WCCUSD Special Board of Education Meeting for March 09, 2022

001i'd like to say good evening to everyone and i want to welcome everyone uh to the board meeting this evening which is march to the 9th and we will open up with the pledge allegiance and then after the pledge allegiance will be the land acknowledgements you understand 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 just tomorrow now we'll go to the land acknowledgement okay i apologize for that delay we recognize that we are presently on the lands of the churcheno molechma karkin oloni peoples and acknowledge them as the first inhabitants of the land we currently occupy all right thank you now we are moving on to a4 welcome meeting procedures once again welcome to

002tonight's meeting we're allowed to get um closed session but therefore [Music] we the board here to serve the public commitment on any uh discussed enclosed session item uh that is us agendas the board will adjourn to close session and convene an open session to continue with the regular agenda meeting at 6 30. if you are attending the meeting in person here at the job and you wish to make a public comment and now on to close session you would need to submit an orange request to address the board formed to indicate your desire to speak if participating by zoom you will need to raise your hand by clicking on the appropriate icon in the zoom app or by pressing star 9 if accessing the medium by phone there is no yielding a time to another

003speaker and there is no substitution a speaker permitted please finish up and raise your hand the coming cards now if you are here in the audience and if you are in the zoom on any agenda item please get in line to speak by raising your hand now to access translation of the agenda click the top of the web page using the word english for translation into multiple languages media interpretation services are available by zoom by clicking on the globe icon at the bottom of the screen due to the brown app board members cannot discuss any items that are not on the agenda and do not usually respond to items presented in public come in please note that the order of business may be changed without notice now we'll go to the roll call dr hurst

004thank you mr president president christian here present trustee clerk gonzalez hoy thank you dr hurst president trustee reckler good evening i'm president trustee phillips not here at trustee smith folds good evening everyone can you hear me yes good present all present with the exception of trustee phillips at this time all right thank you thank you now we are moving to a6 the disclosure items to be discussed in closed session government code 549 57-7 tonight to tonight the the board will discuss a public employee uh uh discipline dismissal and release complaint and i believe that's the only one we have and it's it and basically are there any public comments for this item there are two public comments okay thank you so we have two and so we will go to the two public comment our

005first public comment is joseph glatzer please be mute yourself thank you please unmute yourself okay sorry i guess you didn't hear me so i was just raising my hand for the regular public comment so should i lower my hand and then raise it again after you guys finish with this yes please thank you thank you our next public speaker is idrisa ladier please unmute yourself good evening board and dr hearst this is idrisa and uh all of you know me i wear mini i wear many hats you all know me but tonight i'm here as a parent first uh and also as an aipac delegate for two schools i noticed on the agenda uh regarding this reduction of workforce and i know it's on the earlier agenda i don't know if it falls into this

006as well so that's what i'm speaking on um i have been around since the before the inception of aipac and asap and oasa and i have seen the work that oasa has done and it is just disheartening to me that in your budgetary crisis the first thing that you would think to do is to get rid of staff when you already don't have enough staff as it is uh this will be an excuse to dismantle oasis which is just a pc way to say our kids will no longer get the few resources we fought so hard for all of the meetings and resolutions were for nothing you need to know that oase isn't the problem asap is the problem asap is what should be disbanded because it's dysfunctional mess by design oasis has come in

007and done the work that needs to be done for our children at least as much as they're allowed to do the asap executive committee makes it more difficult for them to operate because they think they have authority and that is ridiculous and doctor her shame on you for allowing them this to happen in your office you need to get rid of the old biddies listen to the people who are doing the work and disband asap allow oasis to work directly with the parent delegates because you're giving too much power to people that don't have our best interests in mind you're giving power to people who don't even have kids in this district haven't even had grandkids in this district and i can say that they can't speak for me and my children and i can

008give bring a hundred other black families that can say that they can't speak for them as well so i'm just saying as you go behind these closed doors and talk about reducing forces asap is one you should not touch because if you do you're going to have more than a problem with these black families and i speak for more than one thank you all right thank you thank you and now we will go to closed session and we'll see everybody back here president christian i have a point of order go ahead we still have hands up are we sure that those are for not for closed session well they're going down now so there's one hand still up are we sure that's for is that for now or for later can we be sure our

009next public speaker will be zelon harrison please unmute yourself hi good evening boys thank you all for i know y'all got a lot going on with y'all thank you um trustee jamila smithfold for making sure the public gets hurt i appreciate that i just want to say i i was a past generation and i just want y'all to know we want our children to have the best of whatever y'all can do and i know it's a lot going on and a lot of children are not showing up but that last caller got praying i'ma pray for her and i'ma pray for y'all that y'all make some good decisions that we all can win at this black students are hurting and we need educators we need the right things there that's gonna help our children thrive

010please make your decisions based on data based on resources we as a black parent we put a lot together and we don't want to tour down due to budget cuts please make sure that you think about how important black educators are when you're doing your cuts because we don't have that many and that we have resources left in place for black students please and thank you have a good evening okay thank you and now we will proceed on uh to close session and so we will reconvene back here at 6 30. one welcome back from closed session and now we will proceed uh with the march 9th special meeting with the west country council unified school district to assess translation of the agenda click the top of the web page using the word english for

011translation into multiple languages the meeting interpretation the meeting interpretation here available in the zoom by clicking on the globe icon at the bottom of the screen due to the ongoing covet 19 concerns that matters in which the board of education meeting and continue has changed thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation as we experiment with new ways to conduct the people business while allowing the maximum participation and hearing to our values of uh the request and of the community the board will hear public uh comment tonight if you are attending the meeting in person you would need to submit an orange request to address the board formed to indicate your desire to speak on the agendas item please finish those up hand in those area and and staff members in participating by zoom

012you will need to raise your hand by clicking the appropriate icon in the zoom app or by pressing star nine accessing the meeting by phone there is no yielding of time nor is a substitution a speaker is permitted if you are making a public comment from zoom please raise your hand now due to the brown hat board members cannot uh discuss items that are in the agenda and do not usually require uh to items are presented in public comment please note that the order of business may be changed without notice for all of you who are new to the meeting we have the parliamentary who is miss dunny and the board of the parliamentary uh of the information that is presented tonight speaking tonight speaking agenda goes in this order we will start with trustee

013smith falls we will have trustee phillips we we have clerk gazelles hoy and we will have trustee reckler and we will have the student trustees trustee flores and trustee leon president christian i have a point of privilege yes go ahead um two things one miss maria's hand was up i don't know what she needed but her hand was up so i want to make sure that we acknowledge her hand two i would like the parliamentarian to speak to why we are changing it tonight just last week we were told that what we do is you raise your hand to be recognized and we go in order to vote so like the parliamentarian to speak to why we're changing tonight thank you all right thank you so we is the parliamentary online yes i'm here okay

014go ahead um so i do not know why you are changing it tonight we should not change it tonight we the chair will certainly and i'll be watching the raising of the hands too for the trustees you should be raising your hand waiting to get recognized and then speaking because otherwise what we're doing is we're pulling every single person and um mr chair if i could just remind you uh to ask if we have anything to report out from the closed session yes thank you i just want to make a clarification uh to the board it was the board president and the clerk that made the decision for this evening that we would go in the regular order that they would call out so the board president and the clerk made the decision all right

015thank you and so now we will report out uh from closed session that hurts anything to report from closed session there's nothing to report all right thank you and now we'll proceed to a before the agenda review and adoption okay board we're at public we're at the opening public comment okay we will proceed to public comment and then um at the public comment then we will go into the gender review adoption president christian going to murder um i did you wanted me to remind you that we got to let the public know that we're gonna have two opportunities of public comment tonight as well uh now and after the budget presentation um i mean i just did it for you but i'm reminding you thank you for uh the clarification so so tonight we will

016have regular public comment on indy on any agenda's item um but we will come back when we do the presentation we will have the presentation and then after the presentation you will have the opportunity to um speak on those items from the presentation uh for tonight so so we'll have pub regular public comment the agenda eyes and then we'll go from there president christian may i ask a clarifying question yes go ahead so we're going to have public comment then we're going to have the presentation directly after the presentation are we doing a second public comment or are you doing questions from the board first and then public comment or you're doing public comment first and then questions from the board and then discussion and then vote or then motion discussion vote what's the order

017please that hurts so for my conversation with the board president we're actually going to have public comment now and then we'll have public comment also after the presentation and the public will go first after the presentation and then the board will go over their regular protocol with the questions and comments and discussion so it'd be public comment presentation public comment board questions any motion and then discussion yes ma'am and then vote yes that's the order okay thank you thank you all right and now we will go to public comment and inside i don't know how many we have here and then 18 18. okay and then after we finish the in here inside we'll they'll be going to the zoom out all right our first public comment for tonight and veronica diaz hello i'm with

018teamsters 856 we represent your classified employees and i'm here to point out that we have had a very nasty trend of cutting employees only to outsource their jobs within the last decade or so we laid off bilingual graduate tutors a couple years ago and now we have a million dollar a year app that teaches english learning students english i'm wondering if perhaps the actual employees were more helpful to them than this million dollar a year app you are voting to cut the only copy repair technicians in the entire district tonight the district has blatantly told us that they intend to outsource those jobs with service agreements you are firing people from this community and hiring outside contractors from outside of this community that is what is happening here tonight you are voting to fire dozens

019and dozens of playground supervisors tonight the folks that you all deemed essential workers and handed out millions of meals during the pandemic with no health care who are still misclassified as substitute employees not accruing a single benefit that's who you're firing tonight this district suffers from low attendance the school community outreach workers who make calls to parents are on the chopping block our gsm unit plumbers locksmiths concrete masons electricians are dying a slow and steady death we used to have a maintenance department big enough to build entire sections of buildings onto schools now we contract out every single routine project claiming lack of staff while the district fails to post vacancies in those departments we have active grievances for that the district classified our members as essential workers during a deadly pandemic and i would

020like to fire those same people in favor of the six figure attorneys consultants contractors and directors who are going to hand the layoff notice to them how can you move to fire these folks while we still are hiring for their positions and we do not have enough how can you move to fire principals and teachers who are doing two jobs principles are supporting schools as well as substituting in classes because of lack of teachers i understand that firing your employees is the most efficient way to save money in the short term but is it the most effective way to run this district in the long term your staff is worth having a negative budget in the short term while you wait for money from the state that you know is coming our next public comment

021is pedro agradano good evening i am one of the trace pro i work with hvac you doubled or work with the air purifiers didn't bring anybody in we do it because we care about the kids we care about the community what we want is for you to vote no on the cuts and start shopping from the top like miss uh trustee smith false has said when you were adding all these directors you can save a lot of jobs by making sure that the people you hire to build the schools build them right we get a school rather than spending hundreds of millions to build the school and then having to spend millions on repairing a brand new school and after that doesn't work you pass it on to the trades you need to make sure

022that you get what you're paying for and not not start trying to build a new technology or trying out new different stuffs at your schools what is simple and works for the kids that should be your priority and cutting all these jobs that help the kids is not the way to go you say that you you look after the kids but by shopping all these positions you're saying that you don't care about the community you don't care about the kids because most of these people they live around this community have kids in the school and yet you want to end their job so that basically not only are you putting somebody else in the on unemployment on hindering the ability we already have enough kids that don't have enough to eat that don't have clothes

023to be and we try to do our best to help them during the community so i urge you and i expect this board to vote no on all these cuts thank you our next public comment is joey tubber president christian joey tabor can we get the name of the man that just spoke his name is pedro agradano thank you okay this is not my first go around with all these cuts i've been here for 32 years and it's always the same thing whenever you guys don't have enough money you want to cut classified we're the ones that make the wheel go around we're the ones who do all the work at the schools and the maintenance and everybody else cutting us who's going to do the work i talk to secretaries all the time they

024are overworked underpaid and they don't know what to do they're not doing anything in their job description they're doing five other jobs and that's not right and i hear it in their voice they're tired they're disgusted they don't know what to do this is absolutely horrific this is the worst cut i've i've been around with one of the cuts a couple years ago for three consecutive years we had six furlough days that we had to do i've heard none of that prior to that we gave up nine percent of our salary why don't you guys take a look at your own salaries and try and do some cuts from that so you know we have too many directors we are too heavy at the top cutting from the people who make your wheel go round

025is not the way to go so i'll stop right now our next public comment is gabriel micheletti hello i'm a first grade teacher at verde elementary and as a first grade teacher i know i teach students the foundations the rest of their education will be based on in terms of these basics there's nothing more foundational to education than the educators and the other incredible support staff that keep our sites clean safe and functioning for our students how do you simultaneously be holding recruiting fairs because we don't have enough educators in march and be cutting positions this is truly nonsensical spending tens of millions of dollars on outside contracts is not only nonsensical it's unethical these are not the essentials the essentials are educators janitors secretary scouts and other site staff cuts need to be kept

026as far away as possible from our schools and instead be made on the record high spending on outside contracts the students families and educators of this district have suffered enough at the hands of irresponsible leadership that chooses to prioritize consultants and district admin over the very core foundation our students need in order to succeed part of the budget shortfall in 2019 led to the agreement to cut contracts and in a few short years you balloon these contracts again spending millions on these things that are far less consequential for students if consequential at all do consultants provide clean safe classrooms do consultants provide food do consultants provide the education the therapeutic services the emotional development this might be the simplest decision to come before this board all year are you going to cut teachers when we

027already do not have enough educators are you going to cut other support stuff when we don't have enough support staff we've had classes all year without permanent teachers not being fully cleaned or will you make your budget work by not spending 20 million on outside contracts that do not directly impact students are you here for the students of this district or not our next public comment is sado wilson good evening everyone i'm sada wilson i'm an educator at richmond high i'm also an executive board member of united teacher richmond and president of the black black educators network wcc usd is currently projected to spend an all-time record amount of money 71 million dollars on outside contracts are consultants outside contracts should be cut before school site staff wcc usd is projecting that they will spend

028more than double the money they have spent in the last five years on materials and supplies including expensive apps programs that not every school has access to before cutting school site staff we need to rein in and spend on non-essentials wcc usd has over 20 vacant teaching positions and over 100 vacant classified positions and that number has probably changed just how things are going lately our schools are still struggling without enough staff layoffs only make this worse find other places to cut back and leave school staff alone wcc usd has hired back almost every high paid management position that was cut during the last financial crisis before cutting school staff like teachers principals and custodians we should trim the central office please vote no on the pks resolution and direct staff cuts away from the

029classroom focus on your priorities the folks that actually make the district go around and work from day to day that includes our entire staff in the district from the teachers to the custodians the security to groundskeepers to everyone we open schools to return and we want to be back but you got to support us thank you our next public comment is shawnee vaughn hi my name is shawnee vaughn i am the teamster union representative for the classified staff we were notified last week that the district is planning to lay off our classified staff who prefer who provide direct services to the children in this community alone the teamsters have a hundred vacancies that have not been filled and the district still plans to cut our classified positions throughout the years the district has spent millions

030of dollars on consultants and contractors that do not provide support to support direct support to students in the community today we asked the board to make the right decision and vote note on layoffs to to to excuse me i'm sorry we asked the board to vote no on layoffs for the certificate and classified staff we ask the board to cut consultants contractors and unrepresentative staff who do not provide direct student services our employees work really really hard think about the endless hours taking all the additional duties and efforts to keep the schools running our school schools struggle enough with the limited staff they have just imagine what that would do with a layoff we who would clean the schools who would serve the lunch periods who would translate the english learning to english learning parents

031a lot of you board members have worked in the trenches you worked for the school you were csos you were teachers you have students on the board make the right decision and vote no our next public comment is sarah creely hello thank you for your service my name is sarah creely and i'm a teacher at hannah ranch i was i began teaching in 1989. i was hired by this district in 1992. i teach second grade sending layoff notices to teachers and support staff is the last thing that our district should be doing right now we don't have the teachers that we need right now to do the job we should be recruiting new teachers more teachers a parent told me that her daughter cried in the multi-purpose room at the beginning of the year this

032school year because she didn't have teachers she didn't have teachers i'm trembling as i tell you this she was crying there weren't teachers for her more than one i don't think hercules middle school and high school still i don't think they have all the teachers they need at our school at hannah ranch we needed two new teachers and we were fortunate because we were able to get them one of both of those teachers are first year teachers which is the hardest year and these teachers they're working their heart outs trying to do their best and one of them is my friend she's a single mother of three young children and she wants to be a teacher and she's so scared about what's going to happen to her if she gets laid off it's terrifying and

033i've experienced it myself when i was a young teacher and it's it's so hard they tell you oh enjoy your summer don't worry you'll probably have your job it doesn't work like that it's so sad it is demeaning and demoralizing at a time when we should be doing everything to appeal to teachers laying off teachers and support staff is flat out wrong in the exact opposite of what we should be doing now our district should stop their plans to spend 71 million dollars on outside consultants it's a question if it's a question between teachers and consultants you must choose teachers and support stuff i agree 100 with the people who spoke before me governor newsom is funding education and we have a surplus there's no reason to do this right now we need to keep

034our teachers what we need and get rid of the consultants that we don't want or need thank you please support our new teachers don't give them a pizza [Applause] our next public comment is camille barker hello my name is camille barker i'm a fifth grade teacher at harding elementary school and i was personally rift in 2019 i can speak to how demoralizing and emotionally devastating this process is to new teachers and personally it made me question whether or not i wanted to come back into the classroom this year has been stressful enough due to the lack of teachers classified employees and support staff with and a global pandemic if you proceed with this process you will drive teachers out of the classroom people are already worried that this district is unstable and are considering leaving

035if you proceed teachers will go and there won't be people to replace them i please ask that you consider the emotional impact that this will cause on our community it is an unnecessary burden i please urge you to vote no on this resolution thank you our next public comment is wendy coyle dear esteemed members of the board my name is dr wendy coyle a lifelong educator teacher mother grandmother and currently a school volunteer in the west contra costa county school district i have in my hand the document that proves and tells you how to spend the 111 million dollars that you received from the federal government you received it in 2021 and you received it again in january of this year are you aware of this money are you aware of this document if you're

036not it deserves a careful read it's online it's only two months ago that you received the second payment the monies that you claim you don't have i claim and this document claims that you do have and you have it because it's public record this is the american recovery plan the coronavirus guide to funding and uses requirements the west contra costa county school district received 111 million dollars from the federal government for the schools it has clearly stated the money the gift i call it a gift because it is i quote not to be not to replace or be used for existing state or local district commitments that means debts that we all hear you had prices conclude pardon me please conclude your comment i'm out of time fine i'll end it by saying that this

037guideline tells the district that that money is to be used for teachers staff academic relief if you're not using 111 million dollars for that purpose something is seriously wrong thank you our next public comment is sam clear good evening my name is sam clear and this is my fifth year teaching third grade at siege elementary school i am thankful and honored to stand with everyone in our community i cannot speak for everyone but will disclose my own beliefs and experiences i also respect siege's long history before i moved here i speak tonight out of concern for a possible reduction in force throughout my five years i've experienced waves of support in silence toward the siege community after we receive stipends immediate attention we later lose staff members due to a lack of funding or another

038form of neglect as soon as district leaders are shown attending a meeting or making statements out of care for speech we then get stripped of our resources at stage we don't define caring as putting on a performance every few months i work with inspirational individuals who teach me how to care for others every day they remind me that we are all valued and welcome at siege they are here covering multiple grade levels in different positions that were not in their contracts they help fill in supports when others fall sick or when positions remain unfilled they endure working in classrooms without functioning windows where temperatures rise higher and higher they stay sorry [Music] they stay after school for long hours to tutor students coach sports and hold art clubs then after the end of their work

039day they all organize to receive basic resources history will repeat itself if you give out pink slips a reduction in force would impact around half of our staff members siege is a focused school for the center of african american student achievement we work with the highest percentage of black students therefore we need to address the disproportionate amount of black students who would lose our teachers and other members of our school community if you have personally witnessed the draining of stages resources over the years you must change course and listen to us if you are new to the district you need to take the time to get to know us and support us we need to work together in order to care for all students at every school in wcc usd have a good night our

040next public comment is john savala good evening board superintendent hearst boss my name is john zabala i'm a school psychologist in the district and i work at grant elementary i've worked in the district for 12 years i want to talk to you all tonight and encourage you to vote no on the reduction in force and i want to tell you a little bit about what life has been like at grant this year we started the year talking about a restorative restart let's get back and i showed up on day one with joy in my heart excited to get students back in the door but this year has been exhausting we are lying to ourselves we're not saying it's been a crisis all year due to covid due to staffing our community suffered the loss of

041a student and other teachers being sick as well so today what i want to say is another thing i want to add is that about seven teachers are who are first-year teachers this is just common for grant we get new teachers all the time and i'm so excited to work with them they're excellent and i cannot believe we would consider pink slipping them i'm a school psychologist i can tell you that i'm burnt out i know a lot of strategies on how to help my mental health cognitive behavioral therapy strategies so on and so forth and i am at my limit so i cannot believe that we would be putting this type of pressure on first-year teachers committed to work with our students in a time when so few people are so please i ask

042you to reconsider what you're doing as this um gentle lady just said if that hundred million dollars that we were given for kovid is this not exactly what we're talking about maintaining our teaching staff so that next year our students can continue their learning please reconsider your choices and one final thing my school community is a 95 free and reduced lunch school we're going to be disproportionately hit by this cut and so we talk a big game about how we support students of color so i ask you tonight is this really what you want to do our next public comment is julia jamsheed hello my name is juliet jamshed and i'm a teacher at madera elementary school since the pandemic began i read news stories all the time about how many billions of dollars has

