001reflection and pledge of allegiance [Music] ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation yes all right roll call would you like me to do it um i will do it for dr smith trustee bartow justin bartow here trustee montoya here trustee crane here trustee anderson yeah trustee or soylu trustee white band here trustee elsie here dr smith here there you go hey um adoption of the agenda move adoption second okay yes trustee crane yes deanders yes trusteer soyulu trustee yes trustee we have one this is an opportunity for the public to address the board regarding items on the special meeting agenda only comments on special meeting agenda items are limited to three minutes per comment up to 20 minutes
002per topic a speaker may not really push his or her time to another person miss lise um one thing about this meeting is that the timing um it isn't really friendly to the public people can't just drop everything and come down here i would request that moving forward you have meetings that are at 6 pm also with the way the agenda is structured it's impossible to comment on alternative education because there is no attached report to the agenda being on the city council and going to city council meetings there are staff reports attached to the agenda items so that the public is informed uh whether it's a copy of the powerpoint that's going to be presented so that we're really at a loss as the members of the public to know what you're going to
003discuss and in what direction you're going it's very broad topic talking about alternative education so i suggest that you in the future have staff do reports uh written reports so that the public can be on the same page with you literally understanding you have very highly paid staff that is perfectly capable of doing a written report to give the public a little more information personally my son benefited from the alternative education program when he was at in newport mesa he went from estancia to newport to back bay and he ended up graduating from the college the early college at it wasn't called early college it was something else but it was at occ so i hope that you will reorganize or whatever you're planning to do today uh to consolidate or to save money that
004there are kids out there who bounce around and who still need he's he's dyslexic still dyslexic but he did graduate from uh middle college high school is what it was called called and it was very thankful um finally i don't want to see any i as a taxpayer i would not like to see any former critical race theory in our alternative education programs uh i don't want to see it come in through contracts or supplementary education material that is not fully vetted in public i know you vote on the textbooks there's a 30-day viewing period but that isn't true with those materials that are outsourced so i just want to make sure that that as far as alternative education i'm sticking to the rules that no critical race theory is attached thank thank you and
005um this is a study session so we'll be learning more um but we unfortunately have to unfortunately unfortunately move to closed session um the items are a conference with legal counsel existing litigation b liability claim and see public employee discipline dismissal release employment and we will move at 12 35. [Music] and people ask me about alternative ed study sessions which actually happened yesterday when i went to work so i think a lot of people are really excited to hear about this okay thank you um we have a couple of different items in front of you today so you'll see that um we have a brief slide presentation that i'll go through in just a moment and then we also have a blue folder and in that blue folder are all the documents that were previously
006shared with you with one edition and we'll walk through the folder at the end of the presentation the way today will work is we are going to kind of just reacquaint you with what alternative education is what it looks like in our district and then we're going to talk about the nuts and bolts get into budget academic data and other student related data and our outcomes for today will be for the board to provide feedback to us on program improvement for our alternative education programs okay it might be helpful too i know that the av booth can pick up what you're all saying but you here at the table may not be able to hear one another so i guess as the trustees maybe start to dialogue if you want to say something that we
007give you the mic and it's being picked up but the issue might be hearing one another yes and i know we're we we have loud voices so feel free to use them today and we do have several of our directors present this afternoon and appreciate their them being here because um the work um and and outcomes of today's session will uh land in ed services and so we will continue to collaborate as a team to make any enhancements or changes um to the program so let's talk a little bit about alternative education and so if i could just direct your eyes either to the screen behind you or the presentation in front of you either one for our team here today i just a reminder that we have three basically three alternative education sites and
008programs that we operate in the newport mesa unified school district we have back bay and monte vista back bay functioning as our traditional continuation high school monte vista as our end independent study 9 through 12 program our cloud campus which is our virtual school and you may remember you received a presentation at our last regular scheduled board meeting on that and then we have our early college high school as well so those are our three campuses that we consider non-comprehensive or non-traditional in our district back bay high school is a program that is an educational option and by law students are not supposed to be enrolled in a continuation high school until they have reached age 16 or older typically students are considered at risk of graduation meaning they are typically credit deficient or at
009risk for just not completing their program could be because they have different types of challenges whether it's personal or educational and at times students have needed a more flexible learning environment for up until the last few years most california alternative education programs relied on the continuation high school to drive most of the credit recovery and remediation so this is a long-standing program that california has used to help students graduate the outcomes for a continuation high school really haven't changed it really is about dropout prevention increasing graduation rates maintaining kids in school historically students who've landed at continuation high schools have had trouble attending school whether it's like i said educational academic personal attendance has been challenging and so you'll see many students enrolled in these these types of settings have those types of issues so
010we want to recover students and we want to make sure that they're attending and engaging in school somebody needs to have eyes on them and then historically we've had foster youth and it's been also used as a diversion program when you think about students who've gotten in trouble with the legal system and then it really is a supportive educational environment we want to be able to provide a really caring loving environment for students who may be experiencing any types of challenges so when you think of a continuation high school those are pretty typical concepts and outcomes up and down the state of california we had some questions asked you know are we are we one of the last districts to have a continuation high school and the answer is no we have 27 k-12 districts
