off program and um and so uh that's something that um this this thing together does not provide so it's not part of this agenda item when referencing the current after school program so this is the current after school program this is an after-school provider at two schools or three schools currently one um the junior high one chilling and one at coyote hills we do um i think you're referring to our child care program which is uh

159which is child care it's not after school program and it has not been a child care program has not been eliminated we're currently in conversations with the um our labor partners with regard to how to make sure that we are continuing to provide the important services that that child care does provide and in particular the early drop-off is one of those important services in terms of funding with grant funds so these are ongoing funds from the state so this these funds don't have a time limit and the expectation is that they will continue as is any any additions to that uh team could you could you just give us a little bit of insight because when we um had to approve all the layoffs and we looked at the and thank you for for correcting

160my terminology i meant child care um but when we when we were approving these notices and these layoffs it looked like we were only going to have about two people left in the child care program so has that changed since we last looked at that at that data so this is um this agenda item is not related to the child care program um we are like i said in conversations with our labor partners right now with regard to trying to make sure that we do provide the the best services to our families with regard to early drop-off as well as some of the other services that provided by child care so um we we have not eliminated child care um but we uh we are um uh taking advantage of this grant and this grant

161provides for the type of services that are articulated by think together i will also just say that this the board did approve this this grant plan so this is merely the contract to back up what the board approved earlier this year thank you dr triplett um with that remember marquez do you have a just one comment i i did want to compliment the fact that you know that we're moving on not just three schools that we're moving into the fourth fourth campus and the fact that we have these opportunities available for all of our campus would be a great goal to strive towards as long as there is the funding available and is continuous um to create equity for all the students so they can also um receive the benefits of these programs because not

162only are they working with them with sel and enrichment but they're also um the staff that works for these these particular type of programs are also prepared to assist our students academically so kudos thank you with that um i'd like to move to approve a second um motion made by myself and seconded by member zhang how do you vote remember zhang yes remember marquez yes member hill no remember grindel yes i'm also yes four eyes and one no on to item 15.8 member hill the moving services contract yes so moving services contract so um i see that we um i understand that we need to do a move um it looks like we put together an rfp um and got bids and we got looks like we got two bids and uh maybe more do

163we only have two bids we only have two bits that were responsive the third one was not responsive meaning they were supposed to submit it here and they submitted it by email okay um and so the ones that were responsive one was for seventy seven thousand the other ones for fifty two thousand we're going with one for fifty two thousand my question is um why are we sending this out for rfp so we wanted to give potential moving contractors the opportunity to [Music] look at the the scope of work and provide us a quote so normally we get quotes you know one or two and it's a project this size and so we decided to do an okay um because the part that i'm confused about is um i mean when you when you guys

164submitted to us last year um when we were talking about delegation of authority and procurement practices etc you provided to us the procurement policy that the district is following um and um and in that when it comes to services and this is one of the things that you've been maintaining is that when it comes to services you maintain i'm not sure if this is 100 correct but according to the to our policy it says for services anything under 99 000 doesn't have to go out to bid so why are we making an exception here this is an informal we can do informal vids okay but you but you've said sent out an rfp isn't that a formal process not necessarily so if it was um formal we would have advertised and done the formal process

165just because it's called an rfp does it make it formal okay so then we pre-identified a couple of vendors that we wanted to have bid on this yes okay but we didn't make it open for public bidding well it's uh it's on our website so i'm not sure what you mean so we normally will put it on our on the website then it's published we take every we we do what we can to um while i understand the line of questioning from member hill i just hope that member hill if you could read over the governance handbook and ask these questions to staff for clarification prior to the board meetings so that they are prepared to answer any other additional questions you may have inc in relations to all these the processes yes so i

166so i actually um had questions about this and i sent uh to dr triplett i said i would like to see the rfp so that i could understand more about the process and so i submitted that yesterday and got the rfp and so i'm now only having time to you know come back as i've looked further at this so i i have been following the process thank you so much um with that is there any additional comments from the board remember jean do you have anything no ready to make the motion okay great a motion made by member zhang may get a second second second second in five member marquez how do you vote member zhang yes remember marquez yes member hill yes member grindel yes i'm also yes bye bye thank you item 15.9