043been given to school districts across the country by the federal government to help students teachers and parents get through these tough times and this gives me hope that my students will get the help that they need and they'll be okay but the fact is i've been waiting i've been waiting for the day that our school and our students and our teachers would benefit from those millions of dollars of aid i'm waiting for the academic tutors and the mental health counselors that were promised by the superintendent at the start of this school year the fact of the matter is i'm still waiting we're all still waiting to get the help that we were supposed to get a year and a half ago that money was meant to hire more teachers to fill all the vacancies in

044the schools but instead you're saying that you're broke and we're facing teacher layoffs it just doesn't add up that aid package was designed to avoid this exact scenario it was meant to help districts keep teachers so that students could come back from a year and a half of learning loss well i'm still waiting i'm waiting for the school board to find out exactly what happened to that 111 million dollars in federal relief money and i'm waiting waiting for you to do the right thing and keep the cuts away from our schools thank you our next public comment is kim chamberlain oh it's a little high tonight i'm gonna pull it down just a bit good evening kimberly chamberlain ifpte local 21 ssa chapter i'm glad you're all here tonight in person minus miss fold smith

045i understand i'm also glad to have my labor colleagues here with me tonight normally i'm here by myself begging hoping praying that you will listen to all of us as we speak to you on the severity of the position you are in this evening to decide what your students of this community's futures are we are looking at making all of these cuts you're looking at changing the lives of our students by taking away that one person whether it be a custodian a scowl a lunch worker a yard supervisor a teacher a volunteer that they have trusted that they feel safe coming to school every day for no our attendance does not always show but guess what that isn't the only thing in life having that person each of us as we have gone through our

046educational lives has had and memories of to very much rely on to be there and you guys are all in the position tonight to vote no against taking that person away please reconsider everything that has to be done i ask you to please lobby sacramento to hurry up and make these changes that are needed for education and our students safety thank you our next public comment is marissa glidden good evening superintendent and members of the board my name is marissa glidden i'm a third grade teacher on full-time release to serve as president of united teachers of richmond board members tonight you have a serious choice before you we all want to give our students the best but being good board members means making the right choices for our students your staff have presented serious cuts

047to the most important people in our children's lives their teachers and school support staff you have done this without transparency you have done this without making the other hard choices that need to be made you've done this by choosing to cut certificated staff and classified staff first before doing anything else you may be told this is a matter of dollars and cents but these are real people and real students will be harmed if they are fired if you choose to fire teachers they will not come back to your district even if you rescind their layoffs and the other teachers at their school that are going to miss seven new teachers they will leave two they will leave and they will not come back tonight you have a choice to make will you choose kindergarten teachers

048or will you choose pet projects will you choose counselors or will you choose expensive consultants will you choose bilingual aids or will you choose expensive technology our students don't use will you choose site principles or will you choose central office management who make two hundred and eighty thousand dollars and haven't spent much time or any time at our sites tonight you are choosing students or you are choosing to dismantle our communities that is the choice if you begin this layoff process the damage to our communities will be irreversible make the right choice and choose our students vote no on the pks resolution and cut from the top instead we will remember where you stand thank you our next public comment is emma erbach board members my name is emma erbach i'm the executive director of

049united teachers of richmond after two difficult years of pandemic learning our students need the support that only school site staff can provide tonight you are being asked to vote on a hastily thrown together resolution that will cause chaos through our neighborhood schools although district staff have been planning this meeting for weeks parents and community members were given barely 24 hours notice that major cuts and changes to services their students rely on were being proposed the resolution that was finally posted fails to offer even the basic detail of which services or how many staff will be cut how is that transparent to parents our schools are already desperately short staffed more than 100 days into school and we are still missing over 20 teaching positions and over 100 classified support staff students are being babysat by

050a revolving door of subs or packed into overfilled classes we are seeing increased behaviors in the classroom and safety concerns on campus due to the lack of caring adults we need more staff not less utr believes your staff are significantly over projecting expenses and under projecting revenues but they have failed to show their math or provide the underlying data that would verify their claims we have been told the financial cost savings of these layoffs would be 12.5 million dollars however it looks like your staff is over projecting the cost of educators alone by 10 million dollars over projecting spending on books and supplies by at least five million dollars and over projecting or projecting massive overspending on contracts and consultants more than 20 million dollars which i've just learned will balloon to almost 80 million

051dollars in your next proposed budget that is insane trustee smith folds trustee christian trustee gonzalez hoy you have all worked in our schools and you know just how hard staff work and how devastating these cuts will be to our kids please vote no on the resolution and direct your staff to make budget adjustments elsewhere trustee reckler and trustee phillips you both currently have students who attend our schools you have seen firsthand how the staffing shortages and their impact on student learning and social emotional success please vote no on the pks resolution and direct staff to make cuts elsewhere we are counting on you to do the right thing for students and schools we will remember our next public comment is helen king good evening everyone my name is helen kang and i'm a second grade

052teacher at harding elementary and coming here tonight and speaking in front of you all is a complete deja vu because i stood at this podium in 2019 during the last budget deficit and budget crisis talking to a parent at my school today she said she felt like this budget crisis and these threats of layoffs are it's like a form of ptsd for her and i agree the stress and instability and worry that this causes two communities is immense and it has been completely unnecessary so and just so you all know as board members parents have not forgotten the last budget crisis and how you vote tonight they will definitely be remembering superintendent hurst parents are definitely keeping track of how this is going down they are paying close attention so how is it that in

053one year we have spent or overspent so much i can tell you exactly how superintendent hurst you have allowed associate superintendent martin to spend at her whim on outside consultants and a ballooning administrative staff why do we need a director of attendance we now have four communications full staff communications staff that make on average at least six figures yet there continue to be massive communication failures instead of working to solve staffing and hiring crises and instead of investing in boots at the ground and direct services for students this administration has completely ignored real student needs and instead just ballooned at the top students need direct services when you are cutting from classrooms and from schools you are cutting from students you are showing your priorities so i ask you please conclude your comment make the

054right choice do the right thing cut from the top cut these contractors not from students thank you [Applause] our next public comment is marilyn guinscott good evening dr hers and board members my name is marilyn gwen scott i am a parent of two students at mayor vista k-8 school i am also a community outreach worker for the district and have been working here for five years during the 2019 budget cuts our school loss learning center and our assistant principal these gods directly affected our most vulnerable students this year our our office already has one bacon clerk position we have been operating with a skeleton crew of three our principal our office managers the scowl to support the needs of over 500 elementary and middle school students as well as their families our teachers and our

055support staff this is not sustainable now we are facing even more cuts this will make an already difficult situation even harder i hold you the superintendent and the board accountable to do an inventory of the over 100 existing classified vacancies keep cuts away from our schools and cut from the top our kids are counting on you thank you our last public comment in person is jose a de leon good evening board superintendent i'm here as a representative of wccaa this is your administrators union for wcc usd in the next month we're going to be making very tough decisions at the classrooms and at the sites there are some schools that have been cut up to 12 teachers some only cut two but everything will affect the classroom the principal style tease the teacher leaders will

056try to make the best with the whatever band-aids we can put together but it's not going to be enough how do we continue to ask for more success of our students by taking away resources we also are spending a lot of time training new teachers we are making them better to go to other districts we spent a lot of time making sure that the curriculum is correct that they're serving their students that they're doing the sel and that they're supporting beyond academic needs we need to make sure that whoever we train we keep if not then our our we will be having diminishing uh resources for our students so be uh please very thoughtful on what happens next in this process all the staff will always work towards the betterment of the students please don't

057tie our hands by reducing our staff thank you very much our first public comment on zoom is joseph glatzer please admit yourself hi joseph glatzer history teacher at hercules middle six years of service to the district wcc usd is projecting record high spending on outside contracts consultants and upper management positions they're projected to spend more than 20 million dollars on contracts and positions that don't affect our classrooms if you're wondering how there's a disconnect between all the facts the public commenters are sharing and the district budget presentations which say we're on the verge of bankruptcy and the sky is falling it's because this is a manufactured crisis designed as a political tactic to weaken the teachers union during our contract negotiations where god forbid will be fighting for things like a salary increase after the

058struggles and sacrifices we've made for the past two years through a global pandemic and lower class sizes for our students this is insulting after all the hard work we've put in over the past few years and every year frankly we were called essential workers and heroes now you want to fire us we teachers are taking extra students or period submitting nearly every day taking our prep time and this is the thanks we get you're fired like donald trump would say speaking of which lifting the indoor mask mandate for our schools is a form of cova denialism kova doesn't exist anymore people aren't getting sick there won't be another surge our vulnerable educators and students don't matter shame on this board if they follow this path of putting people's health in danger and also cutting our

059heroes on the front lines we will not forget how you vote tonight on these cuts we need more staffing in our schools not less what we need fewer of is overpaid consultants who don't grade papers don't deliver lectures to students talk students through their personal crises in their lives or reach out to parents and i have never heard of a consultant getting a thank you from a parent who said thank you for talking to my child thank you for following up with me i've never heard of that have you because i can tell you i get those comments from parents they say thank you for following up i appreciate how you care about my kid and you're gonna fire people like me for what we do every day in our jobs instead of getting rid

060of those consultants that don't work with a single student shame on you if you do that tonight we will not forget our next public comment is tara fey please unmute yourself good evening board members and superintendent hearst my name is tara fay and i am a teacher in your district i speak to you tonight not just as a teacher but as an immuno-compromised person you're going to hear a lot of angry and scared people tonight talking about the potential reduction in force and all of you should vote no on the ref and i agree with everything said by my incredible colleagues tonight so far they said it better than i ever could but i'm here to talk to you about something else because i'm not just worried about my livelihood i am worried for my

061life superintendent hurst i speak to you directly to end the mask mandate now would be a decision devoid of compassion and wrought with ableism the cdc still highly recommends that everyone wears masks in school and that has not changed neither have the needs of your immunocompromised students and staff we are still here we are still at risk and we still need your support and i know some of you are chomping at the bit to be rid of masks i get it but i ask you please for just a moment step outside of yourselves and empathize with the needs of your constituents who've experienced this pandemic differently than you weigh your own discomfort with masks to the physical and emotional pain of enduring a pandemic knowing that your body cannot survive it at the last meeting

062you voted on resolution number 53-2122 to proclaim march's disability awareness month and a weak letter a week later you are proposing changes that would endanger many disabled people in our schools i don't get it and i hope the hypocrisy isn't lost on you the truth is that you don't care about awareness when the realities of disabled students and staff are inconvenient to you so stop tokenizing us and giving yourselves a pat on the back for doing the bare minimum and recognizing that we exist one month of the year instead advocate and act with us in mind show me and all your other students and staff like me that our lives are worth more to you than your disdain for a piece of fabric across your face it is a privilege to feel safe in a

063masculine space that is a privilege we don't have thank you our next public comment is david damon please unmute yourself good afternoon wcc usd community my name is david damon i'm a member of the oak grove school district in san jose california and a member of the larger statewide community to which all public education communities belong we stand united with the wcc usd community in the defense of their right to equitable educational opportunity the wcc usd is not alone in experiencing the fiscal crisis many districts across the state are will be or recently have been exactly where you sit today these facts revealed that this fiscal crisis you are experiencing cannot be solved at the district level because it is a systemic problem with how districts are financed while the wcc usd is spending far

064more than it needs to on contracts and consultants the problem overall is due to this fiscal insolvency caused by incorrect financing methods the systemic fiscal problems within california public education need to be addressed where they originate or they will continue to repeat themselves this means that our attention needs to be focused at the state level ending the fiscal crisis cycle can only be accomplished when we join together as a statewide community and demand that the state use the billions in surplus revenue it has to adequately fund our schools to get more information on how your community can join the fight and save publication public education please email firefcmat gmail.com california education code division 1 title 1 part 1 chapter 2 article 1 section 201b states clearly california public schools have an affirmative obligation to combat

065racism sexism and other forms of bias and the responsibility to provide equal educational opportunity as the actions the board is about to take tonight are in direct conflict with that need to combat uh racism and bias then that is also in conflict with california law please take that into consideration as you move forward thank you our next public comment is zelon harrison please unmute yourself i know um a lot of y'all just got here this year um on the board and in the district but what we're dealing with right now it can affect our black children the rest of their lifetime all the kids but i'm here to speak for the black kids we i feel that you guys should take into consideration the lowest performing students and it's just good for parents to really

066know what's going on at our school sites because sometimes you know what's going on with our kids but if you guys are removing some educators my daughter came home today and share with me a story about she heard her teachers over talking she's a senior at richmond high and heard her teachers over talking about this meeting tonight and it concerned her because she was like are they going to be here for me when i graduate mom i'm leaving and now my teacher is going to be here um black children already um are faced with a lot of things and so are the other children coming out of this pandemic this budget got dumped on a lot of the board members and the superintendent but at the end of the day you guys are accountable for

067all the kids if you take care of the black kids and show how you can take care of all the kids in that i think we can get a solution here but we need to see what we're dealing with how many teachers is there a master schedule where we know tonight are we going to see something we will know where those hits are going to hurt are you going to just make a decision and then we get the consequences of that i think more communication and clear communication of why you guys are doing what you're doing will help not only us the parents but help us explain things to our children because this is affecting them not just the adults that are making those decisions about what needs to happen here so please be considerate

068of the ones we're really affecting and give as much communication as possible our next public comment is ethan sorcher please unmute yourself thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak my name is ethan sorcher and i teach fifth grade at montalvin k8 we are in the middle of a nationwide teacher shortage two months ago our highly paid central office staff were in classrooms and we were closing schools because we could not safely operate let alone educate you can no longer expect to be able to fire and rehire staff if you vote tonight to lay off educators our students will suffer west contra costa is projecting a deficit for the next fiscal year of 44 million 740 thousand dollars this is slightly less than the 44 million 885 000 you are choosing to spend on

069professional and consulting services by voting to lay off educators instead of reducing the amount spent on these services you are voting to prioritize outside consultants over classroom instruction a 2015 study from the national bureau of economic research found that reducing class sizes alone is enough to overcome between two-thirds and one hundred percent of the achievement gap for low-income students nearly half of our students are considered title one and two-thirds receive free or reduced lunches instead of firing educators you should be raising the level of compensation to attract more teachers and reduce class sizes and caseloads did your constituents elect you to improve educational outcomes for their children or to siphon over 44 million of our tax dollars to private contractors outside the classroom direct your negotiating team to increase compensation so we can attract more

070educators to our district and vote tonight to keep the educators we have please vote no on tonight's resolutions and direct staff to make cuts away from the classroom thank you our next public comment is nashon williams please unmute yourself good evening board and superintendent my name is nashon williams and i'm a teacher at dijon middle school educators have worked hard this year very hard we are working so hard to the point that you think we have been that we have been and currently are in a normal school year what has our district established for educator mental health for educator stress and for educator sanity i appreciate that you have tried to be student focused i appreciate that it is a big job to get this district to do right by students educators and community members

071i appreciate the board and superintendent listening to us for an entire hour of public comment during board meetings but the hard truth is covered in life have taken a toll on us on all of us but we still show up unappreciated we're here overworked still here unheard still here unseen still accounted for and for this reason i believe that us the front line workers in schools the essential workers should be the very last place cuts are made i know you have hired many positions that make a lot of money to help get this district to where it needs to get to but there are people lined up for miles to make the big money and to not be in the classrooms how many people are lined up to be teachers none we still have certificated

072and classified vacancies there is no line of people signing up to do my job there's not even one no one is signing up those of us that are still here keep us keep all of us don't just keep teachers keep all of us please vote no on the pks resolution and direct stamp to make cuts away from the classroom why have we hired all these high-paying leaders but truancy absenteeism and low test scores still plague our district high-paying leaders aren't the magical antidote to a great district transparent leaders make a great district leaders who communicate make a great district leaders who trust one another who trust the employees make a great district leaders who give autonomy instead of micromanaging make a great district leaders who love people not just position and power make it great

073please to include your comment don't cut from the oasis office our black community members need an avenue to be heard and to be represented thank you our next public comment is maggie whitaker please unmute yourself hi i'm maggie whitaker can you hear me yes great i'm speaking to you as a district parent at harding elementary school it is shocking to me that layoffs are even being discussed at this time as i have stated before in these meetings a budget is a moral document this proposal shows me what you believe in and it is not teachers nor students nor classified staff it sure isn't your community these layoffs demoralize our over are already overworked teachers they destabilize our school communities it also doesn't make sense there are so many empty teaching positions in this district and

074all the new tk classrooms to fill you know that you are needing to hire and not dismiss essential teachers so why create so much harm have you seen the many articles expecting 50 percent of teachers to quit after this year will laying off teachers send a message that our district wants to retain and support the newest in the profession most of the teachers who are laid off are not likely to wait until june and hope their position is still available they will easily find jobs in other districts and we will lose our children will lose our school sites will lose our district will lose how will families and students fare next year with even more staff shortages please vote no on the pks resolution please help maintain stability in fully staffed classrooms for next year

075we are watching your votes and we are aware of which members of the board are up for re-election so don't doubt that vote no thank you very much our next public comment is carol peters please unmute yourself oh my time has already started i want to address three things briefly um why does this board willy-nilly continue to change procedures choose how you're going to facilitate the meetings and kind of stay consistent it appears you all pick and choose which parliamentary procedures and policies you're going to follow it makes it hard to trust that you all know what you're doing with every ch with all the changes and um procedure number two there have been rumors that the superintendent um superintendent hearst uh you're considering cutting the office of african-american student achievement that would be a

076terrible mistake dr hershey went to hercules middle school and heard from the mafeniko students mafiniccio is under that department the office has only been open for two years um i hope these rumors aren't true and mr mcgee and his staff remain in their position positions with your full support lastly the idea of firing teachers is appalling remember what just happened in january when teachers were out that type of learning environment is what we're potentially creating for the fall with these teacher cuts we kept talking about learning loss during distance learning unstable learning environment unstable learning environments contribute to learning loss teacher vacancies create learning loss non-credentialed staff or non-content specialists monitoring classes or period subbing create learning loss multiple secondary classes in the library being watched by one sub promotes learning loss you open schools

077in person because you were concerned about learning loss and yet here we are reducing essential staff all board members up there at once at one point in time sought and received the utr endorsement teachers believed in you believe in us keep all school site staff we actually need to hire more staff to monitor clean support and instruct our students make cuts at the top uh with those redundant jobs please we know who you if you believe in students if you believe in schools you'll vote no if you don't know where you stand and you will not be re-elected our next public comment is joe summers please unmute yourself yes um mr president and board members my name is joe summers i'm with the contra costa labor council an organization comprised of 85 local unions representing

078over 80 86 000 working families across this county i'm also here as a son of two proud public school teachers i'm here to recognize the essential work of every single teacher and support staff that educate supports and cares for the children of west contra costa's working families the hard work of this district staff provides such an immense benefit to this entire community that i find it unthinkable that we are here considering layoffs before exhausting every single opportunity to keep your schools whole this district is spending a record 71 million dollars on contractors and consultants outside of your district and setting records in the amount of spending for school materials and uh apps some of which can't be utilized by the students west contra costa unified school district should rein in its spending on these consultants

079not essential services and materials your school employees are not expendable they are the most important resource that these students have they are value members of this community and they are essential to the future of all of our children in a time when you're already short staffed these proposed layoffs will irreversibly harm countless lives in west contra costa the labor council implores this board to vote no on these layoffs and instead focus on cuts that will keep our schools working thank you president christian time has expired on this item on public comment okay you said public coming what now uh the time for public comment ha um at this public comment has expired okay okay so we will conclude public comment and now president christian um i was wondering if you would consider extending it 30

080minutes extending public comment 30 minutes is that a motion you would consider extending public comment 30 minutes is that emotion yeah uh sorry tammy what was that is that emotion are you making the motion to extend the time for public excuse me the public comment by 30 minutes second that motion to extend public comment by 30 minutes okay and it's been moved by clerk gazelles hoyt and second but trustee smith falls and on to the vote trustee leo young yes trustee and we have trustee smithfold trustee smith folks yes president christian i thought we were going in order that i go first and then the trustees go last i'm just trying to figure out what are we doing are we going to student trustees last or student trustees first first thank you smithfolds yes all

081right and then we have uh trustee phillips then we have uh trustee uh clerk gonzalez hoy gonzalez oh yes then we have trustee reckler reckler yes and myself is a yes [Applause] and we will proceed on president christian i have a point of order yes can we make sure that we let everyone know in the zoom that we are extending for 30 minutes then we're still going to have the presentation and we're still going to take public comment just so they don't put their hands down okay so so you would have opportunity to come back uh after the presentation um to make a comment so um so we'll just have 30 minutes from here and then after that that's it and then we we would shift gears all right we will proceed and our next

082public comment is adriana larson please unmute your song good evening trustee trustees dr hearst and the wcc usd community i've been an active involved member of this community for nearly 10 years as a parent to two children one at harding and one at kormatsu this past week on top of an already difficult two years during a pandemic i learned of this special board meeting tonight to vote on budget cuts that will hit our teachers and our staff in our classroom in our classrooms i instantly had ptsd to our 2019-2020 budget deficit i cannot believe this during the pandemic a silver lining for wcc usd was that our budget deficit disappeared we are barely out of the pandemic and the silver lining is gone i'm unclear how we are here once again in a budget deficit

083with the influx of money from the california governor's office is the money being mismanaged allocated to external control consultants or is there no def deficit and you are voting to make budget cuts today to scare teachers into larger class sizes regardless of how we are in this disaster once again i'm infuriated that the people who who will this who this will affect the most are not the people who manage and have been making poor decisions on our budget what other company or job do you know of where this holds true i wonder how many teachers will stick around with an employer like this i want to remind everyone that we didn't have qualified teachers or substitute to staff our classrooms adequately during the roughest months of the pandemic gratefully some of us had a parent

