001um i would like to call this meeting to order please rise for the pledge of allegiance which will be led by trustee gonzalez hoy i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which to stand one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all trustee christian or trustee reckler can one of you do the land acknowledgement yes thank you we recognize that we are presently on the lands of the chachenyo mema parkin aluni peoples and acknowledge them as the first inhabitants of the land we currently occupy thank you very much ma'am i would like to welcome everyone to this special meeting of the board of education uh where we are here to uh talk about the board governance audit conducted by leadership associates the mission
002of the west contra costa unified school district is to prepare students for post-secondary education and to be responsible thinking contributing members of our global society we believe in public education as the most important function in a democratic society we believe we must treat everyone with courtesy dignity and respect provide safe and nurturing environments in which to learn teach work and participate serve our students by working as partners with our community to develop well-rounded lifelong learners and contributing members of a global society take responsibility for our behavior and performance to ensure the highest possible achievement of all students employees and our school community provide equitable and essential communication and support for successful learning teaching working and participating respect celebrate and welcome the diversity uniqueness and contributions of all members of our school community the board member
003should not subordinate the education of children and youth to any partisan principal group interest or the member's own personal interest this meeting will provide public comment opportunities on agenda and non-agenda items in person through the zoom app and by telephone we have changed the public comment format which will now occur at the beginning of the meeting public comment will last for one hour and includes any agendized item the time allotted for each speaker has also been extended to two minutes if you are attending the meeting in person you will need to submit a request to address the board form to indicate your desire to speak on an agenda item if participating via zoom you will need to raise your hand by clicking on the appropriate icon in the zoom app or by pressing star 9
004if accessing the meeting by phone in order to be recognized to speak on zoom your hand must be raised before public comment begins due to the brown act board members cannot discuss items that are not on the agenda and do not usually respond to items presented in public comment dr hearst can i have the roll call please absolutely president phillips here trustee clerk smith folds good evening everyone can you hear me yes good evening everyone present rusty reckler good evening president trustee gonzalez hawaii good evening president trustee christian good evening president student trustee irene cole here president thank you student trustee justin trujillo is absent all present for and counted for with the exception of student trustee justin trujillo thank you very much sir next we are going to go to wcc usd public comment
005um i'm assuming these two belong to you too i'm smiling you can't see my face um if you are in the zoom right now um please make sure that you raise your hand uh because once we get into public comment you won't be able to get into the cube so i'm just going to give folks in the zoom a little bit of time to raise their hands if they would like all right going once going twice two and a half trying to let you raise your hands if you want to talk all right three gone jeffrey being junior is the last person in the zoo we will now begin and the first person to speak from the audience is ms sheila swift hello how are you tonight this is my fifth time i've come to
006speak at the school board meeting and i'm really i'm i'm happy that i have the opportunity and i appreciate it i came today to again ask the board to and the superintendent to please reconsider the vaccine mandate i didn't have much time to prepare my my words tonight and i'm speaking from my heart i didn't have time to prepare because i was helping to organize a an event called shoes for freedom where we set up shoes and letters and posters in front of the school board there were so many parents there i i was surprised and i think you'll be surprised too it's not just me and two people here in this room but there's so many people it's a ground swell actually of people who really want the vaccine mandate to be reconsidered so
007many people will be excluded from a regular opportunity to be educated if the primary objective of our school district is equity i don't know how it's equitable to exclude children that have natural immunity or whose parents have religious beliefs and personal beliefs that inform their choice not to vaccinate their children this won't be the last time i'll be here talking to you i really appreciate all the time and effort you put into what you do and the responsibility is i will follow up again with emails on um on what i've said and also with studies there's a new england journal of medicine study that just came out about natural immunity that would be very interesting i think you'd be very interested in reviewing that thank you the next speaker is mary swift hello i'm mary
008swift i'm here on behalf of my sister sheila and my nephew val cole and i just i want to thank you for hearing us and i want to state that i'm opposed to the vaccine mandate as i strongly feel that natural immunity is sufficient and possibly better because natural immunity does not confer antibody dependent enhancements as the vaccines might um that was a b in america we're free to abstain from medical treatment that we do not consent to c i feel that vaccine mandates set a dangerous authoritarian precedent and lastly i feel that it is my body and should remain my choice based on my medical history and my conversations with my doctor uh my medical history is private and inclu and includes conditions that may be exacerbated by the ingredients in the mrna vaccine