011in orange county and we have 12 that include secondary schools meaning 12 districts that include a high school one or more so you will see that we have several district partners in orange county who still maintain and have thriving continuation high school programs lots of acronyms there for you and we could actually play a game to figure out if you can figure out who they are um but uh we can clarify that in the end when we get to our packet uh then we have monte vista which serves as our traditional 9 through 12 independent study program so you may remember that before again before these last couple of years we've been very creative since covid but prior to that you know students who needed an independent study program super flexible maybe could not attend
012school on a daily basis got to attend monte vista and uh independent study has been around for an exceptionally long time again this is a long-standing program in california we typically don't have independent study schools typically that's a program that lives within a school and in our district in particular we have students who have access to a to g coursework they're able to obtain their diploma be college eligible there's just certain activities they don't participate in because they're not at a comprehensive high school so they don't get all the bells and whistles of the regular experience of being in a comprehensive high school with activities and clubs and potentially athletics teachers who teach in these settings have appropriate credentials and they flex their credentials because they're in an alternative site as long as they have
013a valid teaching credential in a subject area they're able to kind of broaden their scope and teach multiple courses or i should say supervise multiple courses and then of course we encourage it all to be content aligned to grade level standards and again the outcomes for a independent study program how how does that differ from a continuation high school they both are graduation track diploma track and they both want to provide that flexible learning environment but independent study is even more flexible students only report to campus a minimum in high school at least of a few hours a week and they do truly independent work important things to this think about when we're considering programs and while i have this listed under monte vista it's really for all of them if you think about it
014but you know the things we consider are teacher quality we want to ensure that we're placing our students who are in a truly flexible environment with high quality individuals so the goals of these programs really should be to have real important high teacher quality we want to make sure that students have a process to get in and so we by law we cannot just force students into independent study we cannot just force students into continuation high schools they have to have a pathway to these programs so whether it's an application process or there is a district-wide process where we encourage a student to potentially be placed there with their families and they are part of that process and then we need to support that process to make sure that a student at any given time
015has the right to return to their home school and that's exceptionally important for us to keep in front of us is that we should be able to allow them to return we set standards for that we keep them on pace and track to try to return to their home schools if they choose ensuring that standards align curriculum is really important our board and our community wants to ensure that our students have access to high quality instruction and materials as their friends do or or other students do within our district and that takes work when you're looking at an independent study program are an alt-ed site because you constantly have to be bringing those teachers in and working with them to ensure that they're not missing a beat with all the new initiatives and or curricular
016shifts that are happening in this case at the secondary level we need to make sure we're reaching out to them regularly and having them part of a plc or a collaboration where they're constantly keeping up and then the other thing is we want to ensure quality school leadership and school climate one of the challenges any alternative site has is school climate because you're not getting the bells and whistles the activities the football games and all the things that bring excitement engagement to students we have to think of alt-ed differently and so we need to try to craft a really positive loving school environment with a little distance which is different because kids aren't coming every day potentially or their day is truncated because it's only maybe 240 minutes instead of 360 minutes so how do
017you create that sense of community and connection and shared expectations in a flexible learning environment and so we're making great progress with that with our cloud school we've done some tremendous work there but just think about that as you're thinking about independent study programs how do you keep kids connected when they're when they're distant they're away from us and legal compliance um we have to operate within state guidelines and and um there are rules that we have to follow when it comes to independent study and we have really spent the post-covet experience pulling ourselves in line with the regulations and rules that are that are governed by not only um you know ed code for instruction but ficmat for our business office to really keep us in line um to ensure that we're enrolling students
018who are age-appropriate they're attending when they need to we're tracking attendance and we have master agreements on file meaning that there is a process for students to be placed in these um you heard at our last board meeting a lot about cloud campus but i just want to remind us that we we have our new virtual program that really talks about achievement culture and learning style and is driving an instructional program there to really meet the needs of students in our district who came out of covidon who really have enjoyed the flexible distant learning and experience that they have had and so that's thriving and just a reminder that we did found that in 2020 as a response to covid and we said last time that students still enjoy it we have teachers who actually
019enjoy teaching digitally and the law this year gave us ab130 that said we had to provide an alternative setting so we're proud of the work we've done in cloud which you guys heard about a couple weeks ago and just talking about research you know when you think about alternative education in any program you think about the why why do we do this and if you can believe it the first continuation high school was founded in 1919. um so i was doing some research and finding some of the oldest ones and another another game we could play is if you know where it was founded and it was founded actually there's one one out of state which is in hawaii and then we have one here in california that was founded in whittier um adjacent to
020the correctional facility which was also the only high school at the time at the turn of the century and it really was a model to offer students this different place right and so that's where it roots from and that's why we we have challenges when we talk about alternative ed because why does it have a stigma or why do we not understand it because it was never founded to be something that we believe it to be today it was it was something for students who didn't necessarily at the time fit in whatever that meant but it's been a while so we've been doing this for over 100 years and i believe that we're doing it better than we were in 1919 that's for sure and then in the 1990-91 school year is when the state