084who filled in but as we know they are not any sort of substitute for a qualified teacher trustees we are educated voters who elected you to represent our children and families we will not forget how you vote on this tonight i urge all of you trustees tonight to consider that we will undoubtedly lose teachers to more desirable districts if we continue this practice of laying off teachers only to rehire year after year so tonight i'm urging you to vote no on the pks resolution so we can keep qualified and amazing teachers in our district thank you our next public comment is christina huerta please unmute yourself hi good evening my name is cristina huerta and i'm a teacher at kennedy high school i have been a teacher at kennedy high school for nine years now

085and i'm really really proud of the work that we do there however i'm also concerned to hear that layoffs may be happening again last time that we went through this kennedy was not able to retain our team intact since people moved on to different districts after receiving their pink slip i don't blame them how can the district say that site personnel needs to be cut when we still have vacancies at kennedy our counseling team just filled their vacancy last month and that had been open all year plus we still have a music vacancy and classified positions that are not filled yet outside contracts should be cut before school site staff we don't need to spend millions of dollars on outside contracts and consultants what we need is staff available to support our students and their

086families at kennedy and at all the other sites of this district i urge the board to vote no on layoffs thank you our next public comment is sarah parks please unmute yourself good evening members of the board my name is sarah parks i'm a special education preschool teacher based at terra hills i was very surprised to hear about the pks meeting and the potential rifts again i'm a special education teacher on an average day i rely heavily on classified staff for example today we had a student vomit in my room immediately our custodian came helped us out saved us when i do power school when i do attendance every day i have to step off the floor to enter everything into the computer my aides are a vital part of my community they are running

087the classroom they are there for the kids always losing these staff members would be a huge huge hit our district is already short classified and certificated both at my site and honestly in my classroom i'm still short one classified staff member please please consider these cuts away from some of your smallest youngest most vulnerable students we appreciate it so much thank you our next public comment is karen armstead please unmute yourself uh can you hear me yes okay um my name is uh karen armstead i'm a special education teacher at kennedy high school and i teach students who are on a tractor earn a certificate of completion rather than earning a diploma and right now uh boy what i need in my room is a computer cart and carts or computers checked out the students

088individually are not the same i i really need that the resource in my room a computer card in my room so that i can start to do things with my students like exploring jobs and careers online because students who are earning certificates of completion rather than diplomas are outside that the mainstream and often feel that they have no future that the district is not investing in their talents or skills um i i'm i'm shocked that the district would be considering a layoffs to teachers and personnel in the classrooms when we are supporting students like these i'm shocked that the district would be considering teacher layoffs and laughs of support staffs and at the same time uh you know uh they have a great uh bloated amount that they are spending on um you know high-priced

089lawyers and consultants i urge decision makers to vote no on the laughs to instead cut from the top not from the classroom thank you our next public comment is gene kinster please unmute yourself good morning board good morning community wow i kind of cannot imagine that our without our school would run smoothly if our janitors clerks scowl playground staff or any other of our much needed and overworked staff were laid off we need the staff that work directly with our students i cannot believe the computer program is teaching our english language learners english how does it know if a student can't focus because they're hungry our scowl and our support staff at our school help make sure that their extra food pickup opportunities for our students and our families how does a student explain that

090something happened at their house and they're upset about it our support staff help in these situations how can a computer program know if a student is correctly pronouncing or using words students need people to help them learn english not computer programs speaking of english i am again asking that the board explained how to access the translation options for zoom in spanish you could use ryan phillips screen to show a screencastify of someone actually clicking on the translation area and picking spanish this would help those who have difficulties with tech and english to be able to access our meeting we need to do better we need to make these meetings accessible to all of our parents that do not speak english enough to understand the speed of which english is being spoken during these meetings were

091we not trained last year on the many ways to make sure that all people have access to what they need especially our most vulnerable populations access to board meetings is not negotiable this needs to happen my school is one of the schools that receives a hundred percent free not reduced but free lunch we will be hit harder by this than other schools if you continue with these layoffs my students have had one maybe two times a speech this entire year that was until this week because they finally received the required services because another teacher was hired and put into place i'm wondering on the data how many of the lowland schools were not fully staffed for these services speech ot et cetera how many of the hill schools were not staffed for these services hear

092us no cuts that directly affect student staff class sizes keep the cuts away from the students make them at the top you told us you hear us hear us prove it our next public comment is miss sargentini please unmute yourself and state your first name for the record yes hi thank you um kim dowers argentini parent and teacher i'd also like to speak on the cuts i feel our spending priorities are misplaced it's hard for me to imagine that we even need to cut when i'm taking extra kids all the time still and then i have to sit and watch students with special needs so anxious and crying because they're put in a strange room with a different teacher and more students and then after when the custodian is out there's nobody to do the

093work because they don't have subs for them either so then a neighboring custodian will come just to empty our trash which i do appreciate her doing that so then i end up sweeping and vacuuming and everything else we're also always short of aids i believe we still are short of aids and supervisors and they contracted some of them out but i can't figure why we would be laying off people when we still have so many positions to fill i really feel we need to work on outreach to the community to increase our enrollment and try to figure out why so many families opt to not put their children in our district my son also has been short teachers all year at middle school they think they finally have an english teacher because they're going to

094take somebody and have her work 120 percent i think we should have no outside consultants or contracts i think we've had spending in that area in curriculum the only new curriculum i know that we're getting is eld i don't know why we would have to spend so much money i think we do need to spend on safety there have been multiple guns on campus this year there have been threats and tomorrow students are scheduled to walk out to protest sexual assault and misconduct on the middle and high school campuses the budget sounds terrible when i ask my union to see the actual numbers they said the district has not actually given the finances i find it odd that if it's so bad they wouldn't give the finances we cannot seem to get back to teaching

095and learning when every day we're doing things like taking extra kids or just trying to get through the day i agree with the psychologist who said teachers also need support thank you our next public comment is eric swabek please unmute yourself hello my name is eric schwabeck uh can you hear me yes we can okay um uh yeah you know i also want to i'm i'm a 20-year teacher at lake elementary third grade currently um and i do want to talk about the layoffs um and urge our trustees to vote no on them i just want to tell you a quick little story about you know what my daily life is generally like as a teacher at lake elementary um i almost always have a class my class size increased by five or six students

096um of different grades you know i'm a third grade teacher and i'm getting fourth fifth second first grade kids in my classroom i can't um i can't differentiate on the on the on a dime like that so i mean i try to involve the kids as much as i can but they tend to generally be you know using doing some packet in other words busy work um which you know what kind of education is that and then for my kids you know their class sizes is increased and there are you know more disruption so their education is uh damaged and this is all because we're short staffed horribly short staffed our our principal and the vice principal have to um cover classes and we can't get subs and so anytime anybody's sick it's kids are

097split up so this is not this is unsustainable currently and you're talking about laying off 10 of our of our essential employees this is crazy remember you're probably your your your budget reflects your priorities you have to re-prioritize you have to put first the interests of the children and their education and the well-being of our community and your employees thank you our next public comment is nisa bremer please unmute yourself hello board and superintendent hearst i'm a parent a pta board member and a parent member of the school site committee at fairmont elementary and i'm calling tonight to voice my strong opposition to the resolutions that you're voting on tonight our children our teachers and our site staff have been through enough do not ask them to endure more by reducing or even threatening to

098reduce the already threadbare staffing situation at our schools i know that every single one of you on the board knows how important fully staffed school sites are not only to provide education but to keep schools safe i understand that we are in a dire financial situation and difficult choices are ahead i am asking the board to make cuts to the district staffing and outside contracts do not ask our sites to carry this load i would also like to voice my strong concern over the handling of the budget matters by this board starting with the choice to skip the budget update presentation and the february 16th agenda and continuing with the choice to push the budget update to the end of the agenda in the march 2nd meeting the presentation was rushed and the time for

099questions and comments was virtually erased it's extremely bad look especially considering that most of the public comment that evening was from parents and teachers concerned about the budget crisis now you've called this meeting with barely any advance notice to the community you are further eroding trust i am incredibly disappointed our finances should be a priority please restore the budget committee and give this issue the respect it deserves prioritize transparency build trust so that we can work together to tangle this problem because it is much larger than our district it is from sacramento thank you so much for your time and for your service this is so hard i appreciate you all thank you our next public comment is leah chang please unmute yourself hi my name is leah chang i'm a school psychologist at valley

100view elementary in cameron preschool um when i heard that the district was planning to cut staff i was just flabbergasted because i don't understand where is the staff to cut we have been missing teachers and aides all year our classrooms are at or over capacity a lot of my teachers at elementary schools have had to take on split grades so they've had to take on two grades of students because we weren't able to hire enough staff at the beginning of the year um our mild moderate support needs classrooms so our special ed students those with the highest needs have been short on aids all year um not having enough aids means our those high needs students are not being provided the services and supports that are written into their ieps many of these special education

101students have not been able to mainstream with their general education peers because our teachers are at capacity and we do not have aids to go with them and support them to ensure that they are successful i have seen firsthand at my site classrooms devolve into chaos because of rotating subs and the lack of aids and support staff these students need structure and consistency and we are already at risk of losing the teachers and staff we do have to burn out so please vote no on the pks resolution and direct staff to make cuts away from the classroom thank you our next public comment is mitzi paris carl please unmute yourself hello can you hear me yes okay um my name is mitzi perez karo this is my fifth year teaching at kennedy high school i

102teach digital art web design and yearbook i am very disappointed at the recommendation that the cfo and dr hearst have given the school board i think every time we get a new cfo it is their recommendation to make risks and i don't understand why that's the first thing they go to you should be called cutting consultants at every level we don't need these consultants in our classrooms we need our experts the teachers the educators everybody in the room that's currently serving our students to be there after a devastating year on distance learning and like it was such a hard year and coming back to school and hearing this news it just makes me so sad to see that your priorities are not in the right place we need our teachers in the classroom we need

103all of the support staff in the schools and it's it just seems so silly so many people are leaving the profession and you want to get more cuts in the schools please make it make sense because it does not right now thank you our next public comment is ted lam please unmute yourself good evening trustees and dr hearst thank you for your service i'm here to urge you to vote no on the pts resolution my name is ted lam i'm the pta president at harding elementary school i'm a parent of a fifth grader there are many first-time students at hardy our tka and kindergarten classes are bursting my wife and others volunteered in the library because we don't have the full-time librarian i heard words since in the school year 2020 2021 during the thick

104of covet like we think education and we can do better during those dark times it took repeated messages from dr hurst and the school district that there would be in person for this school year for some of us to believe it others had a hard time believing that would really happen until the very last it did happen return to to in person teaching even with a lot of bumps this school year the students are learning and enjoying being in class again this has a lot to do with the commitment and hard work of the teachers and school staff our teachers and school staff are part of our community we are just starting to believe things are going to be close to normal and now this this is the other shoe dropping that some of us

105were afraid of i strongly urge you to vote no on the pts resolution tonight our teachers school staff and students don't deserve this uncertainty thank you our next public comment is david mulgo please meet yourself evening board members and superintendent hearst um i would say trustees but again we're waiting to find trust in all of you um you guys hire these people to guide you but you have to listen and so we wonder if you really are listening to them and what's going on or this is just payment to somebody um filling your heads with stuff i would suggest that you reach out and go find a sister school that has a successful program and work with them to find ways to improve your program so that it mimics it in a way that you

106find success but to take resources away to the from the children and the teachers and staff that directly support the brick and mortar that's that's taking a foundation out from under the house that's basics you guys need to look at the top and all the waste and spending on the sides you know when you're building a house you don't really need a jacuzzi or a tennis court or these other options but you do need the teachers and those who support them inside the brick and mortar i still recognize smith foles as the president you still haven't resolved that again trust and definitely we'll be thinking about all these things when we vote uh and and i think we should be wearing politics on our face when these people can afford more ice cream than gasoline

107we can afford to get to work that's poor taste you're still putting up misinformation on your kiosk that should be rectified and you really need a better plan and system for contact tracing it's very inefficient and costing students time away from school thank you [Music] our next public communist tara taylor mcdonald please unmute yourself hi my name is tara taylor i'm a teacher at kennedy high school i cannot believe i've been here three years teaching a kennedy and i'm once again worried about my job i chose specifically to work in west contra costa i care about my students everybody who works at my school cares about their students we have one vacancy that has not been filled we need more people on the ground we do not need more people in offices making decisions we

108finally got young teachers young bilingual teachers young black and brown teachers in a classroom where our students can see themselves in education and these teachers are now facing are once again about to be faced with cuts this is ridiculous at the beginning of dr hurst's um position you asked the teachers what do we need you had a listening session not once did i hear a teacher say we need a consultant or we need to hire an outside company to help us teachers need to be in rooms and with the year that our students the past couple years that our students have had seeing a familiar face in the room mask or without mask is needed you are re-traumatizing these students by having constant like circulating door of teachers and staff office staff what happened to

109the heroes who fed all of our families during the during the shutdown you're gonna let those people go this is ridiculous our next public's comment is maria recendis please unmute yourself good evening board my name is maria resendiz i am an employee and taxpayer contributing to the education of our community please do not do any personal layoffs classified or certificated or human capital is our most important asset and has the most impact on the education of our students please plan the cat strategically we know we are in a structural deficit this might be the opportunity to fully staff our working force with the layoffs from other districts if we want to make wcc usd a destination district as we are envisioning to be let's start by showing your commitment to our working force and demonstrating

110that we are behind them the students and the future of our community depend on your decision please vote no thank you our next public comment is jeanette bradfield please unmute yourself good evening president christian trustees and superintendent hearst my name is jeanette bradfield teamster representative for the 1300 classified staff with wcc usd i'm speaking out tonight with great sadness for the teamster members who are yet again facing layoffs i am dumbfounded that while we have 100 vacancies in various classifications just in the classified positions we are being told that there are 100 positions that will be laid off or eliminated as you've heard our members say this evening employees are doing multiple jobs towing the line for this district for years rarely getting the respect they deserve i have spoken with members across all teamster

111classifications who are suffering due to burnout because they are so overworked they are not taking their breaks and lunches despite the unions urging them to do so employees are working outside of their classifications many have accepted additional work because they are afraid they may be disciplined employees are performing jobs in higher classifications without pay to go with it yet when they apply for a position at one of the higher classifications they are told they don't have the minimum qualifications the district should be ashamed of themselves for not providing the training to employees who are performing work which they are not familiar with due to the low staff this is a safety issue and contributes to low morale instead of timely job vacancy posting postings and follow-up with potential new hires people have dropped out of

112the hiring process in utter frustration due to the lack of response many of these positions have been filled with long-term substitutes rather than hiring permanent employees members in the trades department are often including your comment members in the trade department are often pressured into signing off on their bargaining unit work to contractors we have contract language that provides for a review and discussion before routine maintenance is signed off to a contractor these requests for routine maintenance sign-offs should be rare and president christian that concludes the 30-minute extension of public comment [Applause] all right thank you and i don't want to i want to thank everyone who has given public comment up to this very moment and now we are moving on with the agenda and we're going to be for uh gender review and adoption

113and uh dr hurst uh what do you think the precious time that you think we will uh need for the presentation um for the items see the item is a 20-minute presentation mr president okay and i'm gonna ask clerk gives all this toy to keep track of the time okay lord i ask you to uh be succinct in your comments and pick one or two points for this evening that we can move along at a good pace thank you for your events and your cooperation board are there any adjustments that you wish to make to the agenda okay may i have emotion thank you president christian i move that we adopt the agenda with the addition of the public comment after the presentation from staff all right thank you can i get a second a

114second all right president could we have a time limit for the public comment so that the public knows at the end of item c4 how long the public will get to speak yeah public comment would be 30 minutes thank you and um all right so it was put to the floor and second president christian i have a point of order yes go ahead i think in an important discussion that we're having we should take public comment for at least as long as we do in the very beginning so i don't i think we should take public comment for at least an hour minimally i actually think we should take everybody whose hands raised but i think we should take public comment for minimally an hour is that emotion it is a motion that we accept

115the agenda as it is with the with the adjustment of that we take public comment for at least an hour after the presentation um to the parliamentarian can you uh repeat yourself again so and um trustee smith folds please correct me if i'm wrong but it sounds like the motion is for one hour of public comment after item c4 yes minimally one hour if my colleague wants to extend it to all hands or race i would be amenable to that if anyone wants to extend it but my motion is for at least a minimum of one hour that will get all the looks like that would get almost every public person every person in the public that has their hand raised right now if we extend to an hour may i make a quick suggestion

116to that since it's could we do 30 minutes with one minute public comments so that we can get all the people who are waiting it's okay if you say no and just think you know is that a friend are you offering a friendly amendment um well i'm getting a little confused um but but i guess yes that would be a friendly amendment so trustee gonzalez hoy if i did the count right we at 58 minutes we would be at the last speaker right now who raised her hand if we did two minutes if we stuck with two minutes actually right now would be 60 if we stop now there would be 60 minutes of public comment left after c4 if that's if we stay at two minutes so are you accepting the friendly amendment or

117no trustee gonzalez hoy on this one i'm gonna have to go with two minutes of public comment so i will not be accepting the friendly amendment thank you though so trustee gonzalez toy because your friendly amendment was declined do you wish to make that as an amendment no thank you i take back my motion great uh trustee regular point of order would we please be able to check in with mr mcintyre about um the entire presentation he has speakers i think there's a lot more that's going to happen than just a 20-minute presentation you can ask the parliamentarian to help you mr mcintyre with our guest speaker what do you anticipate uh so my presentation will take right around 15 minutes and i have uh mr mike fine ceo of vic matt here as well

118who will probably take around 10 minutes uh but you know if there's an hour of speakers and then the board has questions and deliberation it seems like if we were going to have that kind of extended public speaker we'd probably have to extend the meeting you can ask if so the motion dies oh so can i move to adopt the agenda as is yes that is now that the there was no second for the one hour the current motion that we would be voting on is adopting the agenda with an additional 30 minute to public comment after item c4 okay so now we will move forward and we will now go to the vote so it was it was moved by trustee clerk gazeles hoy and second by trustee smith fo and so we'll start

119off with the student trustees uh trustee leon get clarification on the uh the agenda review and adoption of the agenda then yes trustee flores flores yes christian i have a point of clarification is it one minute or two minute 30 minutes uh is speakers our speaker's going to have one minute or our speaker's going to have two minutes you said the speaker have two minutes our speakers going our public comment speaker is going to have two minutes or public comment speakers going to have one minute uh one minute smith votes yes okay uh trustee phillips yes okay uh clark goes on his heart gonzalez oh yes uh trustee ragler reckler yes and myself is a yes and so the motion carries and we pass before the gender review and now we are moving on to

120the action items see i would like to move to this presentation uh companies uh item see tonight um with the various areas and after uh public comment we will hear from clarifying questions pertaining and discussions on the information tonight the presentation and so i will now turn to doctors so we will not be voting on each resolution separately we will hear each all four present we will hear all four at one time and then public comment and then vote on them at the end or are we voting on them one at a time because they're listed on the agenda one individually so we're gonna have the presentation and then the board will be voting on each resolution individually trustee phillips has a question as well so is it one presentation for all four items okay

121thank you that was clarification i was looking for trustee phillips and then claire godzilla's toy i think dr hurst just answered my question in that uh conversation thank you thank you just wanted to clarify the timing um i was asked 15 minutes but then i heard mr mcintyre say that there was going to be additional time so i just want to make sure that i am keeping up just 15 plus 10 so are we 25. okay thank you all right so now we turn to dr hertz thank you very much mr president tonight's meeting is certainly difficult it's an action that none of us want to take we're forced to deal with the issue has been known for many years put simply our student population has declined and we spend more money than we receive

122the action before us tonight is to consider issuing precautionary notices of reduction in staffing pursuant to education code that must be issued before march 15th as you all are aware the board is not deciding to reduce staffing tonight only to keep the option open statutorily the board is precluded from making a decision to reduce staffing until after a hearing before the office of administrative hearings has recommended that reductions are legally permissible thus the board does not actually vote to support a reduction of staffing or positions into the period between may 7th through the 15th the vote tonight is the board only keeping the option open to consider reductions in the future and nothing more the district will continue to negotiate the impact effects of layoff through may 7th and beyond while we monitor the governor's

123may revise and other legislative decision making the board has the power ultimately to rescind any final reduction notices issued in may any time before school starts again in the fall and as we have more data about who is retiring and not returning we will revise the layoff list accordingly so i hope we can take a deep breath understand that the board meeting around may 7th is the actual board decision date to reduce staffing and positions and with that i'd like to turn this item over to dr mcintyre our interim cbo thank you dr hurst uh you know there's been a lot of talk about about the structure of the organization and full disclosure i'm i'm one of the consultants uh who was brought here to help and i came right after the equity audit uh

124and i have to say i came to wcc usd because i wanted to be a part of the team that was serving some of the most underserved students in the state and despite my difference with some of the speakers tonight regarding the financial position of the district i truly consider it an honor and i'm proud to be here with each and every one of you uh and the staff that i've had the opportunity to work with i know this is tough tough stuff we're dealing with tonight um you know when i when i came to the first board meeting as your new independent fiscal expert the direction i received from the board is tell us the truth the unvarnished truth we need to hear it uh and and unfortunately you're getting a rather big dose

125of that tonight and i wish i had a different truth to tell you but it's it's the right truth it's the right truth using industry standards and best-in-class practices um i also want to make it clear because there was one comment that was made that's just kind of sat wrong with me at no point has any member of the board has the superintendent has any member of the executive cabinet or leadership team asked me to manipulate the financial position of the district for any reason nor would i if i was asked to do so i would prefer to quit and leave so i just want to make that very very clear uh what i have done is work with the available staffs that's been here we've spent a lot of time talking about position control