167you have the floor again mr hill remember hill sorry oh this is the one that has a public comment oh no member held it's the warrant report yes thank you so i i had two questions about this and one of them was a was a follow-up one of them was a follow-up from the last session and so and i didn't have the information handy in front of me um but i noticed that the same topic came up again in this forum report so um can can you guys tell me i mean what what is this learning leadership academy you uh oh llama are you talking about the leadership learning academy yeah yeah so um we've i believe we've uh talked about this with the board in the past so um part of our professional development

168for our principles is a bi-monthly what we call a leadership learning academy and it's a half essentially like a half day morning time where all the principals meet together and we support their professional growth and so i i don't have the item that you're referring to but i'm going to guess that it's a it's a food item is that correct yeah so so what i'm noticing i mean and so again i i saw this i was curious about it and then when i saw it again you know wanted to sort of look a little bit further and um so it seems that we've been we've been incurring a lot of charges here um and so on september 2021 ll um a meeting on october 1st um so this uh la lla needing 314 on um

16911 221 to 171 dollars to the mexicans or mexico tortilla factory on november 21st cello a breakfast 155 dollars on december 8th um ll meeting 221 on january of this year lla meeting 137 so basically all the way up to the present um and so it seems that we're catering food to these meetings and then as i look at the account stream code and i'm still kind of learning how this stuff works but i'm understanding that this is coming from donation money um and you know it's it's my understanding actually that both in terms of our our policies that we formally adopted is whether as well as other guidance in edcode that these are actually inappropriate expenditures um and uh if i let's see if i can find the actual specifics here so we we

170have a policy 3 300 expenditures and purchases says the government governing board recognizes its fiduciary responsibility to oversee the prudent expenditure of district funds in order to best serve district interests the the superintendent or designee shall develop and maintain effective purchasing procedures that are consistent with sound financial controls if you go further into this policy and this policy was adopted originally adopted in 1996 and was last resol revised in 2018 it says um the superintendent or designee may authorize expenditures for light refreshments for in-service and or award meetings in which staff students volunteers and parents or guardians participate as a part of the educational program the cost of like refreshments will not exceed 760 for breakfast um etc etc so so my concern is is that you know are these basically a gift of public

171funds um and um again i mean you know we we've been talking earlier about how we understand that there's a deficit and we understand that you know and that we've made resolutions to um you know basically commit to change our structural deficit but in my experience everything that i've learned in business is that you count the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves and yet what i see constantly is i see i hear us mouth the words that we understand the deficit and we're going to take action and yet we're engaging in really you know inappropriate behavior here um and i actually think that this this violates our policies um so i just i'd kind of like to get um you know maybe i'm missing something maybe you can provide more detail to me

172dr triplett on this uh yeah so if you can um uh the the policy that you read um i think um really articulates well how this this purchase or expense is in alignment um with with policy so i'm not really clear on how that yeah so i'll read it i'll read it again because i know i read it fast that's okay let's just i think we want to make sure that we understand so what it says is the superintendent or designee may authorize expenditures for life refreshments for in-service and or award meetings in which staff students volunteers parents guardians participate all right it's not for breakfast meetings for staff we don't do catering to our employees and i can tell you that in my district they don't do that either that and and so again

173i don't think that we're living up to the policy um correct me if i'm wrong miss dela cruz but in service uh is the definition of uh professional development for uh for staff so that that is uh in alignment with that policy so so it's the seventh nothing inappropriate in the purchases that have been made so all of these expenses have to do with with the meetings and the in-services and the professional development that um that we conduct the learning academy is a professional growth development meeting the um [Music] the other llas that's what they are they're they're meetings to help our staff and our administrators develop and grow as professionals so there's nothing inappropriate 760 for breakfast thank you um with that said i'm ready to make a motion remember zhang make it a

174second or for many other members there's already a motion on the table excuse me thank [Applause] apparently you haven't read it okay so i'm happy to read this to you so it says right here okay in terms of duties of board officers the president okay um it says right here that you are supposed to enforce and maintain the board's policies related to the order of business and i am thank you excuse me and the last the second and last bullet point is rule on parliamentary procedure okay that's what it says right here it doesn't say rule on what's in the governance handbook it doesn't say rule on something else it says rule on parliamentary procedure yes the parliamentary procedures that we have already approved as a board is the governance handbook thank you there are