009i trust respectfully that you guys will do the right thing thank you so much for all that you're doing thank you very much for your comments we are now going to move to to the zoom where jeffrey being junior is the last person our first zoom public speaker is hulan barnett you may emulate yourself yeah can you hear me yes okay i just want to make it clear that this school board represents nazi behavior draconian behavior and has not even looked at options like berkeley unified i just called my buddy he works for berkeley unified he's a counselor he says that the students there have an option of testing so we're talking about a city that is supposed to be the enlightenment of the bay area and they at least give those children the option
010of testing the reason why they give those children the option of testing because that white community that sits on the hill that those families that sit in those berkeley hills would not play with a school board that allowed that to happen so what i say to the community is this and and the reason why i say it's a community is because i think this this school board is disrespectful of the population because it's poor and non-english speaking so they figured they don't have to have a fight and and my suggestion to the community is this because i'm very proud of you community for stepping up take your child out of the school that's the best option you can do and watch watch west county especially in pno especially in hercules especially in el cerrito that's
011where the folks that are affluent live and can teach this school board a lesson for their lack of respect now the sad part is that they put people of color in charge to do something like this to their own community so my question to mr phillips is what is your agenda mr hearst what is your agenda why do you guys want to disrespect people of color and poor people is it you want to be elected as county assessor mr phillips what is it you want from this community can you tell us because we deserve better to have black faces and brown faces disrespecting the community and i'll leave this with you miss with with any one of you please just be aware that we will not accept it our next public speaker is david muther
012please admit yourself yeah good evening i've spoke a few times before too and i am not anti-vaccine i'm not anti-medical i believe there are many vaccines and medication that work well and have worked for many many years but have been tested thoroughly there's plenty of scientific real scientific evidence that they work these children you are trying to make an experiment with are going to get a vaccine that's only been out for five six months it is not enough time to have data i ask you to please reconsider your decisions and wait till the end of the school year not to uproot these kids in the middle of a school year you have a a b students very excelling students that are going to be leaving your school district or finding other means i also ask
013that you find ways to allow them to test out ged earlier than 16 or earlier than it's applicable so they can just get out of the district and go on to college and better their lives the no bullying no discrimination policies the lip service to the tribes that you sit on their land give it back if you really feel that way give it back give back our rights religious liberties was the main one of the main functions of this country being developed and you're stripping that from people you're you're causing stress on students bullying is is a thing when they're not vaccinated and everyone is of course the student advocate is not going to get a great consensus from students who are scared to speak up and scared to take a vaccine that may harm
014them every day in the news we are seeing more and more cases of students and adults being harmed by this vaccine and not effective anymore and new variants coming out that these were not made for thank you for your time please reconsider please at least give us until july our last public speaker for tonight is jeffrey bean jr please admit yourself good evening i am jeffrey bean i teach fifth grade at shannon elementary in panel um i don't think that the comments here tonight by the way from the first five speakers are representative of the wider community i think a lot of people are getting the vaccine are having their children vaccinated from what i've heard um and i i don't think the five to one ratio in public comments is representative just by the
015way um i wanted to call tonight to talk about um funding for intervention for high needs students we've talked a lot about equity um the last year and a half or so which i think is a good conversation to have i think one of the biggest sources of inequity in our school district is lack of funding for students who have special needs i'm not just very much special ed i'm talking about students who just have struggles with reading or are struggling with math and uh back when we had the budget cuts uh two years ago uh our learning center shannon lost uh two thirds two out of the three uh tutors in our learning center and that funding has not been restored um i think that it would be important for equity for our schools
016to have reading specialists credential teachers who can work with students one-on-one or in small groups to help them learn to read people are really the driving force behind schools and people employees are what affects a student's learning outcomes and i encourage the district to consider ways to direct funding toward people an extra person another teacher another tutor who can work with students in small groups would be great i'm sure all schools that would benefit from that thank you for your time have a good night this concludes our public comment for tonight thank you very much to everyone who called in and in case anyone is curious i'm not a candidate for county assessor we are now going to move on to item a7 which is agenda review and adoption ford can i please have a
017motion to [Music] adopt this agenda i'll move the agenda as published a second it was moved by reckler and seconded by gonzalez hoy ford is there any discussion that needs to happen on this okay um who starts the vote tonight okay mr gonzalez trustee smith can you confirm i just jumped in but i believe it was me is it me it's you trustee christian was last time and then you're this time cool uh gonzalez oh yes rickler yes smithfoss yes christian yes koya and phillips yes so the motion carries we have our agenda for this evening so we have one item that we're dealing with on this evening action item b1 which is board governance audit and with that i'm going to turn uh this over to the superintendent giving the board once again i'd