126cleanup uh that that included many staffs and many departments and even one consultant in the business business office uh who's been very helpful but mostly through the existing team who has really stepped up in a very very difficult time and i'm very very proud to work with each and every one of them in the business office and hr especially um so my goal tonight is to provide you a financial assessment of the district so you can make your decision that's it that is that is why i'm here and what my presentation's about so with that i will jump into the actual presentation sure sorry i'm better with math than i am with technology okay here we go so here's the uh the presentation i want to make it clear i'm using data that you're going

127to see again next week in the district's second interim report so that means i'm using actual data through january 31st of this year and the projections for the multi-year projection for the rest of this year so february 1st through the end of the year and the next two years so one of the things we do when we look at financials over time is we it's kind of an iterative process the the district adopts their budget and we talk a lot about how many ftes how many people are where in each position and we locked that in and then we we talked from then on as we have these uh interim budget conversations we talk about iterative changes to the organization so for example in this case there were a couple of places where we saw

128revenue increases in the current year for example where we were awarded the fcc grant on the unrestricted side of the budget on the restricted side of the budget the amount we were awarded for educator effectiveness increased so these are a couple things that we want to make sure that we're constantly updating the budget and showing the most current information we have to recognize the good and the bad and as soon as it becomes available that information becomes available to us so here you see some of the changes in the revenue side that we've seen recently on the expense side uh we've we've actually talked a little bit last week about the need and in it as we developed the second inner report and we're dealing with some of the shortfalls that we have operationally meaning

129where our expenditures far out seat our ex far exceed our revenues we're having to make some adjustments in our sr3 expenditure plan so we're actually moving some expenditures from the unrestricted side of the budget to the restricted side of the budget to fill part of that hole and so there you see where the expenses are are decreasing on the unrestricted side and increasing on the restricted side as a result of that move but there would be a decrease on the unrestricted side as well because part of this plan to fill the hole because my goal in addition to the reduction in force that we're talking about tonight is is we would also be using some of the other post employment benefits uh money that's set aside in trust along with the ester funds and the

130reduction in force to move the district's budget certification from negative where it was at first at the first interim to qualified a week from tonight and so i'm going to show you how the district looks with and without the riff because i've had to create two second interim reports as a result of where we are tonight and the timing of things so part of what we have to recognize or talk about is is is our part of the conversation should be is how does a district approach spending money because there's been a lot of talk about these contracts and this money in the five thousands that the services and other operating expenditures and and every statement who said we're spending more in the five thousands and in the four thousands of books and supplies is

131100 correct not for the same reason they're saying it's correct but they are correct in part and and and so the part i agree with is we are spending more the part i disagree with is why the reason we're spending more is primarily on the unrestricted side of the budget as a result of the fact that we're spending those covet dollars and so we received those one-time kova dollars and as we spend those off so monies we received last year and this year for this for specific purposes and uh one of the nice ladies held up the what we usually call the allowable uses or assurances on how you'll spend each type of covet dollars she's right there is a list of allowable uses and we have to certify how we're going to spend those

132dollars and so some of those cova dollars had broad use and some had very narrow use for example covet sr3 has a very broad use some of those governor's uh relief funds had very narrow use and so yes we have spent some of those money on a lot of those monies on supplies and and other uh other things to to to serve and meet the the proposed uses of those funds uh but separately when we talk about the the vetting process around contracts uh we do actually have a process we follow and over the next couple slides i wanted to show you the lens with which the leadership team has been directed by the superintendent to evaluate every contract and so here in the next three slides basically is where we lay that out this

133is what the superintendent gave the leadership team so he said when we're talking about a programmer initiative and how it's going to be funded is it research-based now does that apply for example to utilities no does it apply to a new tractor to mow the yard with no but when we're talking about you know education on the educational side of the spectrum is it research based what is the effect size on students will it help is there research to show that those purchases will help move student learning forward so that that is one of the things we're looking at also is there a critical need where does it fit in the instructional direction of the district now obviously based on what we're hearing there is an opportunity for more partnership before the acquisition of potential

134contracts or or services in this regard because we clearly don't have the buy-in from everybody that we we would benefit from having we also want to look at for example uh how how long we're going to need this service or item that we're looking at and the role and and who plays a role in the effort one of the things that we find especially as we're downsizing to meet our student population is that you know everybody is working what used to be two or three jobs 10 years ago everybody is across the entire organization and very often when we lose a person or we reduce a person making sure that every major component of their job is allocated out to somebody else things get missed they get dropped and that's part of you know one

135of the things the district's really struggling with and of course where does the work occur is an important factor finally how do we pay for it in our budget uh and what is required to sustain these programs so so i just wanted to share that there is a process that's used when we talk about expenditures specifically around contract uh you know those outside contracts because they need to be justifiable they need to be sustainable and they need to make sense and and so we need to do a better job in how we're communicating that part out for sure so there were other steps that we didn't spend a lot of time talking about in board in the board meetings since i've come here uh one of the things that we happened right around the time

136of first interim we saw gosh we went from a positive budget certification to a negative budget certification was hold on to the extent that we can just stop certain expenditures immediately let's do that so if we had central office positions that we hadn't already made an offer to people in do kind of a hiring frost is what we call it it's not technically a freeze because the board didn't direct it but we just we would slow our roll to see if we could do without some of those central office positions there were probably eight or nine of them in the business office for example that we didn't fill because we thought we well while there was a lot of work to do at the same time how can we justify spending more money when we

137know we're in such a difficult position also reducing some non-essential expenditures so you know if you're gonna reduce the size of an organization training becomes more essential but do you have to go to the you know which training you go to is there a cheaper option can you there's not is there an option without travel so for example if we had people going to trainings where they hadn't already prepaid for the travel we made them switch to the online option if there was one things like that where we could save some money additionally a recent examination of several of the subscription-based contracts uh and and several departmental reviews of departmental budgets resulted in a six million dollar ongoing cuts of contracts and that was just recent so there has been work it's just we don't

138spend a lot of time talking about it this is just the normal course of business that we would expect of our department leaders so at the second interim here we have the general fund this is restricted and unrestricted general fund overview in the second column you see the unaudited actuals from 2021 and the third column you see the 20 20 21 22 first interim budget you see the changes since first interim and on the very far right you see the 21 22 second interim budget and so what's important to recognize in in this particular budget is you know the fact that one revenues down slightly from last year to this year that had more to do with our upp because remember our attendance was held constant but our unduplicated pupil percentage was down and we

139had some other funding sources outside the lcs where funding was down a little bit we lost about we were expecting to lose about 11 million dollars at first intro we also saw expenses uh were coming in higher we talked about from at first interim how we found for example that insurance hadn't been booked for the year in one of the areas it was about a two and a half million dollar hit and there were several other areas where we saw things that were in the prior year that were not in this year's budget so we added those in at first interim since first interim we've had to make make shifts uh to recognize some of the s or three funds that we're going to spend in this year so where you see the revenue we've

140received money from the federal government but we can't recognize it until we spend it so it's unearned revenue but when we spend it it becomes revenue and we book the expenditure at the same time and so what you see here is us booking the the federal funds and the expenditures uh between first and second interim and so now when we look at the the crosswalk between first and second interim we see that the total revenues are up to about 453 while the expenditures are at 477 and so we started the year thinking we were going to spend about 29 million or at first interim 29 million more than we were bringing in it's a slightly better picture today we're expecting to spend about 24 million then we're bringing in so about a 5 million dollar

141improvement we expect it in this year with a fund balance of 35.51 million dollars with 23.8 million in the unrestricted balances and 11.71 in the restricted balances now when we talk about some of the fund balance that 35.51 million dollars we have to recognize where those funds are sitting and so i said there was about 23.8 million in the unrestricted side of the budget and about 11.87 million on the uh restricted side so unrestricted and restricted with on the unrestricted side we have some committed balances of 4.1 million and assignments of 8 million and and i think we definitely always need to be very transparent and make sure we're continually discussing what that list is and so staff had assigned 2.5 million dollars to cover the new recruitment slash hiring bonuses that were approved by

142the board those are paid out over three years this year being the first year so there's an estimated cost allocation of about 2.5 million and so we'll see that drop down a third each year as as those are paid out i know the hr team is now that they've done their work on the reduction in force that's going to be one of their next big projects is identifying those people so we could put together that list for payment at year end also the there was the board went through this equity review process and as a part of the equity review uh staff set aside 1.6 million dollars so the board had that for its edit at its discretion to use to address some of the equity issues that were identified as you were going through

143some of that strategic planning process with the superintendent and and defining that vision for staff on the committed side of the budget there's about five and a half million set aside for technology uh and and about two and a half million dollars set aside for the cte pathway academy is the growth of those cte pathways so typically you would fund the equipment and the leading edge and then as students enroll in those pathways the attendance would pay for the ongoing cost of operating them is it not showing the presentation it's showing the presentation on zoom it is oh okay good thank you trustee smithfolds okay so so there we talked through the uh the assignments and committed funds in the in the unrestricted fund balance so so that tells us where we are today for

144this year but when we school districts don't just have to to look at the current year they have to look at the current year plus two years we call it the multi-year projection and and due to some legislation that passed back in the late 90s we have to look at this over an extended period of time in an effort to help forego the reality that some districts found themselves in back in the olden days uh where they found themselves insolvent or having to ask the state for money because school districts can't go bankrupt what they do is they run out of money and then the state has to come bail them out when they do that the state takes over uh and and so in that as we look at that projection model some of

145the things we have to look at is what are the risks to the model and so these are what we list as budget concerns so for example the district has been experiencing declining enrollment on the natural for quite a long time but it's experienced massive declining enrollment in the last two years not unusual throughout the state but at a fairly large degree for a district of this size in addition to the lower attendance the frequency with which students are showing up being in their in their seat each day is lower and remember we're only funded for the day students actually show up and so the ada ratio has dropped substantially we we used to alternate between about 93 and a half and 95 and a half were below 90 percent this year well below 90

146this year um also the the drop in the unduplicated people percentage uh you know this could be as well i'll show you a graph but it could be because the families are doing economically better or it could be because we're not doing a very good job of getting the convincing families why they should fill the milk fill out the meal application form or the alternative income form so they can get that supplemental and concentration grant dollars sent back to their school also when we looked at the collective bargaining agreements with our labor partners we found that while we were very well staffed at the elementary and k-8s we were we were according to the contracts overstaffed at the middle schools and high schools that doesn't mean that the students don't deserve more staff i'm just

147saying when we looked at our basic staffing the way we build up schools we were overstaffed at the secondaries and so part of what you're seeing in the in the proposal tonight is aligning our staffing to our student population and the collectively bargained agreements set that baseline staff thing and then any additional staffing has to be funded from another funding source like the local control and accountability plan federal funds title one as appropriate uh and so we're going to dig into that in just a few minutes another risk that's out there is we're finishing up the federal program monitoring review in fact i have a checkout meeting with them tomorrow there are concerns about major findings and any major findings that come from fpm uh findings that are financial means we would have to take

148state and local dollars from the unrestricted general side of the fund side of the budget and pay back the restricted side of the budget we do not have a dollar value yet but we know there will be findings so i'll be reporting that out as soon as i have it we are taking steps to mitigate that number but this is the result of some some practice some practices that have could have been improved over the last five years um they're long-standing practices also we're experiencing local charter growth and so uh our charter schools are some of them are still you know growing they're a kate for example a k-6 school and they they grew up the year five last year so next year they're going to add grade six they're still growing as students and

149some of those are our students going there so we look at the multi-year projection first we're going to look at it assuming that we're only using the redesignation of those esser dollars and the and we're not charging off the other post-employment benefit expense because we're gonna have the trust pay that money directly over the next two years but without a riff without a reduction in force so i want to show you what the financials look like if you were to vote no tonight so when we build those financials we have to use assumptions so here you see the assumptions we're using for enrollment average daily attendance our ada percentage are unduplicated pupil percentage with that three year rolling average and the colas now colas the numbers are bigger than what we've seen historically but they're

150bigger because our cost of operation and inflation is going up so quick so while we have 5.33 designated for next year and that equals about 7.5 million in additional revenues we would not have seen uh absent the cola even if it goes up to six that puts us at about 8 million and you'll see that 8 million doesn't close the gap that we're talking about also our stirs and purse costs continue to increase and our employees uh you know through you know long fought battle decades and decades ago uh you know put step and column into their salary schedule and so the cost of each employee will go up from year to year certificate it goes up about 0.94 per year and classified about 0.97 per year there are no pay increases built into this

151model so when we look at the unrestricted general fund uh this is the unrestricted side of the general fund only with absent any reductions in force but we are using that sr transfer sr3 transfer and we're not charging opab we see the the breakdown of the unrestricted side of the numbers in the current year so we see on the unrestricted side of the budget where deficit spending about 16.63 million dollars which would leave us with the positive ending fund balance this year in the unrestricted side of the budget and we see of that 23 million 8 million committed 4.4 million is non-spendable or assigned and 11.4 million would be undesignated as we project that information forward we see that revenue despite the fact that we have cola revenue drops 27. at 0.3 million dollars next

152year so even though we have that five point three three percent cola built in there we're we're also coming up to what we call the ada cliff and i know there's been a lot of local conversations about the ada cliff so when cobit started the state said you know you probably are going to have a hard time taking attendance in 2021 because the kids aren't coming or they're homeschooling and it's very difficult to track a tenant so what they said is you can use your p2 ada from 1920 and they allowed us to calculate our p2 ada from 1920 at based on their attendance up through the end of february which was right before kovitz started in march of and and so we're able to use that number in 2021 and 2122. we're collecting attendance

153this year so next year we use the higher of next year's attendance or this year's attendance well we know from 1920 to this year it's a massive massive drop in attendance so it's very likely absent a new legislation that we will be using the lower number for next year so the drop completely consumes all of the cola and we're still seeing a drop in revenues next year on the expense side remember we're transferring some of those expenditures out of the unrestricted general fund side of the budget over to restricted so we're seeing expenses go down we're also cutting the labor cost in the in this area on the expenses side because we're not charging other post-employment benefits opeb which is part of those statutory costs because those will be paid directly by the trust neither

154of these are good solutions good budget solutions by the way these are acts of desperation using one-time money to try to get us to move from a negative certification to a positive certification we can't get there with these two acts alone and you see that because you see that even despite all of those changes we would be deficit spending 29 million dollars in the unrestricted general fund next year which would leave the unrestricted general fund upside down five and a half million dollars projecting that forward we see by the end of year three or 23 24 the unrestricted general fund would be upside down by 38.43 million dollars now of course there's also a restricted side of the general fund and we can't pretend like it doesn't exist the idea with the restricted side of

155the general fund is you can only spend those dollars on very specific and narrow uses for which the funds were generated but it's still cash in the bank and so we have to look at the whole general fund when we look at our financial position and so here on the le on the middle column 2122 that's exactly what we saw a few slides back where where we expect to end this year that 35.51 million dollars so that becomes the beginning balance for 2223 and so here we have the revenues for both the restricted and unrestricted general fund side of the budget 436 million we have the expenses and transfers out after we've made all those transfers from the unrestricted to restricted side and we cut those opeb costs you see we're still deficit spending about

15620.6 million dollars so we would have an ending fund balance of 14.91 million in the at the end of next year now what's interesting about that is we would have cash because the restricted side of the budget would have cash but the unrestricted side would be upside down as we project that out to 2324 we see that year we would be def holding all the same assumptions by the way there's no change in assumptions that results that you see how it's almost exponential in growth but that's using the same assumptions and only them forward we see we would deficit spend about 40 and a half million and here we would be upside down cash in the entire general fund so absent rifts we absent reduction in forces we project that we would run out of

157cash in october or november of 23. running out of cash is is when the state gets involved because they have to give give the district money for if the rift were not approved the state wouldn't be involved immediately and mr final talk about that the county would very much be in our business uh and and i'm sure mr fine can speak to that more eloquently than i could so we look at how we can how we build the budget uh there's a couple things we look at we're always looking at that enrollment and attendance the blue bars are enrollment the the green bars are that p2 attendance and we're always paid on the current or the higher of the former year that reddish uh line is actually the uh in ada percentage the frequency with

158which students show up and of course if you look at 2021 and 2122 those look high because we're using the 1920 number and so it's artificially high so really if you wanted to say what does our average daily attendance look like over time take those two years out of the model and look at the rest of the line okay so here we see that the the uh the unduplicated people percentage is dropping rapidly over time this means there's an opportunity uh with through the meal application process and communicating with our families potentially to bring this up some i don't think we'll see 75 percent like we saw in years past but we will likely see we could see some improvement that would help financially in the lcap also looking at our staffing ratios over time

159this is just for teachers you can see that we've there's been an effort to try to align staffing over time and and that's part of what we're talking about tonight is that alignment and and so our staffing for teachers has ranged between 20.9 students per teacher to 22.8 over this period of time so what if we did make the recommended reductions in staff so we have the same financial information in 2122 that we just saw in the under strict decided the budget the difference here is now we're now we have a lower labor cost associated with the reductions and so the the main difference you see here here is the the expenses and transfers out in 2223 and 23.24 those are lower so the deficits for each of those years are lower we would have

160a positive ending fund balance in 2223 as a result of those deficits in the unrestricted side of the budget but we would not in 23 24. this is the by definition this is how we go from negative to qualified under budget certification looking at the entire general fund expenditures we see the same scenario where we're positive cash here next year 22 23 uh 23 24 uh we are not we're negative cash so we can be negative cash in year three and have a qualified budget we can't be negative cash near two and have a and have a qualified budget we stay negative and so the despite the changes in use of esr funds the remaining three funds and using the opeb trust funds as one-time plugs the riff only gets us to qualified why did

161we size it at this size we size it this size because there is a hope that one of the measures that for example the governor's proposal with the three-year ada trend down that those will equal about the amount we have in the budget for that we're using from sr3 and opeb so the goal is to right-size the district with the reduction force to right-size based on the student population we expect to have next year and then we would swap out those sr funds and opeb funds with the state funds if that three-year trailing average or a similar piece of legislation is enacted that that is what the mechanics would look like uh there's there was some talk about what what the grouping would look like and the several board members in previous meetings said if

162we're going to make cuts it damn well better be as far away from the class as possible i think i think that's a pretty accurate quote actually to what i heard so what you see here is the is each of the groups there's unrepresented ssa wcca teamsters new tr i know i'm going fast and these are real human beings i don't mean to diminish the impact that my statements are having right now what you see in the third column is the proposed number of ftes to be reduced by the four actions tonight and on the right you see the percentage of the units being impacted obviously if you've got a giant unit uh you know with with a lot of very valuable staff members for example like utr that's a nice big unit so you

163know 81 is still a huge number but it's five percent of their unit what i can tell you is the 81.6 ftes for utr for example doesn't doesn't impact any tenured teachers so it's only talking about probation teachers on probation which are still important and valuable and they're new and we hate to see people uh those those young motivated people leave but it's not affecting any of the tenured staff on the teamster side you're seeing a lot of positions being downgraded meaning there that we change the number of hours to match for example like yard duty it's based on the number of students you have so if a school is allocated five hours then we we have to go through this process to reduce somebody from eight hours to five hours to match what that

164site needs that's part of what you're seeing the reductions of ftes here but as you see unrepresented that's typically central office people ssa also tend to be office people and so we tried to start away from the school sites and then work our way toward and have it more being to student balance so now if mr mike fine can come on and share uh dr mr martin dr mcintyre just finally you know you're 32 minutes i'm sorry you're fine keep going just wanted to give you a heads up one more time mr fine good evening um thank you dr mcintyre um members of the board and superintendent uh just to double check here that you can hear me somebody here you won't zoom mr fine on zoom i can hear you thank you trustee and

165thank you robert um good evening i'm michael fine i'm the chief executive officer of the state's fiscal crisis and management assistance team and my purpose in being here tonight is just to talk about process and to be able to answer any questions you may have about process my comments therefore are very limited on process they're not specific to any west contra costa usd data or plans our involvement in the district to date has been advisory to dr mcintyre and to the county uh superintendent and several other parties but all again on process and not on any details we have not assigned staff to the district and we've not been involved directly with the district the district has had the unique advantage of having two well-respected school finance experts serving as consultant in interim roles for

166the past four months dr mcintyre and mrs grenhoffer have a third party expert perspective uh the district as dr mcintyre just indicated in his comments the district engaged an equity audit in an equity audit which ultimately led to a recommendation to bring in such financial experts and would complement the board and the superintendent on their choice of the two individuals that they selected to assist you when they arrived they found the district's finances built frankly on a house of cards they conducted the analysis required and for the first time in many years they've presented you with an accurate and complete picture of the district's fiscal condition you're now in a position as the governing board to make informed decisions and understand the impact of those decisions both positive and adverse on your finances and on

167your educational programs in december you appropriately self-certified a negative first interim report the county superintendent concurred with the certification however the county superintendent did not engage in the available interventions at that point because you were actively involved your staff under the superintendent's leadership was actively involved in developing corrective action plans as time marches on though the options on how you will address your financial distress shrink at last week's meeting you spent barely 10 minutes on the important subject of budget conditions this was after you kicked the subject down the road at the preceding meeting frankly board members are not doing your job as trustees you have a fiduciary duty to ensure that your financial condition is stable and is able to support your core mission for students as the governing board you are ultimately responsible

168next week as dr mcintyre has indicated you will be required to consider your second interim finance report you have a choice to either adopt the report as positive as qualified or again as negative and that will be in part based on decisions that you make you've left yourself though with few options the situation i think is important for you all to recognize this situation has been in the making for several years and certainly not one uh that has all uh been created over the last nine months uh in attention to your circumstances for the past four to five years lead you to where you're at right now in addition to the potential for a second negative certification the district will likely be designated a lack of going concern in fact you meet that criteria today