175no parliamentary procedures in this governance handbook and until we adopt these you cannot continue to act like a tyrant no you are the tyrant thank you i have one additional issue i would like to know why we are going out and renting facilities for retirement parties when we aren't using our own and there's a warrant in there to go out and and basically hold an event at the portuguese club for seven hundred dollars and then there's additional info there's additional rent costs for renting tables we have ample space so i don't see how we are walking the talk in terms of saying that we're trying to work on our structural deficit when we are when we are free to away money in a variety of areas thank you i still moved to prove that the

176warranty report may please get a second second motion made by myself and seconded by member zhang member zhang how do you vote yes remember marquez yes member hill no remember grindel yes i'm a yes four eyes and one no miss parks i apologize we should have allowed you to go first um item 15.10 minutes now you are direct my night i was supposed to be at home with my grandkids but at the very beginning of this meeting and i happened to watch the very beginning to see if these minutes were pulled because of the typographical error which meant i had to voiced my grandkids on my husband to put them to bed so that i could be here to address this item you know that you have for a regular meeting you have to post

177your agenda 72 hours in advance you cannot deviate from the items that are before you that are on that agenda that lists the items that you're going to determine you're going to vote on 72 hours in advance for a regular meeting if it were a special meeting that's 24 hours emergencies are catastrophic 15.10 is your minutes dated today clearly that's a typographical error when the agenda came out the minutes were not attached so anybody who looked at the agenda and even ms marzano here was questioning me on why the minutes would say that they were for today so you've told the community that they were going you were going to approve the minutes for tonight so to listen to the discussion at the beginning of this meeting where you were going to approve the agenda

178and listen to the conversation blowing off the fact that and nobody really taking ownership for the typographical error and saying well in your motion or however the whatever the terminology was i was so um angry when i heard that this was just being belittled that way you can't just change the agenda item you can't just say okay we're gonna not motion to approve the may 19th a meeting minutes we're going to now say that they're the may 5th that doesn't work you need to pull them and you need to bring them back at your next meeting thank you um you also have the floor are we going to be pulling this items this way yeah yes thank you it's been a long night thank you madam president yes member out of an abundance of transparency

179i'd like to move that we continue this to the next meeting given that there's no urgency okay perfect we can pull this item okay on to item 1511. do we need a motion no 1511 miss parks i repeat everything i just said regarding your agenda and i have to say that it's very disturbing to me to listen that there was some kind of a mistake made to where this item was left off the agenda and that this field trip is scheduled for tomorrow and don't think that it doesn't make me sick that i had to listen to what i did at the very beginning of this meeting and have it be deemed an emergency an emergency [Music] according to the brown act is where you the only terminology is is when you're having an emergency

180meeting and that emergency meeting means that it was a it has to do with a crippling disaster a mass destruction terrorist act threatening terrorist activity that poses peril it's not an emergency to add another item you've been in other brown act committee meetings where you don't get to just add an item it has to be and you just don't add an item you just don't get to do that you have a protocol you you have law that says 72 hours in advance on a regular meeting you have to post what's on the agenda so that anybody in the public can come and and express their opinion on that item that's the reason this exists you could have very easily unless this was just determined today uh you know maybe that's what where all of a

181sudden now this is coming up as an emergency again it doesn't excuse it but if somebody knew this yesterday you could have called a special meeting at 5 and heard this item then i think it's disgusting i think it's shameful that it was being it's being labeled an emergency under some guys that is supposedly the discussion before was oh this can this this can happen and and really not committing to when it was asked where is it said that you can do this and nobody would come up with an exact reading of the law or quoting something that says that you can do this you have laws that you have to abide by and adding an extra item because somebody made a mistake isn't the way and it is disgusting like i said that these

182kids are being you i mean i don't know what you're going to do but that they might not be able to go on their field trip because somebody made a mistake but that doesn't mean that you get to circumvent what's out there and how you're supposed to conduct your meetings thank you um remember zhang do you have a comment yeah so the the super majority rule that we have have clarity about the availability of that super majority rule to add an item whatever us if i can see that that would be good yeah remember grindelwald yeah i just wanted to indicate it's it's quite easy to get confused about the rules for calling a special meeting versus the a body changing its agenda and adding an item by super majority but um i i i

183would appreciate it i'm dr triplett if staff or staff could provide um the citation that is uh that's involved here certainly um but before we go there i do want to point out it is 9.50 do we want to make sure that we um don't go over um i'd like to make a motion to extend the meeting to 10 15 or 10 30 just in case i seconded it okay motion made by myself second if by members young members on how do you vote yes member marquez yes member hill yes member grindel yes i'm also yes five eyes to extend to 10 30. thank you uh miss gutierrez do you want to share um the statute so to speak yes this is from a brown act manual and i'm quoting reading exactly as is an