018like to take the opportunity to introduce leadership associates member sandy thornton juan garza and jim brown and this evening they will be presenting their findings and their recommendations from the governance audit i believe they have split this up so i will turn it over to them whoever is going to be presenting first thank you very much and superman i'm jim brown and uh i'm part of the team with sandy and juan garza uh we're not new to west contra costa as you know we helped with the superintendent search a while ago and we've been um helping you with a couple of workshops related to governance superintendent evaluation and all that so we uh have a a good history with working with all of you uh and continue to be impressed by your commitment to uh
019the high quality education for all students in the district and looking at everything through the important lens of equity this particular opportunity to work with you is a little bit different and it comes from a request from the board itself to ask for some help in taking a look at current governance practices and seeing what is working well and what might be done better and we chose to term that as a governance audit and you've been through an equity audit which was very extensive this is focused primarily on governance um and particularly the relationships among between and among the board members themselves tonight you will hear us use two different terms one is the board which refers to the five of you the other is the governance team which includes the five board members and
020the superintendent our audit focused uh primarily on the board itself but there were some issues that involved the governance team itself and district practices that may be contributing to some of the good that to some of the challenges that you've asked us to take a look at so what we're going to do is uh give you a quick overview of the process that we used and then we're uh going to share our findings and recommendations you have a copy of the written report which we've submitted and at the conclusion of that we'll be glad to answer questions from the board regarding the findings and and recommendations and we would appreciate after that uh a vote to accept the report uh that doesn't necessarily mean you agree with everything in it but you've received the report
021and acknowledged the work has been completed then what we're going to do is turn to the superintendent and you to talk about the action plan where do we go moving forward in terms of the recommendations we're hoping that the action plan will be specific and include one action at least one action related to each of the recommendations eight recommendations that were submitted so uh again we'll do the overview of the report answer questions and uh ask for an acceptance of the report and then turn to you for discussion about an action plan moving forward the process that we used was not terribly complicated we identified based on our previous conversations with all of you and we've had numerous ones over the the course of uh well since last january since last december almost a year
022ago now we begin our first work with with all of you but uh we identified several questions that we thought were important to ask and what we did is we asked each of you and the superintendent the same questions and then we took notes and uh but the questions were basically about the strength what do you see as the strengths of the current board are there any issues that are preventing your board from functioning as an effective governance team [Music] we think based on previous observation some of your board meetings are not as efficient and effective as they should be and what can be done about that if you agree the next question was given that it's the board's responsibility to resolve conflicts between board members and not the superintendents how would the board should
023the board choose to resolve these conflicts and then the last three when a board member does not agree upon protocols that have been adopted by the board how should the board deal with that the last two what can you do to make the board governance team function more effectively and the last one your governance handbook is uh out of date and really needs to be updated we heard so many times the notion that well where does it say that in our bylaws or what are the protocols when did we agree to that and that's the purpose of a governance handbook to identify your key policies bylaws and things like that parliamentary procedures that guide your conduct as a board and as a governance team one of the things that struck us uh all of us
024after we completed the conversations with you is how honest and sincere all of you were in terms of answering the questions and wanting to address the problems that have identified we know uh and this was only reaffirmed how committed all of you are to addressing the needs of the students with a strong equity lens helping all the staff in the district do their best work and while still addressing some continuing difficult financial issues we believe that the strict leadership uh from the good from the board and the superintendent is in good hands that all of you want to do is right to help the governance team work more effectively and please accept our findings and recommendations with these thoughts in mind so we'll start with our findings and uh juan garza will begin that with
025finding number one you know sandy that's you sandy you need you're muted thank you thank you jim sorry about that it truly has been a pleasure to serve uh this board superintendent and the community west contra costa major finding one despite some significant accomplishments such as the reopening of schools and the transition to a new superintendent the work of the present board is adversely impacted by conflicts between board members which spill over in a public arena failure to follow established governance procedures lack of understanding added of an adherence to board bylaws failure to respect the different roles of the board and the superintendent and insufficient attention to the mission-critical work of the district examples number one the board seems to not agree on the role of the board chair or understand the parliamentary procedures which
026allow for orderly conduct of meetings number two the process for developing board agendas is not understood along with the ways in which an individual board member may have a topic placed on the agenda for discussion or action example number three despite efforts to get board members to ask important questions on agenda items in advance of the meeting this does not seem to be happening with any degree of regularity or consistency example number four board agendas often appear to be too dense with mission critical work not receiving the attention it deserves example number five there is lack of agreement about an organized way for the board to conduct in-person and or virtual meetings the two are not mutually exclusive one is for finding major finding number two the process for gathering input from students staff and