021of california opened the door for all school districts to offer independent study as a program you always had a student or two who might have been ill or something had come up where they needed you know days off and the school would work with them but there were regulations that govern that as well and so that opened the door and again all of our partner districts um have a version of alternative ed when you think about early and middle colleges those go back as about 30 years ago and those are thriving right now in fact those are the next most popular campuses that districts are trying to to found in their school districts because people are seeing the benefit of the early college experience and the acquisition of early college credits people are really excited
022about that and i think parents are actually uh kind of catching on to why these schools are attractive for many students um and then of course you know we have information on the the um types of things that early college students gain when they leave our programs not only do they get a high school diploma they're earning college credits and then of course we have some that are actually acquiring that aa degree which is the goal so lots of different purposes for our programs and they've been around for a long time and so that's the purpose of this slide and just letting you know that in 2021 there were 430 continuation high schools in california and we have right now 800 comprehensive high schools in california so it's a small carve out and very few
023districts have actually closed their continuation high schools there have some there are some that have but they've modified their program and they've recreated it so to speak and so those students are still being served but not necessarily in a continuation high school model so those are the just kind of some faqs for you to kind of get you acquainted and now i want to be able to present to you what's in your folder so that we can have a discussion and and generate some thoughts um we cut thanks to my lovely assistant claire warner everything is color coded so we can speak by color which is is great your yellow document is your budget and so jeff trader's office got together with me and we prepared for you the cost for alternative education on the
024back side you'll have cloud which we can speak to in just a moment we have early college academic data which is in green that just kind of highlights for you um all the different academic data for the alternate bed sites you have early college back bay and monte vista there it also tells you how many people we have working at each site so you'll see if we just look at the green for just a moment where it says early college you'll see certificated classified health services special ed food services other staff and administration so it lets you know how we're staffed and i did the best i could to place people where i felt like it could be in a good category so um that tells you who works there and then we have some
025academic data for us um if we could move on to the salmon-colored document that's just early college data one of the things we want to think about when you think about early college is you know how is this different you know continuation high school talks about at promise youth students who've shown sign of risk of not graduating you have mona vista kids i independent study who want that exceptionally flexible lifestyle and then you have early college and you wonder well you know who goes there you know you have 220 kids there this year who in a sense also want a different environment and they want a more collegiate environment where it's a small environment they have a very focused course of study and their outcome is very specific they want to be able to obtain
026a level of college credits to get them in the door the profile of an early college student tends to be a first generation college student who needs that additional access whose family is encouraging them to get those you know 30 40 credits because they can go in potentially to college as a transfer student especially if they get that aaa they go right in as a junior that's a game changer for many of our families and then you have students who are just as i say sometimes mature beyond their years and they just don't want to deal with high school stuff they just want to go to school and they want to get an education that's going to get them out quicker so i've talked to some of the kids i spent a lot of time
027with dr martinez and his students and they're very honest about that sometimes they just don't want the high school experience and they just enjoy the smaller version of it and the pink document there you have subgroup data and this is just a traditional group data by school i think it's important for you to have a comparison you'll see all of our schools are on there but that way you know how our students are broken up by school and it's always powerful just to understand the numbers and who our students are although they are more than a subgroup our state does recognize them and place them into these categories and then you have like a grayish document right behind that which is just the student profile you know that has changed over the years someone asked
028me well what kind of student goes to monte vista in independent study because you know we need to think think differently about this and it's changed over the years and so when i was interviewing um some of our current staff and and mike wagner and some teachers you know they talked about you know before it used to be a lot of the professional athletes and student actors particularly in newport from corona del mar side of town we had a lot of students who were traveling for work they were young workers in those types of industries and so therefore they needed that flexible learning environment and so that was the historical student you know or i'm gonna you know i'm a gymnast i'm an ice skater and i'm gonna do four classes at newport harbor and
029then i need to do two at independent study so i can be gone by noon because i have practice till 8 o'clock at night every day which we still have a few of those but that used to be what i was told historically who we had and that's changed so now we're seeing a significant number of students who are coming forward who just don't and cannot go to school due to social emotional issues mental health issues and we're seeing an increased rise in anxiety and that's definitely started to happen before the pandemic but it's definitely a reality now so post-pandemic students are really struggling emotionally um with just not only coming to school but just operational functioning in life so um the pandemic has brought out a lot of different challenges for students who may
030have already been facing some of those challenges so it's changed a little bit so in talking with the teachers and talking with the principal really appreciating the support we've given the campus to help those students maintain their their status as an independent study student when you think about monte vista always remember that an independent study student here will check in once a week that's by law they're required to check in only once a week they can come more if they want and they get welcome to schedule more time but they only have to come once and so sometimes we ask ourselves right is that the best for a student who's fragile to only be seen once a week so it's just a question mark we ask because we look at every student differently and so