184urgency item may be considered when the board determines there is a need for an immediate action and the need to act came to the agency's attention subsequent to the agenda being posted this determination must be made by two-thirds vote of the board members president or unanimous vote if less than two-thirds of the board is present and this comes from statute 54 95 4 dot two subsequent b two thank you miss gutierrez if you don't mind um i can see where the confusion might be the difference between emergency and urgency is maybe where the difficulty is so thank you thank you okay with that um i'd like to get a motion to approve item 1511 please i move a second motion made by member jean seconded by member grendel how do you vote remember jean yes

185remember marquez yes member hill no because i don't believe that's the correct reading remember rindell yes because i think it is the correct reading i'm also yes for our eyes and one no thank you so much on to [Music] board of education committee reports requests and announcements board of education recognition announcements remember zhong so just hope everyone finished the school year strong thank you member marquez i just wanted to wish everyone a good luck with their finals and to all the staff for all the hard work they put in the school year and looking forward to a great graduation celebration member hill i would like to show appreciation for the u.s constitution and the california state constitution and our way of life which indicates that we are a country of laws not of men and

186what that really means is is that we don't make arbitrary decisions based on personalities we have rules and we follow the rules and i think that what we've been seeing is that we've been playing fast and loose with a lot of rules and including the fact that we apparently do not have parliamentary procedure and people keep on invoking the governance handbook but i don't think they've ever gone to read it and by and by the way um there's that there's also been a contention that somehow csba is in alignment with this and i will tell you that i've gone to research what csba's position is and it's no such thing and not only that i've also contacted and discussed with our former csba board advisor the fact that what we're doing is lawless and i

187will tell you that if you read our manual if you read our governance handbook we do not have parliamentary procedures we do not identify motions we do not identify points of order and all these different things there is no such mention of that we do not have sufficient procedures to actually conduct a meeting and because of that there is a clause in there that clearly states we need to follow and that the president needs to invoke and and um and and follow parliamentary procedure and so again we can decide to be lawless but um it's not a good path remember grindel yeah i'll try to actually stick to the agendaized discussion here instead of going off on other areas so i just want to recognize the uh i appreciate the district's recognition of asian and

188pacific islander um appreciation month um and um and also want to compliment all the teachers and students you know on the home stretch of this year and um very excited about that and one last time to um to comp to congratulate our new principal and head of special education i'm really really thrilled to have such high quality people continuing to work for our district generated in our district um and they went through a rigorous rigorous process i feel sorry for him actually when you once you describe the the process i think i might have bailed out after phase two if i were involved so i've um i'm not i'm not encouraging you to relax it i'm just i'm saying i'm impressed um so i wanted to compliment them and they're going to be part of

189turning this district to the positive and increasing enrollment and putting any financial problems behind us so thank you thank you member grindel um with that said i also um echo your sentiments member indel and the rest of the board and also i also wanted to make a point that it is national health mental health awareness month also along with asian pacific islander heritage month and we do all need to take a deep breath sometimes and there are a lot of chaos going around around in our lives and especially this year with with returning to school in person and the challenges that that all invoked for not only our students but also our teachers as well and our staff and a lot of times we don't take time to really think about that and allow ourselves

190to digest while we're moving in this fast-paced environment so i just want to recognize all of the hard work that our our teachers have done for our students and all of the hard work that our students have put in throughout the year but not only that but i know how much our executive team have persevered with shortages and staff and taking on multiple roles and also responsibilities and i just really wanted to really really appreciate you all up here and thank you for all the hard work that you've done along with all of our teachers and the rest of our classified staff and all of our preschool teachers and our paraprofessionals so thank you okay um on to board of education committee reports um are there any reporting out from mission rop mr um remember

191grindelwald nothing of substance to report um remember zhang is there anything from selpa nope remember marquez is there anything from ebic none at this time and is there anything from the audit committee no and there is nothing to report out from the parcel tax committee and also we don't have anything to communicate out for the liaison committee as well so on to board of education requests remember zhang do you have any requests at this time no requests remember marquez yes i do thank you um i'm not sure if everyone's aware but i have been attending i'm about to i have one more course to go and then yeah and in doing so i've learned quite a bit and i want to thank everyone for giving me the opportunity to attend and also to my principal