027community lacks both clarity and consistency at times it appears to us that time allocated to community input ad board meetings and listing tours detract from the ability of the board to discuss among itself the items which are placed on the agenda and the superintendent to do his job examples example number one the role of the board members in gathering input from students staff and community is not clearly defined and the ways in which different board members operate often creates confusion about who's doing what and sends mixed messages as to who's who is responsible for leading and managing the district example number two there is continued disagreement disagreement about ways to respect the value of stakeholders input at board meetings versus attending to the fiduciary and policy responsibilities of the board pending number finding number three
028that there's not a clear process in place for dealing with and resolving conflicts between and among board members or resolving disagreements at board meetings the board also seems to lack protocols which define the roles of all board members including that of student board members example individual board members and board meetings themselves do not always model how the board expects others in the district to act two the board lacks knowledge of and respect for the parliamentary procedures which should guide the conduct of board meetings finding number four sandy as you're finding four the district lacks two key documents to guide the work of the board and staff strategic plan and an agreed-upon process for handling staff and stakeholder concerns two far too much staff time is being confirmed by requests from board members for information or
029action on a wide variety of items three the lack of a strategic plan and stakeholder engagement plan sometimes leads the board to be too reactive to particular staff stakeholder and individual board members concerns we'll move on to recommendations i'll begin with recommendation number one the first recommendation update the governance handbook to include updated board bylaws protocols to guide board member conduct parliamentary procedures and board meeting procedures we recommend this to be done by a committee of the board with the superintendent and assistance from one of us the full board should provide clear direction to the committee and review its results before approving the final document the board should buy into the changes and monitor adherence to the principles protocols and practices contained in the governance handbook this needs to be done as soon as possible
030thus the handbook should be clear about the consequences for failure to follow agreed upon protocols board bylaws parliamentary procedures etc recommendation number two the process for putting items on the agenda should be reviewed and updated with particular attention to the development of the strategic plan and a 12-month board agenda calendar board agenda should be based on the strategic plan and a 12-month agenda calendar both documents should be prepared by the superintendent and then reviewed by the full board and modify it as needed individual board members may suggest items but the full board needs to approve the final calendar should ensure that board agendas are aligned to the strategic plan and respect the staff time and resources individual items may require it is critical the work of the strategic plan be completed as soon as possible
031recommendations three four and five three the agenda for board meetings should be much more reflective of the district's strategic plan lcap goals and metrics items should be clearly designated as action discussion and information board and superintendent reports should be brief and to the point only dealing with individual activities and not major agenda items no meeting should go past 10 30 pm which would be possible with a more effective board agenda planning process and adherence to board meeting protocols number four we advise that the board have someone to serve in the role of parliamentarian who would be present at the board meetings to help guide the board and rule on parliamentary issues an example would be uh when we've seen this come up the role of the chair this should be a third-party person who has
032no alignment to any board member this is not intended to be a permanent position but one to help the board transition to meetings that are more aligned with parliamentary procedures five the superintendent should be asked to develop a plan to be approved by the board for securing staff and public input on important district issues individual listening tours by board members should not be part of that plan it's important that the full board and the superintendent be involved if listening tours are part of the public input process and we think they should be there are multiple other ways to to secure meaningful input such as occasional town hall meetings by the full board and superintendent and i would add to that listening tours by the superintendent himself number six i'll take that jim okay now that
033the new superintendent is on board and given the turnover and key leadership and staff positions it is time for a management audit which would build on the work completed by the equity audit team this audit should focus on the district's organizational structures including reports to the superintendent interactions among the board superintendent and administrative staff and roles and responsibilities of administrative staff there are several groups well qualified to conduct this audit one of which is the ccee seven we believe that the board and the superintendent might benefit as would all of us from having an individual coach or mentor for a period of time to be determined and eight we strongly encourage the board to emphasize the importance of meeting as an entire group to deal with the challenging issues facing the district including comments are
034in conclusion we see it very important that the full board need to discuss and vote on the agreed upon protocols and consequences and that these agreements be noted in writing in the board bylaws and governance handbook these policy agreements need to include development of board agendas length of the agenda number of questions each board member can ask what will be what will be what will determine if board meetings will be held via zoom or in person and at what location if in person that all board members will be treated equally the role of the board president needs to be clearly delineated listing tours and visitations of campuses need to be addressed roles and responsibilities need to be clearly detailed including emphasizing the amount of superintendent and staff time taken up by board members that adversely