031that's been a discussion as we've been working with the administration at back bay and monte vista is to really pay attention to the students and is this still the best place for them and that goes back to once a student's placed in any alternative program they don't have to live there forever right so can we encourage them to come back to their home school is there a way that we can do a blended program with them and do a modified day and bring students back for four hours a day at their comprehensive school and then give them a few hours of independent study to meet the needs and then that's something to consider when you think about cloud because cloud is a virtual program where teachers in a virtual space are seeing students for the
032most part every day we've done a really great job with dr stevens this year of really ensuring the synchronous time or lifetime with teachers is up to date uh and that we're seeing kids on a regular basis so one of the things we've thought about is really thinking through independent study and monte vista kids kind of merging into cloud so could we merge some of those students into cloud so at least they're getting the flexible learning environment they can still do their studies and travels and other things that they need to do but at least we're seeing them with more regularity we'd have more eyes on them we'd have time to talk with them do those check-ins that may be potentially a very good option for some of our students is and and cloud by
033its very nature is um defined by the state as an independent study it's just delivered virtually and so for the auditors and the business people in our world it's considered independent study it's just a different delivery model so you'll see that often when you read about virtual schools it's a different delivery instructional model that may be something we want to consider when we talk through this today is like you know are there students that could be served through independent study through um through the cloud so that's something for us to talk about today as well and then your final document there which was added um this is a late ads this was not sent to you it is white it is the last paper because that's all i had and i wasn't going to ask
034claire again it's just a list of the um alternative education sites in our partnering districts and their classes minutes per week their hours and their grading period and this was actually presented two years ago to you so i stole this this morning from dr baumeister's presentation when you guys were converting cloud to the quarter system um this is i clipped it from there so just to kind of remind you of where we sit in orange county with our um our time and how we um how we operate the programs so part of what we want to have a discussion about today and why we have we have us together is really just to discuss ideas and concepts and or thoughts you have on the data that you've seen and what you've heard now that you've
035heard a lot about cloud last time you've heard more about back bay and monte vista and you know about early college does the um does the group have any other ideas and or suggestions that could come from this information and i'm welcome to pass the mike thank you thank you for all these documents and i love color coding um they speak to me um look one question that i wanted to throw into the mix also as we think about which direction which students are best suited i love the idea of well i'm going to ask my other question to um trustee bartow since i have like because it kind of prefaces the other one um with the montevista the gray sheets which i found super informative because it's like the blue writing was the intent
036of monte vista and the red writing is the reality of monte vista and the reality of monte vista is the reality also from the subgroup data pile the reality of back bay profile it seems like even though the intent of it was maybe the profile of cloud or early college even but who it's actually serving is really indicative of more of a back bay type student so the merging potential there but then we do have to address the intent which is the blue so who could best serve the blue and that would be a cloud campus it sounds like that's that's the thinking there so thank you for that because that really helped delineate the two groups of students and so my question in getting at the back bay students is um what is the
037relationship between the percentage of kids at back bay or monte vista frankly at this moment in time versus five years ago and access schools what percent of those kids have come in or out of access have some touch to access schools and then come back into our system because that to me is one of the bigger concerns is the access schools because when we lose these high-risk kid who is having difficult situations or some discipline issues or whatever and they go to access we lose sort of control over them and we can't give them counseling or wrap around services because they're not our kid for that time period um so that's something that's just been concerning me on another front but this discussion kind of speaks to it too because is there a way that
038we can keep our kids here and rather than access we keep them here and we give them all the services that they'll need which might mean back bay might need four counselors or two psychiatrists or whatever it's going to need but to make sure that we best serve the kids that are tending to be over i mean we have 20 percent of the homeless kids there in monte vista 12 at back bay so that's the high risk kids that are going to need the wraparound services so just understanding that access lincoln do we have to send them to access or can we keep them here that's a great point and access in our district and access to access so for those of you who don't know what access is it is a county school that
039is an alternative education site funded by ocde that any orange county school district has the ability to send their students to and the majority of students who attend the orange county access program have had typically a disciplinary action against them that is 99 of the students who attend access so in our district we have exercised our rights to send students to access at various moments in time through student services um that is something that we have discussed as an educational services team with student services that that's really not where we want to go that what you've described is true that once you let a student go that you don't really have control over their educational program and support and we will always have the option to receive them back because by law a student can
040only be removed from their home district for 12 months basically one year based on their expulsion you're not expelled for life where young people they have not they have um they have the responsibility we have the responsibility to accept them unless they've been incarcerated youth that's a whole different that's a whole different group of students that's different but if you have a student who's just done something really bad made a bad judgment and they go away for a year they have the right to return we have as a district uh executed that differently over the years and that's something that we are working on and we have we have decided that we're not sending kids to access just to send them to access they can only go if they they've only placed their let's put
041it that way if we cannot accept them because they become a safety issue we're working directly with our new administrative director um sarah coley on that because she oversees that now and so she has been in agreement with that vision to not just send away students who may be just not meeting the standard thank you so much and then the one thing that i just want to clarification before it goes to ever because it said in the red a large group of back-based students are enrolled in monte vista because they're not allowed to attend access what makes someone not allowed so that's us saying no so what's happened there uh so what's happened in ed services is for example a principal come forward and say i want to send carrie taurus to access because i