192who has allowed me to do so while i'm supposed to be teaching so many shouts out to my principal um secondly in reviewing some of the committees and some of the responsibilities that we have as a school district what i came to to realize or to notice is that um what our charters look like versus um what it is that the expectation is of our public and people that we serve and currently because i am serving on the audit committee i would like to request that we have in the future new school year that we put our actual charter for the audit committee um on an agenda item if not for a study session so that we can review and see how we can approve our audit committee's charter if we can lessen and be

193more pinpoint versus many pages or excessive and then find yourselves convoluted or lost so at this time that is my request thank you i agree with that request okay i also agree with that request so we have a majority member hill thank you so i'm going to provide some handouts and then [Music] i'd like to explain and make i think i think you want to have a copy of this remember when thank you and dr triplett already has a copy of this so board on may 10th i submitted a california public records act request to superintendent triplett louis gutierrez and william tunic our outside legal counsel i would like to provide some background on this topic and then request that the board instruct the district to expedite the production of the information i am asking

194for on february 24 2022 i received an email addressed to my board email address from mr tunic of dennis wallover kelly they're our legal counsel and the email stated good morning member hill i'm assisting district staff with working through a backlog of public records requests and wanted to reach out regarding the following requests for records under the california public records act and here's the here's a here's the cut and paste of the request hello miss gutierrez and dr triplett i would like to make a public records request for the following any and all records created modified updated used reviewed or opened by member hill on the laptop he used during the public board meetings of september 2nd 2021 september 16 2021 and september 21st please include all records such as any notes messages any communications

195from any applications used emails documents excel sheets communications from social media accounts and any program used specifically during the above dates and times which is limited to public meetings being in session digital records are an acceptable format for this request thank you and i look forward to hearing from you within the next few days with gratitude mrs m.a crossley so my first reaction to this email was why is the district retaining outside legal counsel at probably over 300 an hour to process a backlog of cpra requests for a public entity which should be following the california public records act the brown act and prop proposition 59's mandates reinforcing the public's right of access to information concerning the conduct of the people's business engaging a lawyer to review cpra requests really should be done on an

196exception rather than a regular basis but as i read through the abbreviated request i haven't seen the original document i could see this was no ordinary request in our district usually most cpras come from private citizens who live in our city in this situation however i did a google search for m a crossway and i found no such person living in newark as i expanded my search there was a crosswalk living in nearby fremont but i'm not sure if that was the person who submitted that request and why would they have any interest in our school board proceedings and my laptop as i read the request more carefully however i could see that this was written by a lawyer interestingly the dates requested were at approximately the same time when we the board were conducting

197an appointment process for the board seat left vacant after former member alisa martinez resigned in august of 2021 at that time i came into possession of information that indicated that superintendent and ms gutierrez at a minimum had been involved in rigging this appointment process and committing fraud by publishing false notices on our website and social media indicating that the board had met and decided to reopen the application process after it had already been officially closed as this was unfolding i publicly called out this malfeasance in open session and requested that the board meet in closed session to launch an investigation into this matter which the board refused to do is this new request for information from my laptop on those dates merely a coincidence or is it connected and is it also merely a coincidence

198that the only people who could see that i was using a laptop were those up on the dais superintendent triplet miss gutierrez the cabinet and the board my laptop was not visible from the ground level audience section of the boardroom nor on youtube videos of the board proceedings i checked the question i have is am i now being spied upon by those who should be falling under border oversight i do not know the answer to this question but the circumstances are highly suspicious and troubling my response to the above request was as follows william thank you for the email the only information i access on my laptop during board meetings is to see the electronic version of board docs including the board agenda and associated attachments i do not have other records as i purposely

199do not check email text messages social media or other electronic applications as i consider it rude and i strive to give my full attention to board proceedings as a consequence of this unusual exchange however i became interested in knowing who specifically was requesting the purported contents of my laptop on those dates thus on april 27th i sent an email to mr tunic asking him to forward me the entire cpra request from mrs crossway as well as the contact information for that requester mr tunic replied back that quote in general the district does not disclose the email address or other contact information of requesters if the board seeks this information through the board president the district could provide it at that time end quote for those of you that are not familiar this is mealy mouth