169either the negative certification or the designation of lack of going concern will result in outside intervention and the board will no longer be the finance the final decision maker when it comes to a broad range of topics that impact your fiscal condition given this district's past and i think you're all familiar with it whether you're new board members or not you know the history that goes back 31 years but given this district's past you all should understand the fiduciary duty the voters opposed to you current projections as dr mcintyre just reviewed with you indicate that you will be cash insolvent by as early as october of 23 which is within the 18-month window considered a minimum for that standard and that analysis if you continue on a path to insolvency you will once again lose

170your local control and your community community and students will needlessly suffer you can change that direction of the past several years and embrace quality governance including spending sufficient time on your financial condition and the options to stabilize your finances or not your students and your community certainly deserve your very best effort and i am happy to address any questions about process that you may have this evening so at this time mr fine is available if the board has any questions about process about their choice of yes or no and what the implications might be specifically president christian if that's the end of the presentation then we actually have to go to public comment first for the 30 minutes okay and by that being said that's the end of the presentation and so we will go

171into public coming and then we will come back um with the board mr president if i may i will not stay with you for another 30 minutes i have other obligations including another board meeting that is that i've put off already this evening that's waiting on me so i'm if you have questions i'm happy to address them now but i won't be here 30 minutes from now uh trustee reckler thank you i do have questions from mr fine uh the first one is mr fine what's your background i've been the chief executive officer for the state's fiscal crisis team since prior to that i spent two years as the chief administrative officer of the agency prior to that roughly 25 years as chief business official deputy superintendent and interim superintendent in the large mid-sized and

172large california school districts i have a degree in accounting and a degree in a master's degree in public administration probably my number one credential is i'm married to teacher and our youngest son is a second year high school english teacher so i'm pretty sensitive to what's before you president christian i have a point of order point of order yes can we change and approve agenda just like that we just proved that we just approved the agenda and in the approved agenda we said that we are going to do public comment presentation public comment i'm sorry i didn't know mr fine was going to even be here so i i hope that he can be invited back so we can have a longer time with him but we literally said that we are doing public comment

173presentation public comment maybe we can send our questions to mr fine in the email and then have them put in a friday memo i'm not quite sure but i'm trying to figure out what is the parliamentary parliamentary rule on now changing the agenda that we just voted on can i get a ruling on that please uh president christian um the trustee is actually exactly correct because we adopted the agenda and because we did say that we would have the public comment after the presentations for 30 minutes um we could have a motion now to reconsider that decision and allow questions to justice speaker for a particular amount of time a motion to reconsider would probably take us 10 to 15 minutes but we do need to stick to the agenda the trustee is correct we

174should be in public comment at this point um trustee phillips adam parliamentarian all right the agenda says and trustee president christian read this it says order of business may be changed without notice that is always on our agenda it is read at every meeting it's on page two and it's the the procedures for our meeting i'm certainly not arguing that point with you it is on every single agenda and motions are made when we adopt the agenda that state that move things around that changed the agenda we did that this evening by adopting the agenda as an amendment to have the 30 minutes of public comment to come after the presentation we can reconsider the motion but we did adopt a rule for this meeting that says we will be in public comment right now

175i i just want to say this one thing it says in the uh it says in the agenda that the order of business may be changed without notice president christian it is your discretion what you do you are the chair we also hired a parliamentarian for a reason i asked for a parliamentary ruling the parliament the parliamentarian gave the ruling so yes i'm assuming it is the pleasure of the president but i would like the parliamentarians ruling to stand this is what we'll do we're going to proceed with the presentation i mean not presentation but with the uh public comment and then we'll go from there so thank you thank you president christian i do have one more question are people in the audience able to sign up again for public comment uh go ahead

176trustee wrecker i'd like to put a motion on the floor to reconsider the agenda so that board members may ask mr fine questions i second the motion i just wanted to know what the process is for reconsideration at this time from the parliamentarian just so that we're all clear i'm not saying i agree or disagree i just want another process uh so so far the process has been followed exactly right since everybody we voted unanimously to adopt the agenda the motion maker was on the prevailing side now we can go into a vote it only requires a majority to reconsider i mean what is the uh what are we trying to do the motion as i heard in trustee phillips please correct me if i'm wrong is to reconsider the adoption of the agenda to

177go into public comment immediately and to allow questions right now of the speaker yes the speaker from fig man is telling us he is going to leave board members want to ask him questions before he leaves so we have so that is the motion it was moved and seconded properly i believe that is correct i'd like to call the question and go to the vote we do not need to have a uh call the question if there are no comments if there are no comments then we then chair we would go right to the vote if there are comments then we would vote first on the call to question i have a comment okay then before we have the comment we're going to do the call to question so now we need to have two

178votes first do we move the do we call the question i go first tonight trusty president christian according to the new method so my vote to call the question hold on one moment please we may not take a vote until the chair calls for the vote okay and as the chair had said previously he's calling the student trustees first and then yes you are immediately following that so president kirsten we need to have the vote for the call to question trustees young abstain floor is abstinent i vote no to call the question phillips yes yes hey krishna abstain so what's the ruling uh did i'm sorry did the chair vote i miss yes president christian voted to abstain okay so the call to question fails so we are in comments we'd only comment on whether

179or not to amend the agenda to allow for the speaker to continue i do not believe we should amend the agenda for the speaker to continue because i as one board member did not know the speaker was coming did not have time to prepare the questions for the speaker to come and we've already told the public who's been waiting now that after the presentation they would be able to ask their questions or say their comments or ask their questions it's their turn and now we are taking more of the public's turn because some people think that they turn into a pumpkin at 10 30 so when i try to extend the meeting we're then not going to be able to extend the meeting so i'm asking for us to hear the public that's my comment

180and i'm also asking for if there's people in that audience that are wanting to speak why are they not able to sign up thank you okay uh parliamentary do we proceed with the is there are there any more comments specifically on do we amend the agenda to allow the speaker to speak right now uh trustee phillips i know that this is not popular but i believe that it is extremely irresponsible of this board to make a decision like this without actually asking questions of figma now regardless of how people vote in the end but to literally decide that we don't even want to ask them questions i think is ridiculous those are my comments and i would like to be able to ask questions uh trustee reckleton we have probably the most highly respected expert

181in school funding in our zoom right now it is irresponsible not to allow him allow us the opportunity to ask him questions about our harrowing fiscal crisis i request he be given the time to speak clerk is all a toy thank you uh i'm gonna support the motion but i do want to say to my two colleagues making this motion that i'm supporting it but when i make the motion to extend the meeting so that we get through all the items i hope that you'll support it as well in return thank you okay so if there are no more comments we would go right to a vote and the vote would be on i have a final comment parliamentarian may i have the comment may i say it go ahead i think it's irresponsible for

182us to have teachers parents community members in the audience in person and on zoom who have waited their turn to talk about their livelihood i am happy mr fine is here i hope that mr fine comes back i hope that we make sure that we have a transparent a transparent knowledge for all board members to know when someone is coming to the board and being part of the presentation but the experts i want to hear from are not mr fine the experts i want to hear from are the ones that are in that audience and the ones that are on zoom it's irresponsible for us to end a meeting at 10 30 when we still have work to do that's irresponsible trustee gonzalez sorry i appreciate your generosity of spirit but you know they're not

183gonna vote to extend it they're we are wasting valuable time waiting not to hear from this public because we're wanting to hear from mr fine send your questions to him in email we have a friday member for a reason thank you um let's go to the vote the young abstain floor is abstained shamila smith folds votes no to change the agenda to have mr fine speak no phillips yes gonzalez yes christian yes passes and now we'll move on to the question mr chair are you setting a time limit on the questions okay on the time um we will have trustee phillips i respect everybody's desire to participate in this meeting whether they are members of the public or members of the board but this board is about to make a monumental decision and you are

184actually giving the public more time than the you're giving to the board to actually deliberate you're not even giving equal time to the board members not even equal time and i and i think that it is extremely important that the public get to speak but the board be given the space to do its work so you we give two hours or an hour and a half for public comment and five minutes for a board member president christian are we on the questions to mike fine because now he only has what nine minutes here are we on to the questions or are we still giving comments are we on to the questions five minutes trustee reckless mr fine good evening if the board votes no tonight and doesn't make reductions from a process perspective what happens

185without an immediate alternative plan uh you really have no choice other than to certify negative when your doctor your um [Music] second interim next week i mean the reality is the board can certify whatever it wants but if the county superintendent at the conclusion of their review i would suspect they would [Music] they would change if you certify something other than negative such as positive qualified i would expect the county superintendent to change that certification and downgrade it to a negative and probably simultaneously designate you as lack of going concern that then starts a process that's well defined in code that is all truly driven by the county superintendent there are number of options available to the county superintendent to begin their intervention in the district they start intervention is designed around the least lowest

186amount of intervention that's needed to solve the problem at hand and can ratchet up accordingly so mr fine if you'll repeat um i think you answered my question but i'm just going to repeat this again just to make sure that you answer this can you tell the board and the community the consequences if the district files two negative budgets in a row and how fast repercussions start to happen yeah trustee i would i would say that two negatives are not necessarily the issue one negative actually is all it takes um the code doesn't contemplate a second negative it contemplates just one that's already happened but as i indicated in my comments earlier the county superintendent delayed intervention as i understand it because you are on course to adopt necessary corrective action plans with the assistance

187you have from dr mcintyre and mrs grenhoffer i would not expect the county superintendent to delay interventions beyond next week if a negative is is again the right category for your interim report to be certified at i would expect the county superintendent to um to begin the intervention process immediately and again there the code lays out a number of options for the county superintendent they must do at least one of those and depending on your response to those interventions uh the county superintendent then can ratchet up to another group of interventions which get far more serious including as i alluded to the appointment of a fiscal advisor would stay in or send authority over the board which would have the authority to stay or rescinded in your actions that you take that would be inconsistent

188with um recovery and what happens to this board's authority dubois does this board get to continue to make decisions or does this board i guess give up its control or abdicate its ability to make decisions for itself and for the district no the phase we're in at this point is the board absolutely continues to be the governing board of the district and you have all the normal authority you would that you that you enjoy that the the statute provides to you to govern the district the difference would be that if you were to make a decision that is adverse to your fiscal stability the fiscal advisor would be able to either stay that action until you decide differently or to rescind your action but they do not have the authority to make a decision on

189your behalf so for example they can't they can stop um they can suspend or reverse a decision you make but they can't make a decision for you that distinction makes sense too so for example if we miss this march 15th deadline what happens they don't have any authority to make a decision let's say between this purely illustration purpose is between tomorrow and march 14th then to step in and make it decision 40. if you were to make a decision but let's just use the opposite situation because i think it's clear if you were to make a decision to go out and hire 200 additional staff members they would be able to stop that decision but they can't make a decision on your behalf can you explain for the general public what a lack of going

190concern is sure it's a it's an accounting it's genesis as an accounting term where most businesses are classified as going concerns it's applied to government agencies such as school districts and cities and municipalities and so on and community colleges in very similar terms you're either going concern which is the majority of all businesses and public agencies or there is a lack of going concern meaning just the opposite you're not a going concern it is specifically covered in california education code 42 127.6 specifically subdivision a and subdivision e subdivision a is the list of initial interventions the county superintendent must follow at least one of those and subdivision e is the is the next level of interventions uh including the illustration i used of assigning a fiscal advisor so it is a message to your community

191it's a message to your bondholders of your debt it's a message to the state that the district is in jeopardy of not being able to continue on its own christie reckler uh you are at six and a half minutes just wanted to let you know thank you thank you mr fine trustee flores thank you um hello mr fine uh you mentioned the state change could you please explain further i'm sorry can you can you ask that one more time you mentioned the state change could you please explain further um you briefly touched on that you didn't really explain yeah trustee flores i i'm not sure what that is in reference to if i said the state changed i'm not sure the context of that that that phrase doesn't doesn't make sense to me um so

192maybe one of your colleagues could help if they know what the context of that was i apologize i i don't recall saying that perhaps you were talking about if someone from the state steps in um okay thank you trustee thorpe so if that is your question um trustee flores uh what we're a long ways away from that this is a district that experienced that in its history um in 1991 1990 1991 um when it was known as the richmond unified school district and it had to turn to the state for three emergency appropriations or three emergency loans from the state when that happens the process then is at the state now through the county superintendent not to the state superintendent would take control of the district the board stays in pieces but the board loses

193its authority to govern we become advisory only and the superintendent is um is dismissed and the county superintendent and this board the president of state board of education and the state superintendent that triad of people appoint what's known as an administrator to act as both superintendent and board together to operate the district and to put it back on stable financial footing your while that threat lingers out there if you go cash in solvent as dr mcintyre described for october of 2023 you are a long ways away from that and i would not i wouldn't spend a lot of time thinking about that if i were you the next step in the process is for the county superintendent to provide appropriate interventions my goal my single goal in engaging with your district at that point in

194time would be to help you stabilize and prevent you from needing a state loan a state loan is disastrous it's not good for your community it is not good for your school district it's not good for you a student and my single goal would be to prevent that from happening and so and the county superintendent would be part of that their interventions need to be designed to prevent that from happening and the easiest way to do that is to get you back on sound financial footing and in a stable environment financially i hopefully that makes some sense and answers your question uh any other clarified questions that's all thank you all right thank you let's see christian i have my hand raised yes go ahead so mr fine thank you for being here um if

195you feel like you got charred or smoked none of the smoke was headed towards you i just needed to know some questions so i want to put that out there i do have a couple of questions one who asked you to be here tonight dr mcintyre did and and i consulted with the county superintendent's office thank you and would you think that it would be prudent for the county superintendent to come and speak to the board directly i understood they did last picture last meeting last week would you think that it would be prudent for them to come back after this decision that we make tonight depending on what your decision is you won't get a choice whether they come back or not depending on what we decide tonight yes if you if you are

196negative certification or lack of going concern they will they will come back they will be back thank you and then you said and i just want to make sure i heard this correct we are a long way from having the state come in is that accurate that is accurate and you also said that we will maintain authority with a fiscal advisor that would be another step in the process is that correct the county superintendent had short answers yes but for clarity the county superintendent has two choices a point initially appoint a fiscal expert right but then ratchet that up to a fiscal advisor and the fiscal advisor comes to you either with or without staying rescind authority but i can tell you that negative and lack of going concern justify a fiscal advisor with stay

197and rescind authority thank you for that and mr fine is so interesting because once again i did not know that you were going to be here tonight but i did read something that you said did you say this and i quote with a huge demand and dry pipeline there is the risk that teachers will look elsewhere or leave the profession absolutely that's a a quote in today's ed source article that's attributed to me thank you so much those are all of my questions all right thank you trustee phillips thank you there are a lot of uh questions and i'm trying to get some clarity um so the next step if this is not passed is that the county would come in correct that's correct they are the you are first and foremost responsible i think

198you know that as a long-time trustee you're first and foremost responsible uh your backstop your initial backstop if you will and second layer of defense is the county superintendent they have oversight responsibility for your fiscal affairs so when the county comes in what is their authority and what i mean by that is well what is their authority when they come so again this is a phased progressive this the system is a progressive um system of interventions in many respects it looks just like a multi-tiered system of support or mtss system that we would use with kids that are struggling um they are to provide the intervention only the intervention that's needed and try to correct things and get you back on track um they're not to be excessive about that or provide something for example

199that you don't need it's meant to be very targeted um and you either respond to that favorably or you don't right and then it progresses um down the road uh to the point that the county superintendent is exercising more and more intervention and step of the way and again the last resort is unable to turn the corner um financially and then at that point you the the numbers really dictate where you go from that based on the projections that dr mcintyre and mrs grenhoff are prepared with no corrective action you will be out of cash to pay your bills most importantly out of cash to pay your employees that's really what the state cares about is that you have cash to pay your employees you will be at that point as early as october of

2002023 when you run out of cash and cannot pay your employees that's when the state intervention kicks in and the legislature provides you an emergency appropriation of cash so you can pay your bills in exchange for the state's interaction the state's intervention and that's when uh governance of the district changes um thank you for that and i guess what i'm just gonna ask this as simply as i can is it because you keep saying if the county comes in it's an intervention at the lowest level and then it ratchets it ratchets up but i don't really know what an intervention is at the lowest level and i think maybe a lot of us don't and i think that might be part of the confusion so i'm going to ask you two questions i'm going to

201put them out there at the same time first what is an intervention at the lowest level and then two and i'm asking this because basically i'm hearing what i'm hearing is the county lynn mackie could come in here and ask us to do the right thing and then if we don't listen she can make us that's how what i'm hearing that's what i'm translating this into um so what is an intervention at the lowest level and then if we don't listen are you saying she can actually make us great great question i apologize for not being more specific so let me give you some examples of what the statute requires the county to do one of these at the first level of intervention assign a fiscal expert that is paid by the county to advise

202you and your superintendent on financial matters fiscal interven fiscal expert is lower than a fiscal advisor that i was speaking about earlier okay i'll give you example in san francisco unified right across the bay from you since november they have had a fiscal advisor appointed by the state who is their oversight agency because they are a district and county in one so the state is their oversight agency they've had a fiscal advisor assigned to them since november to guide them in the creation and adoption of a fiscal stabilization plan okay second intervention would be to conduct a study of the financial and budgetary conditions of the district that includes a whole variety of budget matters cash forecasts internal controls you've had the advantage of dr mcintyre mrs grenhoffer helping you with that to date so

203i would suspect there's not a whole lot of additional work to do in that area miss miss grinhoffer by the way is somebody that does that type of work across the state she's the first person we frequently turn to to do that very kind of work so you've already had the advantage of her expertise the next would be to ask the district to submit a financial projection of all fund and cash balances you in essence are right on top of that dr mcintyre has prepared a second interim report back two versions of it that would be as up-to-date as is needed so in many respects you've kind of already done that it would be probably the county would want to do some extra review of that some extra analysis of that um probably have a

204lot more questions than they would normally ask on a standard review of a second interim but you're already well underway with that the next would be to require the district to encumber all contracts and other obligations meaning to report those obligations as far out as they go right now you have probably uncovered most of your obligations through june they would ask you to be identifying those obligations beyond that point in time direct the school district to submit a proposal for addressing the fiscal conditions um and so the the proposal that she'd asked you to submit and that she would work with you on would be your fiscal stabilization plan um it has several names but that's the name we most commonly assigned to it san francisco has given it a again using them as an

205example they've given it a local name to it that they were more comfortable with but it's it's your plan of action for the next year or two year period of time the next item is to withhold compensation from the members of the governing board and the school district superintendent for failure to provide anything the county superintendent asks for so she has the authority to stop your stipend that you may receive and to stop the pay to the superintendent until you comply and then another one which i don't believe is relevant to west contra costa would be to do a study specifically to ask us to do a study on assignment and misassignment of teachers based on credential areas sometimes that's at issue and sometimes it's not i'm not aware that nobody's had a discussion with

206me that that's a circumstance in west contra costa and so that may not be those are examples of that first level of intervention when we jump to the second level of intervention the county superintendent is then required to develop and impose on you a budget revision that would enable you to meet your financial obligations so you can see the difference in asking you to come up with a plan versus coming up with a plan and imposing that plan on you okay so you can see it's at a higher level of intervention and so on to stay and rescind any action that you take that would be inconsistent with that recovery plan or stabilization plan to assist in developing in consultation with you as the governing board a multi-year financial plan that looks out in the

207future so not just current budget but your your myp that dr mcintyre briefly reviewed with you when he showed you the three years um in each of those columns um if and we're about this timeline um if this was early in the year this wouldn't decide next item wouldn't apply but since we're later in the year it applies and that is assist you in developing your next year's budget and making the necessary adjustments to it so that you are stable financially as you appreciate you spend the average different district i should say not because i don't know your exact data the average district spends between 85 and 90 percent of its budget on people on teachers on classified staff counselors and so on um and without the ability to adjust that then it makes it

208very difficult to balance a budget on the remaining 10 to 15 percent which in many which the largest portions of that remaining 10 to 15 you don't have a whole lot of control over its utilities uh which is dr mcintyre indicated or in the 5000 object codes that number of people criticize today it's non-public school non-public agencies for your special needs children um and maybe transportation i i don't recall if your district contracts out for part of its transportation or it's all staffed inside but if it's contracted out that's the third highest category in that in that remaining 10 to 15 cents next would be appointing a fiscal advisor and there's a job description for that um and the um those would be examples of that next set of higher interventions and they have to

209do at least one of those but they could do them all depending on what your response as a governing board is to the county superintendents mr fine excuse me mr fine trustee christian i have a point of order uh your point order it's 9.50 we need to vote to extend this meeting i would like to motion to extend this meeting until we complete the entire agenda which includes d comments from the board i second that motion all right um yeah it was a motion put to the floor uh trustee reckon i'd like to put sorry sorry about that i'd like to put another motion on the floor to extend the meeting until 11 30. i'm gonna put a third motion on the floor one moment we have to have a second for the for the

210um extending until 11 30. last meeting you said you don't need seconds but okay once we had gone into a discussion on an item we do not need a second because that's an inherent second there is no been disc there has been no discussion on extending the time until 11 30. so mr chair do you have a second for the substitute motion of extending until 11 30. just a second motion dies uh trustee phillips i moved that we stay until we can pull all of the action items in c i'll second that so we are then then at 10 o'clock we would be moving that would just follow our agenda me because at 10 o'clock we would have to go right to the action item of having a motion and then immediately voting on it

211we'd be eliminating the 30-minute public comment is that the intent of your motion sir so i'm not we already had a discussion um i had stepped away so i know that the board wants to hear from members of the public that is included in what i'm saying um because my understanding is that after the presentation is over that they're gonna do make comments and then it's gonna come back to the board for deliberation i am saying that i would like us to stay until we complete all of the action items which are c one through four and public comment i just said that i i'm trying to clarify your emotions sir the thirty i believe president christian was an extra 30 minutes of public comment and that's going to start right when this presentation is