042cannot deal with her anymore she's just not doing anything but she's also not lighting any fire but she's not doing anything we have denied their request we have said no you're not going to send them to access you're actually going to find a place for them here so let's call mike wagner and let's figure out based on the student profile should we send them to continuation school depending on their credit situation or do we do monte vista like what's best the next option we need to start discussing is how can cloud support that so as we have cloud as a program that does have a high school component and a very good one at that how do we leverage cloud to also support some of these students because again a student who's not successful who's
043not attending school is not engaged in replacing them in an independent study program where we're only asking them to engage for four hours a week again may not may not be the best so let's look at cloud and how do we leverage that because now i can meet with that student every day for three hours maybe or every other day for four hours to have eyes on them and ensure that they're we're doing what we can to provide them with what they need following up on that thank you um i was looking at it green i can't hear you though eat it okay um so in looking at the numbers again um for back band monte vista i'm for the um english language learners and the numbers there are quite high back bay it looks
044like there's 40 percent and monte vista is 29 i'm not seeing on the um the list of staff that there is an eld teacher that is designated to each of those schools do we have any ld person we have not we have not historically no so we're working on that and we actually did fly positions mid-year we had not we didn't have a lot of success this year trying to get eld teachers in the district because we flew them i want to say in december or january it was late um that has been something that again we just haven't had eyes on and so you're right that anytime we place by law an english learner at a school site we have to have english learner services and then when you get to a certain percentage
045you need to have a teacher that can provide that level of instruction and so we are adding eld teachers in several different locations in the district back bay being one of them what is that number that they would require well you look for a class so all students need to have um eld support so we have different levels of eld students come in as a one two or three or they used to call them beginners newcomers right so the language has changed over the years um and so for us to hire a teacher we look at well how else could we support them if we only had a handful so we only had like three or four or five can we do this because some teachers have authorizations within their credentials to provide that in
046english um so we look at that before we start hiring but when you get to a point where you can't just have it one section where you're doing more then you say okay we need to hire a teacher we also look at levels because students again they're not all the same language proficiency level so we need to be able to have a teacher who could have multiple levels to be able to provide that and i don't know that we have looked as deeply as that in the past as we are right now and then kind of a follow-up on services related to back bay um it looks like we have um an on-call social worker an on-call behavior specialist is there it sounds to me particularly if we have students that may be close to
047access or just have a really high amount of aces adverse childhood experiences that need support rather than removal from their original comprehensive high school is there a plan to have more support staff like a full-time social worker at back bay a full-time behavior specialist full-time support because these students are very at risk so what we're doing in collaboration with student services is we're taking back feedback from the sale team so what we've done as a district is we've placed these types of supports all around the district through teams and they go out and they support schools and those that have part-time have part-time because of potentially the numbers of students they serve and so one of the challenges we have is that while back they may only have for example 110 students today their high
048need students and so we're trying to get feedback from the sites to say is this plan working for you are these services working for you because if they aren't and they can base that on data then we can say potentially there's the the chance for us to be able to provide more support but this is our first year really where we're really putting uh support staff out into the schools and we're trying to collect the information to see what's working and what's not thank you and then i just have one more question um about the cost um for which one was that i emailed you about it oh for for cloud the the more comparable costs per student so cloud um so on your buff yellow sheet i don't know what you call this it's
049yellow i guess mary yes canary so you have on one side it says alternative ed cost second interim budget and so you'll see um a back bay cost line monte vista the two of them combined early college and then your comprehensive high school and then you see on the very bottom the per people basically a rough per pupil allotment that you have there are expense when you look at cloud cloud is on the other side and and again this is one that i shared with you in the presentation before but we're at about four million dollars for this current school year so when you look at per pupil when we were at 2200 students two years ago with cloud at 11 million dollars our per pupil is roughly about 5 300. so if you go
050back two years we were investing in cloud about fifty three hundred dollars and jeff you can check my math but that that could be could be a few cents off but about fifty three hundred dollars when you go into this current year when you're looking at um our current investment of about four million and we kind of had a high of 555 students at one point that drove our number um to about 7 500 dollars per pupil and right now we are at uh let's see we're at 246 students because any alternative education site kind of so it fluctuates excuse me but we always have to stop at the high um and so we started off high and so that's where we're at with the so our budget was kind of built on that that
051555 ish pupils um and that's about 7 500 so we have definitely um and i know you were um to your question trustee anderson was you know it wasn't completely perfect in math um because we over funded and jeff came out with a formula in his office to fund a cloud student like what we thought it would cost then we added ended up adding staff and so it went up a little bit yeah first of all thank you for this robust package staff thank you for all the work and dr torres um i it is evident that we definitely need to have this we should be having this discussion um as trustee ursula pointed out there the the intent versus the reality is is a wake-up call to all of us and i think that
052we definitely can do better um i do have a couple of questions one is back bay switched to the quarter for this year right have we seen any movement of needles the needle moving in a better direction because of that or are we how are we looking on that yes so students earn 15.4 credits now is that right can we get a got a thumbs up yes per quarter so yes we are seeing students able to acquire more credits more rapidly and so this will be our first year with data to see if that improved rate our graduation rates or not okay and if that's the only sole data set we look at for that but that's something that we're definitely tracking all right and uh speaking of um graduation what is needed to graduate