200lawyer talk for i don't want to give you this information so i'm going to make up a phony process to obstruct your access i have since responded with a formal cpra of my own requesting this documentation and a response is by law due back from the district tomorrow friday may 20th board the public has a right to know whether whether the people they elected to represent them are now being spied upon by those that they have been elected to oversee we need to know whether we have corruption in our district and if so to what extent the best way to get to the bottom of this is through full transparency consequently i'm requesting that the board instruct the district to expeditiously respond to my cpra request so that we may answer that question thank you

201so after seeing the public records i think it is very problematic that i see somebody wants to access information on a personal laptop because i thought like four members like whatever we do on a laptop shouldn't be subject to public disclosure so it is somewhat very rare unusual request to see member hill's laptop particularly on that one particular oh i guess it's three meetings not not just not just one meeting and yeah so so so this is very very unusual so i i do think memorial might be targeted for some whatever the the request was for mr hill to whether or not we wanted to extradite his public records act request we didn't we didn't agenda as a discussion of this so i don't think there's an agenda i mean i think he can discuss

202it well he made his point you can discuss your request absolutely just to see who is actually requesting this or who this mob crossway really is yeah i want to know who that is because by the way and i will show you right here this everybody is my laptop you can see it is very small if i open it up like this nobody can see the only people that can see it are the people up here oh i'm conspiracy the um my understanding is that the uh there is no process for um jumping the line when it comes to public records requests but i'm confident that staff would would respond to member hill's public records request in uh in the proper course am i correct in that mr triplett yes yes that's correct we um

203so the question i want to ask is do we have are we legally allowed to disclose the requesters information yes so um per guidance from legal um we um we we do disclose the name of the person um however um we don't disclose the um the contact information that's not that's not what um mr tunic's response to me stated he said that i can ask the board through the president so number one the cpra is in completely independent process so as i've said before no secret can be kept from the board we can see any and all information my cpra request is an independent action as a private citizen but we as the board have the authority to tell the district to disclose that and they can disclose it either in open session or in

204closed session so so given the proper process i do i given the unusual nature of this request i will say just do it in time following the regular procedure that's the last seven days or 14 days 10 days and it's expired tomorrow the 10 days is up they have to make a determination so i believe the the request on the table is um reply to your cvr tomorrow to reply to the cpr tomorrow is that i thought the request was for the board to direct us to the doctor if it's expedition it's going to get done tomorrow my request is to produce this information so i've requested this information my request is to produce it so and i'm i'm requesting that the board given the the um seriousness of this issue um also take an

205independent action requiring that this information be produced and that is separate from my cpra so that's my request so just to be clear um because i just want to make sure that other board members are are clear on um on the request um so we we intend to respond to the cpra requests but what i hear remember hill you saying is that you are asking the board to approve beyond what we normally do to with cpra requests to actually provide the contact information of this individual so if the board agrees to that then they are saying that they are directing um they are directing us to provide the contact information we we did provide the name of the person like we do in any cpra request but uh so then that's what's on the person

206appears to be a pseudonym um and so we need to get to the bottom of who this person actually is i i have no i all i know is that that's the name of the first well it'll be very clear if we see who the contact information is for um so that that will that will provide whether this person truly exists or not and how to get a hold of them so it sounds like the the request is on the table does the board want to direct the district to provide not just what normally is provided in the cpra request but um above and beyond that no i'm not okay with that and i hope that my other fellow board members agree that you know um we should definitely follow our current procedures on how

207we reply to cpra requests and and provide the information that is laid out by our legal team and and if there's a reason for us not to be able to disclose contact information for any reason especially if the intent of releasing the information and that person is harassed for their public legal right to request a cpra request i don't think that's okay so i i think it's unfair to make an assumption that harassment would occur uh you're making assumptions about um all of us here um so yeah so well then like i said the best the the the best disinfectant um is sunlight um and transparency but if you're not interested in providing transparency on this project process we'll have to go through the formal legal process of the cpra point of view so point

208of order there is no point is um is there a second or is there a majority of people who want to i agree with remember nguyen thank you sorry president thank you i do have a request though i hope i can get to it yes i will let you get to i won't skip over you uh make sure mr mr hell are you done with your quest so i don't have any other seconds thank you thank you okay remember grindel yes i have a fairly long uh request as well unfortunately and um the um i don't think as long as that one though it it does sadden me to have to make this request as will be clear to anyone who's been watching our meetings member hill and i have strong disagreements about the proper