035affects the ability to improve the system and any other specific details that have caused division among the board in addition it is most important that a strategic plan be developed and used to guide the work of the board superintendent and the district we also believe a close examination of how the district systems and structures organized should be completed within the new future especially since there are several critical leadership roles that need to be filled that concludes the concluding comments so uh board members at this time we would appreciate an opportunity to answer any questions or address any comments you may have and then we will uh proceed to discussion of an action plan to move move forward i'm board members we're starting with uh trustee gonzalez hoy uh this evening they have a lot of
036uh findings and recommendations so um maybe we can do a couple of rounds that would be great starting with four questions a piece thank you president phillips and good evening jim sandy and juan good to see you all thank you for being here on another late evening uh good to see you anyways i have a few questions about the recommendations only the rest i have a clear understanding my first question is on the first recommendation about an update on the handbook how would you recommend the changes that are made by this committee are brought to the full board in the recommendation as i read it to me it reads us all the changes should be made and then the whole document should be then reviewed by the board is that how you would suggest it
037or would you suggest changes come to the board as they are done by the committee we think in an efficient way inefficient is always the best given the complexity but an efficient way would be the board to have a discussion of what should be the contents of the governance handbook that should be an initial discussion by the full board these are the documents that we want in there bylaws uh how we get board agenda items you know the the content of key policies such as that affecting superintendent and board evaluation what needs to be in the handbook and along with that are there any preliminary thoughts about the changes needed in those particular documents then it should go to a a smaller group to do the uh the grunt work and also i think that
038group um if the full board hasn't done this there are some good examples that's one area that we could help with out there of what other districts have done without governance handbooks and it's always good to look at a couple of those because that will inform your discussion so start with a full board then with a smaller group to actually put the documents together in the wording and the language then come back to the full board as a draft and then have comments and that so it isn't an easy process and it does have to involve an interplay between the full board and the committee we don't what we don't want is the committee going off by itself and then producing something and everybody's saying where did that come from okay the board should should
039have that discussion first in effect give a charge to the committee this is what we want you to do and here's some thoughts about what ought to be in it go back to the committee and then back to the full board for discussion and eventual adoption completely agree absolutely okay wonderful thank you that uh that cleared fighter for me thank you jim my second question is on the second recommendation um the part says members may suggest items but need full full board approval um how would that work in practice um let's say that i have an item that i would like to see on an agenda and this is after we have already created the year calendar that you're suggesting how would that happen in practice dwan do you want to take that i was
040just going to give an example of what it looked like in the district where i was working the board the board i had a seven member board and at the end of every agenda we had future agenda items and if a board member suggested something uh typically you know there was a just a general agreement yes it goes on there but if there was a comment made by another board member like why are we doing that we've already done that or this is a waste of time then it required the emotion and a second and then a vote to put it on the agenda to make sure that everybody agreed it should be on there versus something that's just going to take up time to for lack of a better word appease the interest of
041one particular board member i i have found that the discussion the adoption of the 12-month calendar is is really important in organizing the work of the district and that is usually the way we've seen that done is that the superintendent comes with a a draft of a calendar and that includes of course all the fiduciary responsibilities of the board what you have to do you know approve a budget approve certain personnel action all that and there's a timeline for those the interim financial report so you'll lay that all out on the calendar for the year and then the superintendent would suggest here are other issues that we need to address in the course of the coming year and there your strategic plan of course and your lcap can be major guides to that so that
042those documents say in in front of you and are actually a means of organizing the agenda okay that is going to uh that's going to create a pretty substantial to-do list for the board for the year now having said that there are items that come up during the course of the year and it always is important and one outlined a process where that can happen something is going to come up a board member needs to wants to suggest something and there's a there's a built-in process at each board meeting okay here's what's scheduled to come up at our next meeting are there any changes in the agenda or anything like that and then make a decision about that uh but this advanced planning here is critical as opposed to at the last minute and all