053the graduation rates would you would someone be able to break down or at least give us insight as to the 59 grad rate is it because certain students are leaving the program that's they're not completing them their education at back bay or what are some of the factors involved in that great question so looking at graduation rates in california is interesting because they measure two things cohort data and then you're basically your annual data so your class data so the class of 2022. so whoever is in seat by october second see beds day is who they look at for the class of 2022 that's one number and that typically tends to be higher because students will 10 if you're there in your senior year you tend to graduate with that class the challenge becomes the
054cohort data because they look at you and they say okay you started in 2018 you've changed schools so you fall out of that you fall out of the data sets that you really kind of should belong to and so you end up getting a lower cohort data so that's like high surface level data george you're right there so he's agreeing with me so that's good um and then the other piece to just consider is students do leave you know and they just sleep here or disappear and that has been um that's been a challenge for us especially with our our new influx of foster youth and homeless youth with without within our district especially is we have a lot of students who aren't completing the program um and they don't um you know they don't
055naturally go to adult ed because one of the other things we can do which we don't operate our own adult school program we send our students to huntington beach which works well for us but we can do better at helping those students and say okay if you want to exit with us you know then go to adult ed and enroll and at least give it a shot and that would change our graduation rate somewhat but still not that cohort data because that cohort data is going to track that person regardless of where they land and that came out new with the california dashboard that wasn't something we were always held to for all those years but the california really had an interest in saying to schools you should try to keep your kids as long
056as you can we're going to watch you for that and measure you against each cohort two more questions just real quick how do we how do we compare as far as our grad rates to the other 11 school districts that we we listed on this is it i mean are we are they also in the 50 percentile or 60 out of grad graduates and if you don't have the question now we we can come back to it so i'd be happy to compile that data i actually put out a survey to ocd partners so my java likes on friday just to kind of collect that data and i would imagine i'll have that in a week or two dr olmsted's helping me with that i asked for a couple of other pieces of data from
057alternative bed sites that weren't currently visible on their websites i will say having been in two three former districts with alternative ed sites i would consider 59 on the improvement side meaning we have room to grow there i think that um there's there's definitely a place for us to to move up um i i feel like that is a little bit low um but i i don't want to say that without not having all the information and knowing that we have we've had a really difficult couple of years and so that you know our our look should also be back um even prior to the pandemic because that's really rough to look at and to determine how we landed there okay one more question and then i'll give it to you sean um she keeps
058just checking the pink the pink sheet uh i noticed there's a there's a some gate subgroup data and then what was the intent of putting that in there that was uh was it just to oh yes so [Music] so um oh i'm good i'm good just to give us no i was just i'm sorry i was reading the wrong way so no gate was just to give you another data set so we do measure students you know they can become gay identified we just wanted to be able to show you that's another set of just a set of information when you look at subgroup data um and you know sometimes we don't always know or realize that we actually have gate students who fall into you know our most gifted sometimes our most high risk
059yeah that's why i said it was nice to see this because a lot of times they need to belong somewhere else and all to add makes sense for that track mine is a simple question i i was curious to hard number enrollment data we've got percentages and i appreciate that which shows a different thing but how many students are actually enrolled in you mentioned back they had 110 that was good i was taking notes and cloud campus was a high of 555 and and were about 246 and i totally understand the flexibility of the numbers going up and down because it's students as need and at this time of year they're working their little fingers to the bone to get back to their high school if they're the really hard credit recovery kids or they're
060not or they're comfortable where they are but mainly how many kids are officially enrolled in monte vista and then comparison with the enrollment data and you know that i've been asked i ask for that all the time just because it does tell its own story and i can provide that to you so i can get you current enrollment data and i can get you current student numbers but not by percentage right but actual numbers in each setting thank you krista while you pass that down to your question jeff and the team are putting together a multi-year study so they're already working on that once you brought it up they started to engage the work and so it's enrollment over years by school by grade level projections and also transfer data so it'll be it'll be
061comprehensive and we have a district enrollment report that comes out every month and it's just something that i always looked at and did it in my head and said oh look at this this is staying the same and going up or going down it's just more data i realized it was kind of in two forms people that have to be there and people that want to be there so we look at back bay and in some form i guess some monte vista students that kind of have to be there they're pushed there however there's a huge opportunity to have like early college we see how successful that is and those are the people that want to be there and it's thriving and i hate having the stigma of those that you know have to be
062there oh i'm here because i blah blah blah you know in in and so it's interesting to me as i were looking at this it would be interesting as we move forward to see how can we get those that have to be there to want to be there in ways and offer those transitions because maybe those people that are you know those students that are in that because they have to be there are already resigned to the fact that this is going to be their life or whatever is going to happen to them so rethinking you know what does continuation high school look like and giving in those other opportunities and when i was thinking about it you know a lot of times hands-on giving them those job skills school's not for everyone but you