209role of a school board member i believe it's our role to provide policy direction hire and evaluate the superintendent approve and monitor the budget it appears that member hill believes that our role is to micromanage this district and even to get directly involved in personnel issues his approach is incorrect and is dangerous to the district as much as it saddens me i feel an obligation to stand against damaging statements made by member hill in the meeting of may 5th 2022 there was an extreme example of this behavior for clarity i'll describe a particularly egregious situation mr froster a newark memorial high school teacher well newark teacher now spoke at a public comment claiming that he had been reassigned due to his expression of opinions regarding apex credit recovery among other issues mr foster has claimed

210that there was there was rampant cheating by students and that the cheating was enabled and by counselors and teachers mr froster reported that he that he was told that his that his opinions and the way he stated them made numerous other teachers feel uncomfortable and created a hostile work environment for them mr foster stated that he believed that that his reassignment to the junior high school was in retaliation for his complaints about apex and his colleagues mr foster has every right to complain about alleged retaliation even if a board meeting is a less than ideal venue claims of retaliation for expressing opinions is a serious charge and i take it very seriously however a complaint is not necessarily true it must be investigated impartially there are always two sides to such stories and district staff

211and consultants are are experts on how to handle them at the meeting on may 5th member hill then read a two-page written statement in his statement member hill made accusations there was a massive staff enabled cheating going on with apex credit recovery by students teachers and counselors member hill also described his conclusion with certainty that the complaint of retaliation was true and accused staff of covering up the alleged cheating and even going to the extent of listing phone numbers and website addresses of agencies that could that could receive um complaints about um retaliation no evidence for these serious charges was or has been provided mr hill has has an obligation to be impartial and not to project unfounded criticism from the diocese he betrayed his obligation and in so doing cast a cloud over the

212students and staff of memorial high school and this entire board jumping to this unfounded conclusion with no evidence or investigation was unfair to all the students and teachers and other staff who are involved by these actions member hill may in fact be contributing to a hostile work environment at the high school this situation makes it clear that the proper role for for the member of the board is to consider all information including a report from the superintendent and to study and to studiously avoid commenting on personnel issues member hill has been reminded of this numerous times yet he continues this irresponsible behavior which harms the district a board member repeating damaging statements attacking the reputation of our students teachers and counselors without investigation of fact is despicable i will speak up to defend our students

213and educators from such unfounded slander i unequivocally reject these accusations and support uh and and they support the students and staff's right for a presumption of innocence in the face of unsubstantiated accusations therefore i want to request that staff direct our legal advisors to advisors to review member hill's actions on this and other cases and to prepare a report that describes any legal exposure that may have been created by member hill and what board actions could be taken to formally reject his statements defend our students and staff and to protect the district from liability i hope that a majority of this board will support this request so i would like to comment um since this request is directed at me so it's important when people speak to put on your listening ears i mean i

214and i have my statement in in front of me right here that i read and i said numerous times that these were allegations um i never said that they were a statement of fact i said they were allegations and i said that these allegations have been made for the past year and there has been no investigation and i was calling for an investigation i was not calling for a pronouncement or a verdict i was saying we need to have an investigation and i'm happy to provide you can go back and watch it i'm happy to provide a copy of this i said allegations but furthermore member grindel i would like you to understand that earlier so you you you dismissed my recognition of the u.s constitution and the state constitution but i would like to

215encourage you to go back and read more in that area because as as an elected official we have something that's known as absolute privilege and if you're not familiar with that absolute privilege the founders believed that it was so important to have free speech among elected officials that they provide virtually unlimited protection for anything that elected officials say and it is so that way ma'am and so so this order we have a request on the table and uh this is not a discussion this is a request session thank you yes so repeating my request i i hope there's a majority of the board that would would direct us direct staff to investigate the actions of mr mr um hill and to report to us so so the request is to invest in whatever he said

216in the last minute when i wasn't here will pose any legal risk to the district um that action and any others whether or not um it's pro it creates legal legal risk to the to the district yes do we have support i i want to i want to first got from the superintendent do you really think there's legal rigs or i mean yeah if you think the legal risk is minimal or non-existence probably we don't if you do think there's a there there is a validity about the claim that we might what what's being said two weeks so dr triplett is not a lawyer i'd be happy to respond to your question remember john um so i believe uh mr remember grindel's uh request was to have a legal counsel review it i agree with