212over right i'm not trying to change that i am simply saying that i want us to stay until we complete all of our action items i think that's clear public comment is not an action item so that is why you all understand what i'm saying um i've made my motion uh clerk gonzalez thank you i would like to make a third motion that we extend the meeting until we are done with all auction items and including the 30-minute public comment um which is president christian that's what i just said yes but your emotion did not include the public comment which is what the parliamentarian was saying that was the issue we can do it you can make the motion i second your motion even though we said the same thing would you i second your

213motion it's your motion would you just accept it as a friendly amendment to add the public comments sure okay all right the motion has been moved to stand to me and the second in the second by uh trustee phillips because he accepted a friendly amendment to his motion to include the 30 minutes of public comment so we need someone to second that motion that is not trustee phillips he made the motion i'll second that motion thank you all right now we go to the vote i'm sorry point of order would you just repeat it out loud the motion go ahead trustee regular the motion is that we extend the meeting until we are done with all four action items and that includes a 30-minute public comment that we'll go to after next after this thank

214you all right let's go with the vote uh trustee leon just for clarification this is on the first motion of the second motion second question um exactly replacement motion uh leon no tracy flores can you guys repeat the motion yes the motion is that we will extend the meeting until we are done with all the action items including the public comment the 30-minute public comment the difference between this one and the first one is just that it does not include comments from the board laura's no uh try to move fools this is the third or fourth time we've not had public comment or i'm sorry not had bored comments from the board my vote is no we need to hear from the board including our student trustees most importantly my vote is no trustee phillips

215yes clerk is our little toy gonzalez oh yes trustee broken reckler yes and yes and the motion carries so now we will ask the parliamentary we do we move on to the uh discussion no so we are that was a replacement motion so we are now continuing with the 30 minutes for the public comment and then we will need to have the clarifying questions promotions and comments on each of the c one through four okay and so we will to see what public comment in one minute per person and we have 30 minutes right 30 minutes and trustee christian i'm sorry i have another point of order go go ahead i interrupted mr fine was he finished he's still here i'm trying to figure out if he is able to leave or not was mr

216phillips five minutes up are we finished with mr fine yeah yes we'll finish thank you mr fine so we will start in the zoom out and then after the zoom out we would come on the inside president christian just to clarify there are 23 people signed up on zoom so there should be some time for seven people in person thank you okay so let's get started we want to zoom out our first public comment is the idrissa ladier please unmute yourself you all know me and i was a student that graduated the year of 1991 and i remember all of the craziness and my parents going to these meetings maybe the state or the county needs to get into our business because y'all mucking it up it's a lot of dysfunction um just the thought

217of firing staff and dismantling oasis it shouldn't be an option i stand in solidarity with all the the other parents all of the staff how do you even think about cutting people that are doing the work when you're more top heavy than dolly parton we don't need you over there pushing paper downtown we need more staff at the schools and dismantling oasis hurst you're falling right into the plan of your old biddies that you've been meeting with regularly the plan was to set up the black office to dismantle the black office so they can make their own resources we don't want that open your eyes and see what's really going on because the dysfunction is in asap not always so get rid of asad they're unnecessary and don't even think about touching the staff or

218oasis because we need all of them thank you our next public comment is robert mandel please and mute yourself good evening i'm from adult school teachers united rather than mr fine being the most respected expert on finances in the state thick matt is the hatchet man for team pelosi headed by governor newsome and in education by sermon and their job is simply continuing privatization through outsourcing and hiring consultants in adult ed there's proposed to be a reduction in teaching even though we are not in debt and using numbers and student attendance that was orderly officially forced down by screening rules that blocked students from enrolling our next public comment is stella miranda please unmute yourself hi i'm calling tonight because i want to bring to the attention of the teachers that you are personally liable

219if you violate the law by asking your students to mask put a mask on or harass them because they are not wearing a mask properly there are 13 ed code laws and amendments to support the students rights to not wear it any person who denies access or sends a student home for school in violation of these laws can be held personally liable i just wanted to extend that out because a student was sent home today improperly by a teacher out of the class it can be a misdemeanor and can be punished we've always been honest with each other who can be punished with fines that's all our next public comment is i agreedano please unmute yourself and state your name for the record my name is i'm a community outreach worker and good night superintendent

220and for members let's make the right decision but not on the later because you are taking the future of our students late of teachers and classified stuff uh is not right you're giving millions and millions of dollars to consultants and contractors that don't understand the lives of our students uh classified and certified staff know their students they have the best for them and time to spend the money on the right stuff classified and certified not contractors or consultants that they don't know our students let's do the right stuff care for our children and vote no show that you care thank you our next public comment is angelina hernandez please unmute yourself hello my name is angelina hernandez this is my sixth year as a teacher at lupine hills elementary today i gave a student a

221band-aid i gave a replace in math to another student finished a read aloud which left my students hungry for more luckily the book is part of a series i taught my eager students how to multiply three factors i held group and individual conversations sorry conferences for reading and writing did i mention i took in five students from an extra class today i am exhausted but i would do it again in a heartbeat i love what i do i love it when the students share their joy to be in school in our morning meetings please find other places to cut back and leave school and staff alone thank you our next public comment is hannah gaitner please unmute yourself hello our next public comment is maria nunez please unmute yourself hello my name is maria nunez

222i'm a first year fourth grade teacher at terra hills elementary school my students specifically need to have materials like class accessible and working tablets class sets of them sets of books effective culturally relevant and holistic curriculums and other materials that they do not have our schools don't need to lose teachers aids custodians or administrative staff our students need people our students need individualized and meaningful help they need people that care for them they do not need another app the fact that the district is considering this at all makes it difficult for the first year and second year teachers like myself to see ourselves in this district and even in a district that holds outside contracts and contractors on a pedestal while students and teachers are being tossed to the curb if you do not put

223teachers and students first then we shouldn't we won't and we will probably never come back i asked the board to prioritize spending on classrooms and direct services to deserving students not central office contracts please vote no on the cape uh pks resolution thank you our next public comment is lauren gibson please unmute yourself my name's lauren gibson i'm the parent of a third grader i hope you vote no tonight our children have suffered significant learning losses and trauma during the pandemic mental health among them continues to soar the rates ideally we'd be increasing direct services absolutely not cutting teachers are the single most important person and an impactful person on a student's life at school we should not lay them off or increase class size that is equally detrimental and not feasible they're already doing

224so much to help help children recover on top of teaching usual curriculum new teachers are assets they have recent educations and are apprised of the latest research based teaching practices i'm a parent volunteer on the playground there's been a real need our principal's usually out there and i didn't think it was in our job description i helped manage volunteers for the classroom which at times has involved us cleaning and sanitizing the classroom given there's not enough support um i'm going to stop there thank you so much please cut everything else and leave direct services as a last resort our next public comment is first press berkeley please admit yourself and state your name for the record uh hello my name is and i am a student at el cerrito high school i am speaking on

225behalf of mr ace's class as mr reyes our world history teacher happens to be one of the teachers that matt gay might get laid off we wrote an email to the school board a letter highlighting mr reyes's a miss reggie's job but in truth it represents all the teachers in our high school that are in the same situation and we collected 49 signatures of mysterious students that also think this is such an unfair situation me personally i am an exchange student with which means i won't be here next year but these teachers in my case mr reyes have made such an impact on me that i am fighting for them to stay so future west contra costa unified school district students can get the chance to enjoy being in class with these amazing people that

226make learning enjoyable and might just leave because of some budget cuts and also not all the teachers have the luxury to be able to stay here until next school year is to get rehearsed and we will lose them for every comment please show that you care for these students and both known in teacher layoffs thank you so much our next public comment is tanya garcia pena please unmute yourself buenas noches mentioned that she was raising awareness about the lack of the lack or the decision or the bad decisions that are being that have been made throughout the years in regards of the services provided to their students she mentioned that the most vulnerable students which are english learners students of color are the ones that are being impacted she was mentioning that they are trying

227to do uh with the personal that they have at the school sites try to res to solve the problems and issues that arise every single day and that she is asking you to please vote no because this these are decisions that have been made um in a negative way impacting all the artists all over students for many years and this is of course in summary of what i was able to hear so my apologies i think we are all very tired thank you [Applause] our next public comment is rocco ray please unmute yourself hi um my name is rocka ray and i'm a science teacher at helms middle school um thank you to the consultants for that presentation we cannot make any cuts at the school level just a few months ago dr hurst admitted

228to us that our district has a harder time hiring and retaining staff than nearby districts i wonder why my students need teachers with experience including new teachers who can grow and develop and become experienced as educators if firing new teachers will save money how much will it cost to onboard a whole new set of teachers how can we possibly have vacancies open while threatening layoffs please make it make sense if you send out rifts people will leave and they will not come back even if you rescind them that is literally what happened three years ago and it will happen again thank you our next public comment is deborah bayer please admit yourself hello thank you um i want to refer back to the comment that um i think he was speaking uh about the adult

229education school because i think he's absolutely right um you know how you can just smell a bully you know you guys are being bullied hard by michael fine and i have to say the consultant mr mcintyre i think who showed the financials he didn't show who how much money was being spent on consultants or who those consultants were there is time you should not let yourself be bullied what are they saying please vote yes and if you don't vote yes we'll make your vote yes um that this is not what you are supposed to do stand up for yourself stand up for the schools stand up for the the the teachers and the and the students and do not let yourself get bullied by these people who think of themselves they're so arrogant please conclude

230your comment yes our next public comment is lupe please unmute yourself and state your last name for the record our next public comment is salon harrison please unmute yourself [Music] and we need to ensure that you guys communicate with parents because that was a lot of information in a short period of time and a lot of the confusion and then i just want to also say that we're not supposed to use the public comment to hurt other parents we're a free parent group that help and try to do what we can and we're out here just trying to all figure it out so please ensure that this public comment is not used to attack us appearance and is used to advance the work we need to get done here in our district thank you our

231next public comment is roxanna molina please unmute yourself i just wanna hope and have you reconsidered the resolution to lay off and certificated and classified staff i asked for your decision to be to reduce the highly paid executive director salaries and lay off those executive directors whose current positions were created just to keep them this year i think about our new teachers that you have recruited for this year they'll be the first ones to go this is wrong we need to support our teachers there are the core of our schools and the reason that you don't have retention on employees is this very same reason our classified staff will also be under the same scenario my seniority is holding me by a thread only it's not fair all of this is bringing unnecessary stress to

232employees brings down the morale and the willingness to try harder please make a good decision show that you care for the students the parents in the community and do your duties support and serve all students properly thank you our next public comment is edith jordan mccormick please unmute yourself can you guys hear me excuse me this is late for me good evening my name is edith jordan mccormick i'm the principal of vista high school and the vista k12 virtual academy i'm calling because in light of ab130 vista high school has set so quietly just the most amazing place for over 30 years and now that we're past the threat of the vaccine mandate i just think it's really important for families and students and people to know that we offer an amazing independent studies program

233that is a choice program and that independent studies is a facilitated side-by-side approach to learning that works really well when families and students choose to participate it is a program that is very collaborative that is a three-pronged approach that involves the student the staff and the family and that we are here to serve those families that choose us and will not um i don't want to say be forced but i hope that if you are looking for what we have to offer that you check out what we are doing we've been doing it for over 30 years thank you our next public comment is carol peters please unmute yourself i would like to not spend too much time and hopefully leave some time for more public speakers in person to be able to speak i

234just want to quickly say um as i said before vote no on this i don't see a problem with county intervention and tiered support i would also like to thank trustee jamila smith-folds and student trustees flores and liang for your unapologetic brave support of teachers staff and students in schools thank you for your bravery i wish everyone was like you three i'm done our next public comment is joseph glatzer please unmute yourself all right joseph glatzer hercules middle this is an email i got from a student i had a few years ago and i saved these nice emails for when i'm having a tough day and this isn't about my ego i promise because i guarantee you every educator speaking tonight gets messages like these hi it's me student x i was in your second

235period advanced history class in 2020. i want to reach out to you and say thank you for all that you taught me in my seventh grade year i was really struggling mentally but your class helped me a lot i remember sometimes you would just give me like 10 minutes to talk to you and vent i don't know if you realized it at the time but it was really helpful for me to come into your classroom and be accepted for who i am was really validating before i started my seventh grade year i wasn't in school for two years so sometimes the information felt like it was too big for my head which left me feeling stupid and bad about myself but you helped me learn and understand what you are teaching it started a love

236with history in me and today i'm in high school ap history class i appreciate everything you've done for me and i just want to know if any of your consultants and thick mac people get emails like that because i'll read you another one i'm really impressed with how good you are with um and how you understand teens conclude your comment vote no and our last public speaker for zoom is jeanette bradfield please unmute yourself hello our first public speaker in person is stephanie garcia-villa hello board and community my name is stephanie garcia avila and i'm a former student trustee and i'm here to speak on cutting teachers in 2020 i was standing here advocating for the same thing but the district never listens to students i lost some of my most amazing teachers that i've

237ever had the teachers that were cut made me feel safe and heard it's already hard enough to create student-to-teacher relationships when teachers are suddenly fired because our district cannot manage their money when my teachers got laid off it impacted me tremendously my safe people did not come back and it was hard for me to be myself at school the teachers that saw me graduate now don't even work at richmond high as a person who wants to teach at wcc usd once i graduate gonzaga university this does not make me want to come back your budget cuts are impacting more than your students and even your future educators you think that you're doing the right thing by cutting our teachers but it's not fair for our students and staff why are we cutting teachers when there's

238other places that we can cut think about teachers and students mental health first and for once show us that you really care about the people you work for and vote no on these cuts thank you our next public comment is veronica diaz i've received five text messages from people at home who said that their hands were raised and they did not get called on three months ago i asked for a list of all of the contracts and consultants with outside vendors that you all have we received a partial list it was very obvious that it was partial about a week ago and received what i am assuming is a complete list because we haven't had time to review it review in preparation for this meeting um i very much agree with a previous speaker who

239said that you are being bullied into thinking that this is the only decision that you have tonight i challenge you to ask any of the folks that make over six figures in your district to take a cut and pay 20 30 50 000 and they would still make more than our members do i don't think that the option has been explored again these are the same folks that are asking you to actively commit agreements right now by laying off people knowing full well that next week you're going to have to contract out those jobs at a higher rate i mentioned efficiency versus effectiveness before you may think that this is the most efficient thing that you can do for your budget in the short term i am telling you that this is not the most

240effective thing that you can do for your district in the long term our next public comment is emma erbik hey folks i'm disappointed frankly in your board as a failure to properly follow the laws we have in place to allow for meaningful public participation and a voice in meetings the presentation by mr mcintyre and mr fine was not properly noticed or agendized under the brown act you are required to share with the public the items being presented on so that they can comment this presentation was shown to labor on monday there is no reason it should have been withheld from our community but it was never posted it wasn't even listed on the agenda similarly you are preparing to vote on a pks resolution that until just a few hours ago had no particular services

241listed to reduce when the notice was posted it was completely blank the numbers shown in the unagendized presentation we just saw are substantially different than what was shared with labor earlier this week the very board members complaining about not having time mr phillips i'm looking at you specifically as well as you ms reckler are the same ones who voted to adjourn and then limit discussion on the previous budget update items listen to the people who will our next public comment is marissa glitter did good evening i'm sorry good evening just a few things uh first uh dr hearst there is no such thing as a precautionary layoff notice once these teachers receive a pink slip on march 15th they will immediately find a new job on march 16th dr hearst telling teachers they can just

242take a deep breath because these are precautionary shows how truly out of touch you are within schools and your community dr mcintyre our teachers and support staff are not numbers they are human beings who work tirelessly for students our new probationary teachers are just as valuable as our tenured teachers in fact just this year you gave all of our new hires a two thousand dollar hiring bonus just to fire them a few months later given the fact that you all have a record spending on contracts and consultants and gross mismanagement of funds we would welcome support from the county to help the district make the right cuts to necessary spending outside of the classroom in fact in 1920 the district welcomed intervention by the county to help make cuts why is the district and the

243board so desperate to hold on to power please make cuts away from the students thank you our next public comment is sam clear hi this is sam clear from siege i'm speaking again to question the validity behind your stated supportive equity in our district if you support racial equity you need to keep all staff members at stage if you initiate a reduction in force as directed by your presentation you will lose countless speech community members of color some are family members of chil of children at the school many also went to schools in wcc usd even the staff members who stay will stand with the individuals impacted we won't let you take away our community members taking away around half a siege's community is a clear presentation of the racism and prejudice targeted against stage

244if you care about supporting our community hiring and retaining individuals of color and seeing academic data attendance grow you won't bleed out our resources you have seen how we can come together and organize as a community if you want to give out pink slips you clearly want to take our power you want to dismantle our staff so that we can't fight anymore and you can continue to take advantage of this community if you support the ch community and students of color you need to keep a reduction for it from happening mr chair that is the conclusion of the company's 30 minutes hello we have heard numbers and projections but we have not yet heard your plan on how to fill positions currently unfilled and those that will be created due to these risks if you

245think teachers will stick around to hear if their pink slips have been rescinded you are gravely mistaken the actions of this board the past several years and even how you have conducted this meeting tonight shows that you do not act with the community in mind you are creating a workplace environment that is toxic and causes teachers to leave you have shared your concern over county and state intervention and how this district is run but what we hear is your concern that you will be held accountable for your mismanagement your job is to serve your constituents and their students do your job vote no on teacher layoffs [Applause] mr chair that is the conclusion of the 30-minute public comment next public communist helen king uh president christian we have run out of time for public comment

246the chair is turning the parliamentarians there's only two more parliamentarian oh go ahead uh the public the allotted time for the public comment has ended there's only two more miss dunning the problem was that we had a two public comments on the zoom who did not speak but the clock was still running so then we won by people so there's only two people left which would equal to the whole 30 minutes are and i just remind you that i am here to remind you of the rules that you passed and the rule was 30 minutes so we've reached 30 minutes if the chair is going to allow it then the chair allows it the parlor antenna i'm here to remind you that what you passed was 30 minutes and we've reached 30 minutes patients should

247also not count toward that time we had translation thank you board members so one thing first thing first off dr mcintyre i wholly disagree with your budget presentation we all entered the school year knowing that the district had used all the coveted relief money to pay off its deficits so it is really solely in this one school year that all these all this deficit and all this overspending is happening we know this we and if if this budget is a reflection of the direction the district wants to go it is a terribly wrong direction that means you are saying you want a bloated top-heavy administration because what happened in oakland where ms martin came from is that exactly that and that and oakland suffered financially from it as well teachers in oakland are still suffering

248from decisions made because their heads are spinning and they cannot keep up with all the different academic initiatives that were made secondly we want the intervention please vote no we need the intervention no one trusts the district with how they manage the money vote no our last public speaker is sado wilson good evening again i would just like to say the fact that this meeting was mismanaged is a clear indication of the mismanagement that is going with the funds in this district that you really need to recognize the mistakes that you are making and the mistakes you've made this past school board what i'm saying right now this actually saves me an email i'm going to write tonight and that means everyone can hear it that means you too mr phillips you cannot block me

249this is not an email you all need to actually stand by what you say and do the right thing and support the people that make up this district the staff those that take care of these students and when it takes care of this community you all wasted valuable time on a presentation that was not even shared with the community and now here we are this is why meetings go late because you all do not communicate we're spending six figure salaries on communications and you are horrible at communicating thank you and now we will move on to the resolution yes sir i'm asking i know i could just make a motion but i would like us to just take a five minute recess because we've been sitting here for a really long time and listening intently

250and and then to come back and take up the business so i i moved that we recess for five minutes before we start deliberating i'd like to second the motion for recess all right we take it to the vote uh student trustee lee young leon yes to the five minute motion i need a break trusty floors floor is yes try to smell fall no i'd rather hear from five more people in the audience or on zoom smithfolds no oh phillips yes teddy phillip yes don't sell this toy now reckler yes and christian i'm sorry president christian what was your vote and we will continue christian's vote was no president christian's vote was no i believe thank you now we will move on to the resolution we will start with c1 resolution number 56 dash 21

25122 resolution for release and non-release uh certificated administrator and approval is recommended clarifying question i have a question president christian are we going with student trustees first i do have a point of order which is are we do we get to question the presentation that dr mcintyre made to the parliamentary do we go back and question we have questions on the resolution itself that is the item that we are on now so c1 the resolution 56 2122 for release and non-rec re-election of certificated administrators does that answer the question uh trustee phil me trustee reckler yes thank you president chris christian without questions i would like to make a motion that we move resolution sorry uh c1 point of order i had i had a question oh i apologize i take back my motion president

252christian i have a point of order and then i have questions my point of order point order which order are we going in our student trustees first and then it's my turn to ask questions or student trustees at the end uh we will start with the student trustees and then we will go from there thank you all right so c1 do i need to read it again i'll make a motion though we approve uh resolution c1 excuse me not resolution c1 resolution number 56-2122 president christian when is it appropriate for me to ask my question uh go ahead what's your question thank you very much my question is was the wcca contract language followed in c1 meaning article 15 on evaluating administrators and article 20 to be specific but dr greenwood if you could answer

253that question please good evening board and superintendent hertz uh trustees uh smith falls could you repeat that question i couldn't hear you yes ma'am dr greenwood my question is was the wccaa contract language followed specifically article 15 on evaluating administrators and article 20 on discipline yes it was thank you i would like to second the motion i second emotion okay so we're a little out of order here president christian we're supposed to do clarifying our technical questions first and then have a motion so if we're done with the clarifying our technical questions then we can have a motion yeah i apologize i got ahead of myself i forgot trustee smith votes out of question so i apologize my colleagues for that uh sorry is that on me okay so i'll make the motion now to