063know working is actually easier so involving cte and our in our alternative education not just for those that have to be there but those that want to be there because if i look at our jobs over the last two years they have completely changed right you know i'm working from home more even though i was before but i working from home we don't really travel all these things have have has changed so our education system has to go with that as well and i think we have a unique opportunity to create alternative ed without having any kind of stigma around it for anyone that would want to to do something like that you know i mean the opportunity with cloud campus and monte vista and having that hey i go to school you know online
064and then i'm able to do something over there that kind of sits nicely with maybe a cte program as well so i just as i'm looking at this there's maybe i'm brainstorming a little more about what it could be but i just think that it's an exciting opportunity for us as a district to really be like best in class when it comes to alternative ed and provide students with that you know next level education that kind of excites me a couple other things that i was thinking of and i'm not necessarily sure if they're really questions just thoughts um as i'm looking at cloud campus and i'm talking about you know elementary programs as well there's been a big push on the home school front um for you know various reasons either curriculum based or
065whatever they want to do but they do this where they are in person two two days out of the year so that would be very interesting to see how we can you know as we carry on with cloud how can we do that where they're in person as well say two days a week or they have a kind of hybrid where we don't necessarily shove that hybrid program to our teachers in the mainstream elementaries but we can offer that maybe in cloud and then early college i hear a ton from parents that would love to have their regular students that are in uh you know the comprehensive high schools to be able to be have uh ability to take those community college classes and get that opportunity but you know they they don't want to
066go to early college because they are you know they do want to do the full high school experience i guess you would call it um so just having some sort of opportunity maybe to do to do that and then i think i mean early college is so successful i would love to be able to you know put more students there and and potentially go for i know that there's a certain profile of these students but i don't think that early college is is necessarily for a certain profile i think it's for a certain profile that wants to graduate you know early and get those those but they don't have to be first generation students as well and i think there's a really rich educational environment that early college can have so while i maybe don't
067have questions i just wanted to explain my thoughts on this and just say you know this is just really really interesting and and i guess maybe the question would be what are we also thinking about other alternative ads and how i was some of my statements i appreciate your comments um in in terms of you know how do you enhance and rebrand and kind of make this place a place that kids want to be and um we're working right now actually um dr shaka lisa snowden and looking at the opportunities for cte and rop to be able to push into the back bay environment and lisa snowden has been pushing for that since i came aboard that was one of the things she asked for i really want to get something over there to be
068able to offer to the students so that's that's something that's already on people's minds and we're excited about that um in response to early college oh let me back up really quick um in regards to you know just how do we get kids to love to be there one of the ideas that we were brainstorming with the principal and um our our leadership team and ed services was you know sometimes when you don't as as a leader as a principal and teachers if you don't really understand what's happening in alternative ed and around you you kind of just only know what you know so one of the ideas we had thought about was um as partnering with access um you don't know anything about access partnering with access because they have an edops division so
069you know educational opportunities and options division to have some of their leaders and champions who have recrafted and rebranded alt-ed in their districts just collaborate with us and talk with our teachers and our principals about what this could look like right so just how do you how do you to flip it so that people feel good about attending there and you can kind of reduce that stigma so that's an idea that we had as we were as we were chatting with our principal um and then just in response to early college and college opportunity we are opening our dual enrollment program we are we just got the agreement mid-year this year so that we could allow our students to take classes and have them on our other school sites as well so we're looking forward
070to that we're working through that right now and that'll be coming soon so we'll be able to offer different things um throughout the district that are college-level coursework and then while um while the data shares that you know typically the first you know a first generation college student lands at an early college we offer it to all and we'd be inclusive to all it's just you know in a district like ours as well where we have students who are well resourced in some in some areas they gravitate towards different programs where this could be i mean if parents realized your kid could get an aaa and actually go in as a junior and go to some of the top tier universities we saw a list of where our kids go you would cut out somewhere
071of a hundred two hundred thousand dollars worth of your child's education just by allowing them to have access to our program but again it's that well do i really understand what's happening there and yeah so we have work to do just to continue to communicate effectively regarding those programs and recruitment you know just recruiting to to all and making sure that we target we target everyone so that we can get a mix of students too at early college yeah question on the um cloud cal cloud campus and and elementary programs and that's an all ed program but are we thinking about having more in-person time or you know just try to round out that program a bit more so one of the things that john and i can work on is with um our principal
072is gathering input from the teachers because some of the teachers have suggested like can i meet with my students off-site at the park and go on a hike right can we do a craft day can we have a science experiment yeah like many field trips but where parents drive to a local park because we you know because we wouldn't necessarily bring little on the back bay campus perhaps during the day that's kind of it could be a challenge for us but can they go somewhere could we have another district site where they go and they can do activities where they get to connect and have those authentic connections and then hands-on experiences but it wouldn't be like regular but enough where they'd have those opportunities so that's something that dr stevens has brought up too
073so that's exciting awesome great this is early college high school fill up does it fill up like is it yes so i mean we're just saying who goes first okay but yes it when i say it fills up we don't close the doors right but we do um staff it appropriately and as students come in we just make adjustments and and dave's really good about um about watching enrollment but it pretty much hovers around the same okay yeah yeah i know we're over our time so i won't take a lot and i just wanted my comment really was on all this information which i think is all great um the montevista profile is a thing also for me that was the most remarkable because i did have a childhood who used montevista for the original