217member hill that i am not a lawyer and so i wouldn't i wouldn't um um deemed to to pass judgment in that way but i believe the request was for for illegal that was my request that was my request go ahead remember remember well if this is only for legal i hope this can be minimal i mean rather than being a public agenda item i'm happy to make it public because it needs to be public so you know here on the one hand the board is refusing to actually show transparency around you know what seems to be an you know a spine on my laptop and yet you're all you're you're very willing to actually go in and and challenge me on my political positions on things which i was elected to actually provide and

218try to claim that they're illegal and all i'm going to say is is that you're going to waste a whole bunch of money on in doing that a whole bunch because i've just told you what the law is absolute privilege we elected officials have absolute privilege in speaking okay remember marquez yes thank you madam president so as i say tonight listen to my fellow board members my concern is this i do not find it our place to sit here and quote law that is not our responsibility um one thing is for us to attend and to participate fully when it comes to the correct proper training so that we understand what our roles are fully here here on the on the board um when it comes to my fellow board member hill's request i look

219and i think okay the legal steps what are the steps are we taking the steps that we're supposed to are we following the cpr cpra when it comes to transparency and what he mentioned as well okay if i was to vote and say well yes i'm in favor i think that we need to stop and yes deal with his then i would have a public member or someone from the community come in and say well why is his situation being handled or put to the forefront and i've been waiting and i haven't been um responded to or had a resolution with what my request is when it comes to cpra then in listening to also to my fellow board member former president is the fact that when it comes to just listening to legal i

220am not the attorney neither either any of us here so if we have legal counsel and those in place who will guide us and say this is what you can and cannot do this is what we recommend that you do and cannot do this is what's favorable to you and and to make sure that we are not damaging our youth nor or academic community from pre-k all the way through the high school then yes we do need to make sure that we have our legal counsel tell us what we can and cannot do we are not the law correct i actually want to add on the previous request from member hill i was a member who if i were you in that position i will probably work with the police first like you said okay

221we're on remember request yes point of order okay are there is there a majority on to um support member hill's request i mean i'm sorry member grindels thank you member kendall for legal purposes and clarity yes okay um i'm also in agreement with member marquez so we do have a majority thank you but when i said minimize i hope this is not like a character campaign attack it's just from a strict legal point sure looks like it okay so i do have one request and that request is for all of our the board members who haven't completed um masters in governance to be able to do so so if i can uh i hope that you my fellow board members um agree with me in that a point of clarification yes um you want do

222you um do you want to pursue in your request making it a mandatory for board members or um just to make an encouragement no i'm mandatory i support that even though i have some that means i have some work to do yes thank you yes i need another i agree okay thank you okay with that um superintendent click concluding comments okay thank you um president so um i just wanted to uh to end with some appreciations one um that we did have an event for our retirees and for staff members who have been in the district for so uh the length of time that uh we awarded them longevity um longevity awards um it was a really beautiful event um when i think of the uh lifetime of service that these people have dedicated um

223i i i wish we could have done more to be honest um to dedicate one's life to our kids our district our community but i was really really pleased and um and appreciative of uh the hr department for um creating that event and i also really wanted to thank the the board members remember grendel member marquez member john member wen who attended the event and um and supported it that was it was really lovely um i also want to appreciate member uh president wen for her badminton skills so those of you don't know president nguyen um went and taught some of our junior high badminton and i wasn't aware of how good she was but um comes to come to find out that she you know she probably should have gone pro at some point

224um thank you so much thank you so much for um for i think it's uh all joking aside i think it's really indicative of your dedication to our kids in our community and remember when you put in so much time above and beyond what we do here which in and of itself is such a tremendous amount of time you brought cookies to every um every school the other day for appreciation of teachers and staff um as well as helped us to deliver um food to to all the um all the schools so i just really want to thank you and then lastly i wanted to appreciate a member of marquez um for the amount of time you put into the masters of governance it is it is a huge huge undertaking to to be trained

225in all of that and uh you've been determined to do that and really inform yourself and educate yourself and i myself have gone through some of them but not all so i think you have me beat at this point and i need to i need to continue and to go to some of those trainings as well so thank you very much for that thank you um superintendent triplett with that make it a motion to adjourn the meeting so moved motion made by member grindel they get a second second seconded by member zhang meeting adjourned at ten oh oh sorry how do you vote remember zhong yes remember yes remember hell yes remember grendel yes i'm also yes unanimous five eyes thank you meeting adjourned at 10 28. thank you you