254approve resolution number 56 2122 uh resolution to release a non-re-elect of certificated administrators second all right it was moved by clerk gonzalez second by trustee phillips and now we will proceed to the vote uh comics yes mr president comments comments this is comments for c1 uh no comment all right uh now we go to the vote uh trustee leon we don't know trustee flores flores no trustee smith ball smith falls now uh trustee phillips yes gonzales oh yes reckler yes and and uh christian yes and it passes four to one c2 resolution number 57-21 22 21 22 to release the release from employment and non-re-elect probationary certificated employee and approval is recommended questions i have a question about non-re-electing go ahead trustee smith do you believe that our non-reelect process is the best or is

255there a part of the non-reelect process that we need to adjust change or look at more closely um we have a dr greenwood sorry i think you got to turn on your mic thank you sorry i said we have uh strengthened that process over the last three years since i've taken this position that is just not a process of just eliminating teachers just because and so i made sure that principals have um looked at the process longer and that we've looked at teachers in the first and second year and given them an opportunity to get stronger and better as teachers and look at that looking at them in the second year of their probationary status thank you dr greenwood okay are there any other clarification uh clerk thank you president christian i'll make a motion

256that we approve resolution number 5722 to release from employment and non-re-elect probationary certificate employees second any comments i have a comment dr greenwood i really appreciate how you are strengthening this part of this part of one of the hardest things which is non-re-electing someone i appreciate that you are taking the time to strengthen that part of the department um as someone who has been non-reelected they are there have been many holes in the process before i appreciate that you're doing the work to strengthen that i will be abstaining from this vote thank you all right and we'll go to the vote uh trustee leon we don't abstain trustee flores floors abstain uh tracy smell fall smith follows that sayings for the previous mentioned reasons uh trustee uh clerk trustee phillips yes gonzalez oh yes reckler

257yes and i'm staying in the passes three is staying two three three three yeses and to abstain now we will proceed to c3 resolution number 58-21 regarding the reduction or discontinuing of but excuse me discontinue this continuance of particular kinds of services and approval is recommended questions uh trustee record thank you dr hurst i i see that there could be a potential um rearrangement of the office of african-american student achievement however we do have a board resolution that cites certain requirements that there be in office would you be able to speak just a little bit about what what your thinking is or how a timeline or anything um related to the board resolution [Music] so we would have to go back and sit down and just look at that resolution we did look at it

258prior to this session and we saw that the resolution the board appointed the office and there was actually certain positions i will say that there was never any intent to dissolve the office of african-american student achievement so i wanted to clarify that as well so that we'll stay the oas office will stay but we what we will have to do is to go back and look at those positions and have that conversation if laurisha is on here she could speak to that as well and add some clarity but there is no intention of getting rid of the oasa office so our intent is to get together immediately myself and the cao to have discussion about those positions to make sure that they are there in accordance with the resolution okay thank you any other clarification

259uh trustee flores thank you um i have two questions my first question is is the state going to make any funding changes that will help the problem for so there are three pieces of proposed legislation that could could in theory increase the district's revenue one comes from the governor's budget proposal in january that allows for a three-year trended ada uh another comes from i believe cymbeline mirasatchi who that would also have have a similar calculation on the step down for for declining enrollment districts like ours that could soften the landing we don't have the actual metrics they're not in the bill that allow us to calculate how much revenue that would equate to and we assumed that one of those would come into law when we established the size of the reduction force that you

260see before you today that was that mechanism i was talking about where we would we would pull back the the opeb trust dollars and replace it with it with a state increase but it's a gamble because you can't count state revenues until they're actually signed into law there are also several dozen other bills that would increase our expenses as well but we're not counting those until they're signed into law either thank you my second question is is there anything we can do to keep the new teachers of color and the teachers that came from our community the hope is that we have teachers that will retire and the attrition rate hopefully will help us keep teachers here thank you president christian so a couple of questions that i have we spent 1.6 million on an

261equity review what are we going to address with the 1.6 million specifically and if we don't have that already laid out and we have a tendency not to follow the recommendations that people give us can we take that 1.6 million and use it to cut down on the debt that's the first question so i'll just say uh regarding the 1.6 million trustee smith folds i think we don't have that uh defined yet i think that's part of the strategic planning process and once we go through that process we'll be able to determine from the equity audit what else do we need to implement from that equity audit the second question i have is we this board the majority of the people on the board voted to have a lobbyist what is that lobbyist doing to

262fight for ada turning into enrollment instead of counting it by ada that we're counting enrollment what is the lobbyist doing specifically to that i think we missed part of the first part of your question the board voted to hire a lobbyist that goes down to sacramento to lobby for this district specifically how is that lobbyist lobbying for it to be a change from ada to attendance to being able to for it to go to enrollment what is that lobbyist specifically doing you have any insight on that um dr mcintyre sure so there there is a conversation actually scheduled uh next week with capital advisors to talk about strategy and how we can help support the legislative effort and lobbying whether it involve dr hurst or board members going to the capitol and talking to the

263right people or staff has yet to be determined but that conversation i believe is scheduled for thursday of next week my next question is i see that there's eight million dollars in committed funds would it be prudent for us to have the assignment for leadership district leadership to come back to us with a plan on how to use that eight million dollars to cut down on the debt so the eight mil the eight million dollars in commitments would need to be uncommitted via resolution back to the board it's until the money the committed funds or assigned funds are spent it's completely at the board's discretion so the eight million we're talking about includes the five 5.5 million dollars for technology uh purchases in the upcoming two years and 2.5 million dollars for cte pathways so

264it's up to this voice discretion to take that 8 million and say that it is no longer committed and it can be used to pay down debt is that accurate 100 thank you president christian i do have a couple more questions if you would give me one second what are we specifically doing to gain enrollment risha if you can answer that i know that marin is working on that um specifically trustee smithfolds um the first part of that is using our a2a system to give principals a list of all students who have been chronically absent or missing for several days so that's the first part of it in which they would have a start at their school site and then if schools are still unable or have met with the parents they've signed a contract

265to come back to school or get back on track if that then still does not the kids are still not coming to school or students are still not coming to school then they would have a start process which is more sorry of the tier two process with marin's office and the three technicians who are supporting in the truancy office another thing a strategy tier three that we're actually working on we did talk about how he attempted to have scowls do home visits last school year during covent and so there's some implications around that but that's one of our next tier three steps is to really start doing home visits and instituting home visits still trying to figure out who will do the home visits but that is part of our strategy um at the tier

266three level we also are phone banking and calling parents um and we are also looking at any parents and he's working on a strategy right now to identify students who have actually left the district we're actually meeting about this today to do exit interviews to also find out why students left the district and i believe we're going to have a board presentation on our strategy to bring back students to the district and also find out why students are chronically absent thank you miss martin a lot of what you just told me was about attendance what about recruiting for enrollment what are we doing to increase enrollment not just for this year but for subsequent years what are the specific strategies i appreciate you telling me everything that you just did about attendance but what are

267we doing specifically to target getting more students enrolled into the district pulling them from charter schools pulling them from other schools pulling them what are we doing to attract students to the district as far as enrollment specifically i mean that that was part of the um you know role that's part of marin's role is to bring back families to the district and really get information out there about our district um he did send out information to the community through flyers because we've expanded the tk program so we've expanded tk to more schools this school year to bring in more tk students and we've done some flyer creations that have gone out to the community but beyond flyers and expanding tk programs that is essentially all that's happened there are some other strategies um that i

268have in mind for how to actually bring students back um one of them that i've been talking about with our college and career director dr hughie is really thinking about how are we thinking about um our pathways because parents are attracted to pathways and so really thinking about with dr hearst even our stem pathway so we've been talking about that as well from tk to 12 and then we're also talking about um her doing more brochuring and campaigning around our pathways because we haven't really done a good job around really saying these are the pathways and cte programs that we have at our schools so really developing brochures and flyers to actually get that out to the community and allowing more of a stronger transfer process as well um and i'd love to engage more

269about it but there are also implications in that too when you have more of an open transfer policy and parents are choosing to go to the school that they want because of those pathways or those cte programs versus their feeder school do you agree miss martin that there's more attrition in the secondary that we find more attrition in secondary and what are we doing to target specifically secondary school sites that's also another conversation i just had with mr freeze because we were saying how our secondary schools and particularly our middle schools we noticed that that's where we're actually losing students and so how do we develop a plan what does that look like in terms of and these are larger conversations that really um you know we can't just make a quick decision but it's

270really around the structure of schools you know what is the best model of schools is it you know we currently have almost every model so is it k eights is it really six eights is it six twelves what is the model so that you actually keep students in school to where they want to continue and also is it that if you have pathways from tk to 12 are parents more likely to actually stay because you have this cte pathway connection from tk to 12 in those schools in your area that you continue to stay i also think we need to do something around really doing some campaigning for middle schools um and just really thinking about how do we get more parents to know what is happening in our middle school so that they don't

271drop off because that's where we see the biggest decline honestly is in when looking at the data with um the attendance department is really our middle schools our six eight is actually where we're seeing most of the decline in enrollment in our secondaries thank you have two more questions the next question is we talked about the office of african-american student achievement with the office of african american student achievement are you dr hearst i believe you said that the office won't go anywhere so the office of african american student achievement is staying what about the staffing inside that office so you're absolutely right the office is definitely staying um in our closed session we were looking at those positions i sent a message uh to laurisha about this and i think we just need to sit

272down and really talk about those positions unless miss martin could talk about those positions and whether they're there so i do know i saw it in the resolution uh key positions and i think there was seven or eight positions there so we know that we can't just uh get rid of those positions in the office um we believe it's there i just need to have the opportunity to talk to miss martin about those positions thank you dr hurst my final question is there was a slide that talked about the vetting process it had a lot of questions that were asked of what was supposed to be asked of contracts and consultants are those questions asked of each contract in each consultant and will we be able to look at the answers to those questions so

273that is the process that we're using um we did not script anything out but i also shared that it's not just that process is about impact as well so i'm not sure if i was talking to you or another board member but we talked about some work around the impact on which which program is having the most impact and using a research-based approach but to answer your question absolutely we're using that process we will bounce everything up against the vision but also it's about impact that the program is having sorry thank you dr hurst and will we be able to see or can a board member request to see that report i think we can uh continue to work on that and then we can get that to the board um that's not something that's

274gonna um we'll be able to deliver right away i think it's an ongoing conversation but we can certainly work on that and get that to you thank you very much those are all of my questions the only thing else is comments thank you all right there any other clarify question all right go ahead jesse phillips so my first question my first set of questions are related to things i heard in public comment um one statement that i heard in public comment was wait for the money from the state that you know is coming and i think i heard the answer from you a moment ago but i just want to clarify it sounded like you said monies that may come from the state you've already baked that in is that what i heard you say

275so we cannot include them in the multi-year projection but when we're sizing the the reduction in force and what we were trying to achieve we had to figure out what that minimum would be miss martin did everyone freeze i see you moving and i'm moving did everyone else freeze i was really looking at my screen trying to figure out what was happening so yes everyone is frozen but us okay so everyone's frozen butt us okay so let's okay so we're not frozen it looks like they're cheap it looks like they're ending the movie the meeting i don't know what's happening so the meeting just ended so miss martin can you plea everyone please stay on zoom miss martin can you please text dr hurst yes and tre and miss logan and let them know what's

276happening those 250 people still on zoom please stay on zoom we are troubleshooting at the moment trustee smithfolds do you want to put a message in the chat for everyone that they know in case they couldn't hear you yes ma'am i would do that right now i will do that right now just please stay on zoom we're troubleshooting would that work yes okay i said there i sent them a text tracy okay and then and um principals are texting me saying that they can actually hear us okay good so that means that we are still live i guess at some point thank you everyone please stay on zoom we are troubleshooting it looks like they're trying to come back now i just received a text from dr hearst that the internet is down and they're

277working on it okay thank you everyone still please still stay on zoom parliamentarian excuse me miss dunning we are now only one board member so we need to stop all business correct correct thank you we will technically it's called stand at ease we'll just stand at ease until we get everybody back thank you i will put that in the chat as well thank you good evening everyone there's 243 of you here we are standing at ease until we finish troubleshooting and get everyone back from the board meeting at dejean thank you so much please just hang on tight thank you okay i see dr hurst back yes ma'am dr hearst is back but we are still only one board member on screen trustee clerk gonzalez hoy miss flores needs to be trustee flores needs to

278be promoted i'm not sure if you can oh never mind she's gone thank you i was telling you that trusty flores needed to be promoted but she's here this trustee clerk gonzalez hoy can you still hear me can you hear me okay okay thank you trustee smith folds can you hear us i can hear you thank you thank you we're just waiting on president christian yeah all right sorry about the delay and we're back home and we will go to trustee phillips thank you i'm not sure where the internet cut off so i don't know if folks actually heard the question so i'm just gonna to start please forgive me for recapping um the questions that i'm beginning with are coming from comments that i heard in public comment and so one was wait for

279the money from the state that you know is coming and what i thought i heard so i was going to ask about that and then what i thought i heard you say was that although you didn't use the word baked but that i'm talking like trustee reckler now that potential monies from the state is baked into what you you presented to us tonight is that accurate so yes and no it is not included in the actual numbers so the revenue is not recognized but the assumption that one of the the three major initiatives uh will result in additional revenue we're counting on because the reality is we don't actually want to spend those opeb dollars that are meant for the employees when they retire that's money that the district set away to pay for those

280retiree benefits nor do we actually want to use reallocate those s or three dollar dollars for operations when we when we they would i which is legal but they should ideally be used for learning loss and for you know social emotional as as you know we would be reallocating with the uh there's 16 uses for us or three allowable uses we would be using number 16 versus the top five which is where we would ideally point our efforts for the benefit of students so we've done what we can to to buy ourselves time for the legislature to hopefully add some revenue but if you know if they don't we bought a year if they do then we have the ability to replace those two expenditures with uh the new revenues okay so we're not just

281waiting for the money we're actually banking on it coming that's what i'm hearing yes sir okay the second thing that i heard and i heard this from more than one person um and that was cut from the top what i saw in your presentation was that we have a structural deficit of 38.43 million in the out year could we actually close that um a hole that big could we actually close it by just i mean cutting from the top is that actually realistic you could fire everybody in the central office you wouldn't get to 38 million dollars can you say that a little harder i'm sorry you you could release every single management person in the central office and you wouldn't get close to 38 million dollars there's just not enough people my third question

282i've heard people in public comment say keep cuts away from staff what percentage of our budget is actually dedicated to staff this year it's just slightly over 86 in the general fund so that leaves 14 for everything else and that 14 includes programs and things for children yes all of their supplies materials uh professional development for teachers utilities lights heat air conditioning um transportation for students those non-public schools like mr fine was speaking about uh and consultants and and other things so everything else falls into that 14 if we cut that 14 i'm not advocating for this i'm asking you know question if we cut that 14 would that fill the hole the on the unrestricted general fund side of the budget uh there there's between the the technically yes i mean you have to

283decide do you want things like electricity and transportation for students and it's it's i know there's been a lot of accusations that there's money there's just a million consultants running around but that's just not the case there are consultants but it's not at the scope and size of what's being proposed it's been conflated is what you're saying that if we did not and i'm not trying to sensationalize and i'm not trying to put words in your mouth so if i'm doing that correct me are you saying that unless we do some cuts to staff the option for no cuts to staff and taking it from somewhere else means we don't have lights in books and things like that is that what i just heard you say it was funny i was i was having a

284really interesting conversation with a community member who was in there was a a panel put together a couple years ago where they went through all of the existing contracts before you know the moneys we spend on those books and supplies and consultants and everything in the services and and one of the things that really struck me was when that person was telling me that they expected to find a lot of contracts that they'd be able to unfurl and how few they actually could because there's not i know there's this implication of rampant waste but it's just you know could you find things to stop yes is are we spending money frivolously no and so at some point if you know if you're trying to do all of this out of the 14 that's left over

285you're going you're going to be making a choice between people or utilities you know that's literally gonna that's how far you're gonna get down and and we have to provide electricity and water and heat by law the next thing i heard was and you kind of just touched on this but one lady said all three together she said cut consultants contracts and unrepresented and i'm assuming human unrepresented staff if we got rid of all the consultants all the people who are not permanent employees in the district is that enough money to close a 38 million dollar gap i i would have to look at that but keep in mind a lot of the consultants on the especially on the restricted side of the budget are in special ed so every time we can't hire a

286staff member to meet us this iep need internally has to be contracted out and so you know a large portion of what we're spending in uh contracting out to experts and consultants happens on the restricted side of the budget it's it's not so heavy on the unrestricted side as you might think um so could we do it there there are there are ways to nickel and dime things together and cobble some savings but there's been a lot of effort to do that already i think one of the places i pointed out as we found about i'll be happy to yield my time uh one of the things we pointed out was the fact that we found just over six million dollars in subscription savings uh and and some departmental savings going through this very same

287vetting process like the superintendent uh shared with that with his vetting process that he's instructed management to use that now that we have i've only been here since november i can't say that every contract that's a multi-year contract has gone through that same process nor can i talk about the hiring bonuses that were given before i started here i know they exist where they're budgeted but i can't really speak to how we got there did that answer your question i think so another thing i heard in public comment is that this is a negotiation tactic um can you speak to that i sadly i wish i could say i was i was deep enough that i was i was thinking so far ahead right now when i'm thinking ahead i'm thinking how to keep local

288people in local control of the school district so my perspective has nothing to do with bargaining i want people to feel like they're fairly compensated that they're treated well and they're respected that is my personal position but when i'm looking at the budget and i'm bringing second interim to you next week and and when i'm proposing the the the cuts in addition to the one-time plugs money we're using to plug the hole in the budget that has come from years and years and years of deficit spending that was masked by covet money um my goal is just to keep you all locally in control what i mean all of you i mean the board i mean the labor partners i mean local control that's my that's my purpose has nothing to do with bargaining there

289was um and i'm out of the public comment questions um there was a comment uh tonight about the 5.5 million dollars for tech is that for the kids tablets i i would have to defer to miss logan on that i don't i know we spoke about it once when i first started here but i i'd be drawing from from from some pretty grey memory at this point so i also need to confer with you dr mcintyre exactly if this this 5.5 is for the tablet refresh or this for 5.5 is for classroom projection so we had both um earmarked so i guess we would have to go back to the board meeting where this was actually committed because there was a formal commitment document we have a resolution sitting out there somewhere so i can

290pull that i mean i do remember voting for some projection stuff and i remember voting for tablets but but what you're telling me is it's either a for the kids tablets or b for projection so they can see at school correct they need that right they need that so we have an annual refresh of tablets so that we can have working tablets in the hands of every student our classroom projection is end of life in most of our schools and in some of our classrooms is dying on the vine right now so we have short-term solutions to help support teachers to have um projectors on carts to support that need temporary solutions um but the desire is to refresh projection so that it is modern effective so that all students can see so that teachers

291can teach with modern technology and then there was a coming about 2.5 million and that adds up to eight the 5.5 and the 2.5 the 2.5 million that's for cte pathways that is correct meaning programs for the kids right yes sir like career programs for the kids career technical education programs the expansion of those pathways and i mean i could be mistaken but wouldn't you be hiring teachers out of that money because they can't teach themselves cte right so typically when you when you have a a pot of money like this and you plan to expand a pathway there's there's two types of expenditures when you expand a pathway one is on capital some of these pathways actually require a lot of equipment depending on what the pathway is and and also you need to

292cover the what we call the leading edge the first year of a program until you build enough students up in it where the attendance actually covers the ongoing operation so we call we call the leading edge cost and the capital cost that's typically what you're setting aside funding for in a cte pathway but the but the leading edge cost that's people primarily right because you have to hire teachers and whatever the other people are maybe it's not just teachers but you have to hire personnel to teach the cte classes right that is correct so so if i'm wrong i'm just working through this some of the 2.5 million dollars will go to capital to get the programs going whether it's think equipment we have to buy for example but some portion of that 2.5 million

293dollars is actually really earmarked for teachers anyway already because you have to hire teachers to expand the cte program right correct so there's really not a savings because it was going to go to teachers anyway or portion of it am i mistaken i would have to refer back to the plan to look at proportionality to to to make it make an assessment on whether it was a plus or minus in that regard but certainly a portion i would expect a substantial portion would go to to teaching staff okay one second sir if you don't mind i'm i'm finished asking questions thank you okay trustee wrecker thank you i'm hoping that dr hurst or somebody from one of your designees can answer just a basic question from this evening which we've heard over and over again

294which is if we have vacancies and we're not fully staffed why would you know this you answer that um dr greenwood because we would do it for a precautionary measure um just because of the statutory deadline of march 15th but like i said before with the possibility of resignations and attrition we will be able to finalize this in may and come back and um um hire people back possibly with that as those people leave we'll be able to bring people back is there any other time in the school year that the district makes a large adjustment to staffing well these were unprecedented times we made adjustments all year this year um so normally we make adjustments at the beginning of every school year um once we the students are in there when this once we

295see what we call the whites of their eyes that's when we make adjustments and we look at the whole district and see where we can move students around or we try not to adjust or make disruptions to students we want to see if we have to move teachers in which you don't like to do that either we kind of like to do this all before school starts um to see where those adjustments are needed and so we meet basically daily to see where those movements of students are and where they're coming from and where those adjustments need to happen okay thank you uh the next question i think is for uh dr mcintyre and it's about your projections on enrollment and attendance and can you please talk about your assumptions and how you came up