074intent of it and to see the changes in it there's obviously things that we probably should be doing to change that um or change how we use mona vista because as we've seen people are working from home now and there's some people even though people are coming back to work companies are calling them back there are some people who don't want to come back for various reasons not just covet they just their circumstances are that they would prefer to work at home i think the same thing is for students who are in the cloud campus i'd know some who went there originally for covid and found out it's a better learning environment for their children and they're really thriving in that so you know to me it's important to keep a semblance of that as
075we move forward um and um early college is is i know not just for i it the original intent i was here when it started so i know it was for first generation initially but i know also there are some families even from corona del mar high school who have decided to send their students there because some came from other countries and in england it's more like the high school they had or something like that um but also the fact that their kids don't need all the extracurricular things they're not so compelled but they really would like to take advantage of more of the college courses and having that opportunity for to have an aaa degree is pretty spectacular um so anyway i definitely think there are areas that i know you all will come
076up with some good options for us to consider well i'll go because it sounds like that's fine all right um thank you this is really great i think this gives us a unique opportunity to have all this data because we wouldn't have it other we would i mean we wouldn't have it otherwise yeah especially with like the cloud um i'm kind of parsing it it's just it seems like there's kind of three groups of students um elementary and then um high school who are a little more self-directed but needed an alternative environment and then those who for whatever reason anxiety or credit recovery are just struggling and need that kind of um hands-on so i'm thinking about it that way and how i like how we're bringing that college dual enrollment to our comprehensive high
077schools and rop as well or providing all those things but i'm thinking similar to kind of your point how we kind of look at this um for example when i was in college in austria there was the the school by us it was a high school it was for students who maybe needed a little more help and a little more of a reason to be at school but it was more rop focused with a little bit of college course focus so basically when they graduated they had everything that they needed to go and be successful um i think that even if you've got a student who's got credit recovery maybe offering them a college course is not the obvious thing but on the other hand if you're saying hey this is your your way into
078the rest of your life maybe that's something that we um approach just just an idea um and then for the um elementary how many elementary students did we have in in cloud because i feel like there's a lot of kids who really like that for various reasons but 186 that's 186 okay this year i believe we have that let's see here yeah 100 oh 160 elementary as of two weeks ago and 186 for secondary yeah 160. okay but it was higher at the beginning of the year but that's what we have today yeah i think i mean because i think we'll always have that contingent of of elementary kids and i think this is really good to focus on the secondary because we haven't looked at it a ton but um keeping in mind those
079kids who you know got various um disabilities or you know reasons i know my dyslexic son would probably rather learn in that environment so um anyways those are just my comments change memory thank you um i liked what you were sharing about the educational opportunities it's just kind of changing that language even something as simple as flexible learning environments or something that removes that stigma i think we have we have stigmatized in so i think just thinking of creative ways to call it something a bit different i love how we change eld to multilingual there's just you know an asset kind of a mindset instead of it being a negative um and i think something that stood out to me recently that um dr joachim said was we no longer segregate students with special needs
080a lot of the students that are back bay in monte vista have been separated for a variety of reasons but they're also some of our most vulnerable students and so i would love i think it's a great opportunity as we lean more into community schools and having wraparound support um and including maybe executive functioning it sounds like there's a lot around kind of self-direction that's needed are there any ideas about how we could kind of incorporate or change our model of thinking about that the entire process how it would impact community schools or how community schools could impact how we think about this well i think that's part of our discussion today and um one of the probably logical outcomes of our discussion is to be able to go back to our team and start
081brainstorming i think we do have some early concepts of where we can make some improvements but we do want to start talking about that to figure out how we create a more inclusive environment you know i don't remember wes you probably would when axa changed from alternative ed to educational options called the edops group that was a couple years ago because everyone recognized that that that brings about a certain feeling to people in connotation thank you um and so the state has been doing a lot with our groups to really change that we went from at-risk to at promise at the same time so we no longer call kids at risk they're at promise and that that does matter but part of our work and and that's why i ask for dr shaka and dr
082barrowmeister to be here is to be able to start thinking through how could we how could we start looking at what a new structure could look like to be most supportive of the students who need the most help i would say though because you're fine um but you brought something earlier about um mental health support counselors psychologists that kind of support certainly that's in the wheelhouse for community schools to have a community school resource center at back bay for example to have those services there daily it's it's a perfect fit but that doesn't get to the program design of like a net options conversation but it can be a part of a comprehensive solution for for improving the learning opportunities awesome thank you and while we have george here i would love to i love
083some of this information but i would love to have um our data chat that we sometimes use we have specifically around this but i mean overall as well so because it's amazing you know our wonderful assistant has been out of the office and so we are we were waiting for um susan to get back yes george was aware and has the data and everything ready to go just to get them scheduled this is a great discussion it's actually very exciting to be able to enhance and rebrand i think you use those two uh very powerful words so go team all right thank you so much this was really i was looking forward to this even before the admin at the hoa went to yesterday was asking me all about what we were doing tomorrow um
084i really appreciate all this data and i'm going to keep looking at it we will follow up on additional data requested for um the actual enrollment and enrollment numbers by subgroup as well yeah and i appreciate the folder because i anticipate more stuff going in it puts your cloud presentation in there too yes right here the colors in consistency all right so then i'm going to adjourn with 244 you