296with what you came up with and whether you think you're conservative or talk about your pad or how you arrived at where you did sure uh very important question the the assumptions are so important especially for the out-year projections when we when we looked at the enrollment we used what's what's called a trended cohort survival so it's a cross between what would be a regression analysis a best fit trend line by grade level and and and uh and cohort survival it kind of puts us in the middle and the reason we pick that middle ground is because we find regression tends to be a little um less reliable in periods of higher volatility than the cohort survival method so when you're in high flux periods cohort survival ends up being uh ultra conservative and and

297and the regression ends up being ultra liberal and so what we did was we we blended the two to try to create a more middle of the road uh enrollment model where we've really been thrown for a loop though is is that the ada you know which is a percentage of enrollment typically calculated so normally we'd say oh we think students will show up 95 of the time so we've seen high volatility in the enrollment but in the ada but we're funded on ada which is a secondary measure and so that's you know we've got we're two steps in before we get to the real number that we're funded on and that that's where uh you know gosh i wish we had better future data but but i believe the method we used was about

298as middle of the road as we can get in in better times i would probably try to be a little more conservative but there's just there's a lot riding on this okay i think trustee phillips answered everything on contracts but i just want to ask again so there was a time not too many years ago where everything was scrubbed and there was six million dollars in savings in the spreadsheet has that been done again recently and what are the findings and you know what what else is in there that could get hacked so those are two two separate things uh that you mentioned there one the community member who shared with me a process of being part of a larger stakeholder group where they went through the contracts was not was just a couple years

299ago more recently your leadership team has you know we pulled all those the same contracts and pos that we're being we're being asked for that we did provide eventually i wish i had gotten them out sooner i i'm sorry for that i have to own that that comes from my office um but we we went through a process to to go through what is and say what can we live without next year and just just in that process in in early march we were able to find to realize over six million dollars a year in ongoing cuts there will be a continued process internally and and i know that we're talking about potentially bringing back the budget committee or some other type of committee it might be good to re-engage in a similar process the

300district went through a few years ago or that the community member had shared with me uh you know it's always good to re-examine all of our contracts every department head should have to have a compelling reason for why we're engaging in things but we do when we bring those contracts to board we bring it you know why we're we want to do it so it does happen here at by the governance team but but we're very much open to external scrutiny always it's tax dollars we should be doing that when it's asked for and then can you address books and supplies the number isn't books it's mostly supply i'm guessing and would you talk about what that is absolutely so there's you're correct when we look at the books and supplies line item um there's

301not as much in there in books as you might think in fact we tend to use lottery funds more so for books and technology we are but for example some of our technology purchases that we weren't able to use federal funds for we're using that falls into books and supplies um you know when we buy new switches for our servers and then you know server components for having a robust network system so we can have zoom meetings at 11 30 at night that would be all you know in the supplies category [Music] so there's that and then secondary just full disclosure when school sites put together their school site budgets at the beginning of the year until they allocate out through their school site plan how they're going to spend those dollars they're early in

302the year they're lumped into the 4 000 into the books and supplies until we're told by the school sites how they allocate it and then we move those back out of the 4000s and and out of books and supplies into the right categories so at the beginning of the year the books and supplies can be used as a holding place for school site funds until they give us their their written plan that they've gotten approved by their school site council but that washes out fairly early in the year okay thank you thank you all right now we will all right president christian if there's no one else going i do have a two more questions may i ask them uh go ahead the question was brought up about what is the exact amount that is

303spent on consultants do we have the exact amount of money that's spent on consultants uh i can certainly provide that i don't have it with me here i did provide a breakdown a couple different ways uh for for uh either labor or community member questions that we received before this um but i'm happy to provide a breakdown of the all the consultants we have and what types of services they're providing thank you and then you said there was a question asked of you could you make up the 35 million dollars by cutting everybody in central office you said of course not you couldn't make up the 35 million or 38 forgive me if my numbers are off but the 30 plus million that we have is there anywhere else you could make up the 12

304million what is the 12 million aren't we cutting isn't it a savings of 12 million if we vote yes on these rifts is that not the number that i've seen 12 million you're correct yes yes trustee so could you make up that 12 million anywhere else in the district so so the that was going back to that engagement we had both in trying to make cuts in december after first interim we talked about some of the freezes and and places where we could save money there and then the process we went to with the executive leadership team going through all of our departmental budgets and site budgets saying where can we afford to make those reductions where can't we um so that process took place first because the last place we want to go is

305labor so so i'm not saying that it's absolutely perfect process but but it was you know we went to labor last yes sir inside that labor inside the hierarchy of the labor that you went to is there anyone else that you could cut before making up that 12 million before you get closest to the classroom i guess is my question well that was definitely the reason that i did the calculations for each of the non-represented and then each of the represented groups because as you as you saw on the next to last slide you know the w the non-represented was like 28 uh of the total while uh it was ssa was next because they would be as a group further away from students wcca is is a management but at the school sites and

306so they were of the three leadership groups they were the you know the lowest uh affected as a percentage of their group because of that and so yes we did try to you know hit top management and really follow the guidance um but you know when you look at just total numbers total ftes these groups tend to be smaller because they're not frontline service providers as they as they should be a smaller group so yes sir they're a smaller group but do they make more money so how much does a first-year teacher make on average uh well to answer your first question i'm unrepresented absolutely in wcca absolutely it absolutely depends on the classification for ssa because it's a much broader group of specialties within that classification thank you for that and on average how

307much does a first year teach probationary teacher make i i would have to defer to uh around 45 000. thank you dr greenwood around 45 000 a first year progress probationary teacher makes okay and dr mcintyre we are there's a proposal to cut how many of those probationary teachers the paper's not in front of me i apologize i'm opening that right now myself uh so on the uh teachers it's 81.6 ftes thank you so much and then i have a question about have the contracts report with a column marking have they been marked restricted or unrestricted already i'm sorry i couldn't quite make out your question so we we have clearly marked contracts whether they're coming from the restricted or the unrestricted side is that accurate yes thank you so much those are all of

308my questions everything else is comments thank you all right thank you and now we'll go to the vote motion we need a motion first president christian and then we'll go to comments everything will disappear yep nice if no one wishes to make a motion on item c3 we would just move down and do the motion for the vote trusty record i'll move sorry i'll move resolution number 58-2122 regarding the reduction or discontinuation of particular kinds of service so to clarify you're moving to approve yes yes ma'am thank you whoops what she said you need a second okay we need a second second fill up a second okay comment all right uh leon all right so i'm gonna keep my comments brief but i think this is a one of the greatest opportunities we're going to

309have probably one of the biggest decisions we're going to make this school year and i want to take this time to think about one of the public comments that i took into account today it's from a gentleman from grant elementary he's a school psychologist and he stated we talk big game about students of color but tonight is our time to choose before we make this decision i want to advise the board on how important stool site workers are i went to middle school in central richmond and the school i went to was over 90 percent hispanic now as an asian american it was not easy to fit in likewise to hear i sought counsel from many school site counselors and staff teachers alike people who are at risk of being affected by this resolution reduction

310of employees on any campus is not advisable by students or by staff not even when our backs are against the wall i'm aware that my vote is advisory but i'm hoping my decision maintains well-sounded moral intent thank you very much trustee flores trustee smithfold thank you for the recognition president christian a snippet from francisco ortiz who is on the utr executive team during a year in which educators and education support providers have been carried have carried school sites on their backs cutting them now as deceptive and ludicrous there is a pattern of fear and intimidation running rampant and then and now is attempting to divert the accountability for not prioritizing the best interest of our students how many people have left mid-year and have been fired or threatened to be fired because they asked too

311many questions i want to take a minute to let you know not theoretical but lived experience this is coming from me thank you uh mr ortiz for your comments this is coming from me as a trustee and as a teacher former teacher in the district current teacher and a staunch parent volunteer if you cut teachers this is what the beginning of the school year will look like classes will be combined teachers will not be able to deliver their instructions teachers will be exhausted because of period subbing we are already short staffed this will now have even more of us being short staffed we will lose special we will lose those roles that are that are particular to our community to keep our schools running we will have a number of grievances from teachers because they're

312overworked within the first two months of school when your teacher is absent your child's teacher is absent you have a lag time and feedback they cannot give your child the feedback from their grading or their instruction it increases the email response time that you have there will be more delays if we continue to cut on the ground this is the actual impact that we're doing how are we going to talk about equity and race if we are even thinking about doing anything to the office of african american student achievement it it that does not make sense to me even if you leave the office and you take away the people who have put in the investment who have made the connections and the relationships with the families that is not okay with me what we

313are doing now is making a snap decision that we do not have to make bring back a proposal about that eight million committed funds bring back a proposal about exactly how much we're spending in these contracts and these consultants let us know exactly the amount of the budget that we're dealing with we do so many things in this district that make us feel like we're rich broke we're rich when we're coming to the board and we're asking for things and then we're broke when we're having people ask us for things like keeping their class sizes small like keeping janitors on the campus like keeping our custodial staff excuse me like keeping our extra classified staff and certificated staff that we have then we're broke but we're not broke when we're doing other things president philip

314you talked about cutting and chopping from the top we can easily do that ourselves we all pull a check we can redo we can reduce our own check before the county comes in there are things that we can do ourselves that keeps it away from the classroom we are not doing our due diligence when we are still trying to cut close to kids i will be voting no i'm not going to cut these incon services i'm not going to cut close to kids my vote is no thank you for the moment to have a uh comment all right now we'll want to vote are there any more comments mr president all right two more comments uh chuckie phillips and trustee record and and clerk is all this hard tonight the board is faced with an

315extremely difficult situation i say situation instead of choice because i don't really feel like this is a choice we don't decide how much funding we are going to get from the state the state makes that decision and we're left at the end of the day with the responsibility of figuring out how to divide up too little money what i just heard the cbo say is that we are in a situation where we essentially have to choose between staff members and everything else whether that supplies for kids whether that's programming for kids or even paying the light in heat bill that's not a choice and so regardless of how this vote comes out tonight that's not a choice and the idea that if we vote no that that is somehow the end of this that's not

316true so you may recall in the last board meeting we had a conversation about the vaccine mandate and what i said in that meeting was even though we are rolling the date back to july to align with the governor the day is still coming when you have to have been vaccinated if you want to continue to be in school regard if if this gets voted down tonight the day is still coming where cuts will be made the only difference is someone else will be forcing us to do it whether that's the county or the state and listening to mr fine sounded like it's going to be the county first now i understand folks are saying that they want the county to come in because they don't trust staff but having the county come in in

317a truly supportive role versus having the county come in in a controlling role are two totally different things i don't have any problem with the county coming in and looking at our books but turning over control to another governmental agency is an abdication of our duties i used to listen to delaine easton talk about budgets and them being statements of values and i remember the first time i heard her say that i was like she is so right that is so cool and then i got on a school board and i saw it from the other side and i realized that yes budgets are statements of our values but that statement isn't as deep as i thought it was i became a parent and there were times and have been times to this day where

318i cannot afford everything that i want to purchase for my children and sometimes that makes me feel really bad but that doesn't mean that i don't value that experience for my child it means i don't have the money and anybody else who has been a parent and who is going to be honest unless they're independently wealthy has been in that situation we have parents who want to see their children go to college but they can't pay for it does that mean that because they can't pay for it that they don't value a college education for the child no it doesn't mean that so tonight as hard as it is i'm going to take the first step and i am going to end up voting yes on this evening what i'm going to do after that

319is i've listened to the staff i have listened to public comments this is going to go and and staff is saying that they're right people in public comment are saying that they don't trust the staff i do trust the staff i am not saying that i don't i think in the cbo that we have right now we have actually a subject matter expert recognized across the state i think we need to take advantage of his experience and knowledge and expertise for as long as he is here which i hope is a while but this will go to a third party if it passes and that person will review all of the numbers and at the point where that person reviews all of the numbers for me then i will make a final decision where i

320am but tonight i am going to be voting yes as hard as that is all right trusty raccoon thank you so tonight is horrible for everybody this we've had a lot of horrible meetings this might be the worst this might be the work this might be the worst out of everything we've been through no one ever wants to be in this position either here or being an employee or being a parent or a student but i need to make clear that this is the way this crazy system works that you have to take the best information you have and work with it which is well we're really not sure what's coming but the law says on march 15th i have to tell you maybe i don't know i want to make it clear that nobody

321lets go today this is not the end of careers it's not the end of jobs but it's a notice that we don't know what's coming and then over the next several months the budget and the money firms up and there's another chance to be strategic in the decision we were given a very strong preliminary morning today by the best fiscal school expert in the state mike fine we were told as a board that we are not doing our fiduciary duty and that it is our job to watch over the finances of the district that is one of our most important jobs to ensure the fiscal health of the district aside from hiring the district's leader so i'm going to do what i have to do as a school board member i'm doing what the law

322requires me to do i hope that the state can make good on their promise and we have representation in sacramento that we need to use to start to turn this in our direction around enrollment around attendance around some of these crazy laws that make you do things and upset lives before you really need to or have to there's a lot that we need to improve which is what i'm expecting capital advisors to do and we need to step that up and have our voice heard in sacramento thank you all right trustee clerk this is on this toy thank you president christian um i agree that we have been making difficult decisions since all of us took office and we continue to have to do so the budget is critical and reductions have to occur i

323don't believe any of us disagree that we want to have a balanced budget and keep our local control but in my opinion it has to set it has to center our values and priorities i value our teachers classified staff and administrators over any contract services and that don't go directly into the classrooms i am of the opinion that we have to continue to invest in our classrooms to provide quality education to our kids cutting people is not the way to do so and honestly i think we will continue to be an undesirable district for people if we continue to cut our people over everything else i believe that we must partner with all of our stakeholders in a transparent matter to make the cuts needed and align our budget with our priorities and their priorities

324and our students priorities i believe we send the wrong message not just to our community but our students by cutting our people the last two years have been disruptive enough we need to have consistency in our schools we have to prioritize finding our students who have been left and utilize our staff that we keep to do more outreach we have to all partner and increase our enrollment and bring more revenue yes we must balance our budget but not on the back of our students our schools and our staff we also know that we are getting more money from the state that we are not taking in consideration in this budget we all say we care about equity but cutting our most important resource at a moment in history when our students need the most is

325not correct i hope we all can continue to find our north star which is our students and even if we disagree on who to get there that we center ourselves with that in mind i encourage all of us to vote no but i'm not surprised that we are divided once again i encourage us to vote no on the following two resolutions and bring forward a process that centers our values and priorities as a district colleagues i am voting now thank you and i'm just going to say this and it you know it's it's it's we gotta well let me just put it this way we've been sitting back on a lot of things over a long period of time and we got to go and get um what's due to us from sacramento going down

326there we got our representatives here in this area that represent us down in sacramento i will go and let's take a trip let's let's go down and begin to do some things make some things happen instead of sitting back you know for our kids always been for our young people for i've been part of this district for a long time and you know i just want to just do what's right and do it the best way i can but it takes everybody you know uh mindsets to come together to figure this thing out so so i'm for our young people now we can go to the vote we'll start with trustee leon leono trustee flores i just want to say that we that i will remember you guys as both and i want you guys

327to keep in mind that i will be affected by it and other students will be affected by it my vote is no tragic smoke fall our integrity cannot be conditional a budget is a value statement no matter which side of the fence you're on our budget is a value statement i value people my vote is no uh trustee phillips yes uh trustee rucker or trustee reckler yes just the clerk is alex gonzalez hoy now and i'ma know it fills and it goes to number four c4 resolution number 59-2122 elimination and reduction of classified employees service services it is recommended that the board approve the elimination and or reduction of classified employee service resolution to align the classified staff allocation uh allocation with the student population size and ensure uh physical solvency for the upcoming uh

328school year and going to questions i don't see any questions trustee phillips there was one comment um and it was specific to [Music] contracting out classified work can somebody please speak to that comment and if folks don't remember the comment i can try my best to paraphrase it i i can speak to that comment um we have two uh copier technicians uh who who service some of our copy machines but as we as most of our copiers are on leases the the maintenance is included in the the lease cost of the copier and in our last series of copiers that we own are now up for replacement via leased copiers we don't want to be in the uh you know long-term copier maintenance ownership business uh while those two particular positions uh teamster positions would

329no longer be necessary there is a need for two very similarly skilled teamster positions uh doing um we refer to it as low voltage electrical it's technically not both low voltage electrical but doing work in technology and i don't know if miss logan is able to speak to that but really we saw it as a one-for-one change but in order to reduce that one we have to reduce the one before we could open the other obviously so just so i'm clear you're saying that there are two positions that deal with copy service or copy machines copy machine repair copy machine repair but you're telling me that the contracts that we have because the leases that we have for those machines is actually included correct so you're saying we're paying for repair twice we we have

330older machines uh that we do own and as those life out they'll be replaced with machines that are on leases so the older machines are not the repairs are not included in the leases for the older machines the older machines are owned so there's there's no there's no there's no more relationship with the manufacturer we own them correct and so the people that work for us repair the machines that we own yes sir but those machines are end of life so they're up for cycle out of the system so you're saying once those machines are no longer here the people who repair them that position would become redundant however there's a need for two teamster positions in technology dealing with electronics it's not exactly the same and i don't want to speak for miss logan

331on that because she she has a plan so we we see a one-for-one swap and i know that uh mr tenacio will be speaking with [Music] so as mr mcintyre was sharing yes there is a need um that's increased over the years that it's unmet right now which as he said is around electronics audio visual projection uh repair so we do see the possibility of that one for one swap of positions so instead of the copy machine repair position we would have two other teamster positions for work that is needed that we don't have staff to do right now so [Music] and dr hirsch you could chime in because i'm just trying to make sure that i understand and that i'm clear what i'm hearing staff say is that there are two positions that we

332will no longer need because we are at the end of the life of these machines but there are two positions different positions that we currently don't have that we need so is that right yes that's right so the total number of teamsters in this area anyway actually is going to stay the same because you guys are saying you you guys are actually committing that you're going to hire in a swap yes okay i don't have any more questions president christian i have a question quick does food service have its own budget nutrition services in its own fund completely outside of the general fund has it been the best funded that it's been in years yeah is it currently being the best funded thank you and when we're talking about maintenance and operation is the district

333supposed to provide the union representatives with requests to contract work out there is contract language for work underneath sixty thousand dollars has that happened this year i'm sorry could you repeat that has that happened this year yes thank you those are my questions all right thank you all right no more questions then we go to the vote motion motion all right a motion to move this president christian with no motion i believe that it dies oh never mind there's emotion go ahead remove remove resolution number 59 21-22 to clarify you move to approve our move to approve resolution number 59-2122 reckless second any comments i have discussion all right clark gullitz collect godzilla's hoy and then trustee smith thank you president christian um i'm not going to say too much except our classifier the backbone

334of our schools and same thing as with last resolution i believe that we have to vote no and ensure that the cuts are coming from everywhere else before we cut our stuff so i am voting now and i encourage all of us to vote no and i'm disappointed that we continue to be divided as we continue to serve but it is what it is uh encourage us all to vote now does any question may i go yeah trusty smokehole thank you i sat here and i listened to a board member talk about being a parent and how they could not if they could not give their kid what they wanted then it didn't mean they didn't value them here's the problem if you waste money as a parent and you can't give your kid what

335you want or what they want it is your fault because you wasted money so if we are talking about the situation to where we are wasting funds then we don't get to have president christian excuse me i'm not perfect but i'm actually saying this as nicely as i can i'm not perfect i'm asking you to um manage us so i i don't manage us because i don't appreciate what i just heard and it was i don't appreciate the fact that you interrupted me colleagues colleagues please let's come together thank you thank you president christian president christian may i'll continue yes thank you i do not appreciate the fact that we are continue to talk about cutting closest to kids we are not and we should not talk about cutting the backbone of our district the

336foundation of our district those who help our district run i am so sorry if somebody's feelings got hurt it is not my job to protect your feelings it's my job to combat some asinine statements and it's asinine to say that if a parent doesn't provide for their kid then they are not being a good parent president christian it is what it is now i've sat here for months and have been attacked in silence today is not the day i'm not the one or two when you talking about cutting people i'm not gonna deal with it so take it as it is center me but let me tell you what i haven't done on this board i haven't threatened to throw something at someone i haven't been in closed session and pushed someone up against a

337wall these are the things that i haven't done so what i am gonna do is fight out loud for the people who do the work i'll vote no and president christian as the only other person who's worked in a school site besides you trustee gonzalez hoy and these two people i urge you to vote no also thank you and we need to start having board comments so we can stop silencing our students i am complete all right if no other comments then we'll trusty flores has her hand up all right we'll go to the vote trustee flores has her hand up flores okay so thank you um um this uh hits a little bit close to home my mom is a yard supervisor uh she was during the pandemic she was called a classified employee

338and what's going on now we're gonna cut classified employees aren't they important you know i'm just thinking about all these hearing from my mom i'm thinking about all these students that have felt super comfortable with her and sharing like super personal experience super personal things about their life and you know now i'm thinking like without them who are these students going to open up to we we need classified employees we do not need to cut them my vote will be no all right now we go to the vote trustee leon my vote remains the same no trust your floors florence no trustee smithfold my michelle obama just ran out smith foes votes no trustee uh phillips yes trustee clerk goes on latoya gonzalez sorry no uh trustee regular reckler yes and me myself you know

339it fell so now and now we'll move to adjourn the meeting i second [Music] we don't need a vote on this because we have reached the end of what we already voted we would do so you can just adjourn the meeting by announcing we are adjourned and what time we are adjourned tammy uh we can't hear you i'm sorry um so because we have reached our end of business that we agreed to we do not need a motion to adjourn the chair just needs to announce that we are adjourned and when okay thank you sorry we can't we can't hear you very well but i think that we're done i think everybody's leaving thank you tammy gonzalez clark gonzalez hoy can you hear me you can't hear me i'm sorry if you can hear me

340we're logging off parliamentarian is that still okay