043that it helps organize it better and all that and it's important for the discussion to happen with the full board and juan's example is i think a really great one so every board member has the opportunity to be able to raise an agenda item to be considered to be put on the board agenda but it it needs to be aired among all five board members so that way there's uh a consensus or majority that says yes that that would be worthy to place on the board agenda keeping in mind the 12-month board agenda calendar and the reasonableness of what can be accomplished thank you the three of you for that so the way that i understood that is that after with the creation of the 12-month calendar which would be hopefully all these agenda items
044but if anything comes up that we forgot and someone wants to add it to an agenda we would have at the end of the night kind of what we have now which is would anyone like to see any other agenda items and then if there are others two others that are like yeah that sounds great then at that point it would be added to the agenda but if there's no majority on wanting that agenda item then it wouldn't be on the agenda that's the recommendation that i'm hearing yes the only other part to that would be say for example an item was brought up as one of the board members said this item i'd like to see this report on on xyz it was not automatically going to go on the next agenda item the
045superintendent that you know it would be determined by the superintendent whether it would be on the next one or next month or the following month depending on what was coming up in the next couple of agenda items and where it fit in rather than try to squeeze it in automatically so it could be one the next meeting or it could be the second third or fourth meeting in the future one thing you want to always do when you add if a proposed agenda item comes up there should be a discussion about what work is required in the district to deal with that item so the board knows if this is going to take away from something else that was already a priority time being finite and that but it's good to have that discussion about
046now but an extreme example okay uh in uh june of and if you had a 12-month agenda calendar there my guess is the word covet would not been have been on that agenda and yet you know about three or four months later when the train framework started so the boards have to adapt to changing circumstances and uh just be cognizant of what you've already said you wanted to do and what the work adjustment might be as a result of that new item okay thank you so much um so my two questions were uh pretty big so i'll pass it back to you president phillips so others can get a chance in the second round i'll ask there's my questions thank you thank you very much sir um we are going to go to trustee regular
047good evening to all the leadership nice to see you again hi lisa for the first question is is your list um assembled in the order of importance and priority i would say the um the first two eye recommendations on the on the uh governance handbook which conclude within the uh the strategic plan and agenda calendar are two of the most important we think the others are all important that they complement that but uh we we think those two are probably and in a way the governance handbook will deal probably with parliamentary procedures and protocols and all that uh they are not intended to be in a rank order though they but i would say those two would be probably the most important okay and we would hope in your action plan you would address those
048okay so it's governance handbook strategic plan and the governance calendar right okay thank you for that and then i may be jumping ahead a little bit so stop me if we're gonna if we're gonna get into this later but um so let's say the the first example the board seems not to agree on the role of the board chair um are we going to just discuss that later like how to resolve that or is that something i should be asking you now i think we're going when we talk about the action plan after that we'll talk about that uh uh and in in a way parliamentary procedures may be in adherence to parliamentary procedures should inform that discussion a great deal because it's very clear about the ruling of the chair but how somebody can
049challenge the ruling of the chair and if three votes are required i think that's in your problem i believe that's in but we'll pick it up there okay i can save that then um so um if if you can allow if you can um uh elaborate a bit for uh for high functioning boards that you've seen can you describe some of the best practices that they use to gather input and the difference between the board gathering input and the superintendent and staff gathering input from the various shareholders and stakeholders in the community what we've seen are uh surveys that can be used uh uh that's one one means of gathering input i town hall meetings where the full board might you know be at a school and these are listening then it's not a board
050meeting it's a meeting for people in the area maybe some you know i mean you don't have to have these weekly maybe even monthly but five or six a year could be good there is an organized uh at the board meetings themselves uh there's always somebody and i know that covet in the in the assumed things that have all changed this but always had somebody there if somebody had a concern to express that there was a staff member that met with that person afterwards uh walked them out of the room or something like so people knew that they were heard and paid attention to examples of districts that are pretty good at their board meetings uh uh sandy's district and juan's district have always been exemplary in that regard uh and long for bigger districts
051long beach unified and garden grove unified are both districts with you know long-term stability and superintendents disability and board members and agreed upon procedures for getting public input from stakeholders so those are some preliminary ideas sandy any or one thinking about the the extensive stakeholder input that we engaged in during the search process that included an online survey and jim juan do you remember how many i think it was like 5 000 or something like that responding to the online survey it was a very extensive input in addition to the groups that we met with via zoom so there's uh it's important to genuinely honor and respect stakeholder input it's also important to keep the mission critical work of the district moving forward and you can um trip yourselves up and especially the um the
052effort to ensure that every single child is served at the very very high levels when you're having these uh input sessions very very very regularly the work needs to be able to get done so there needs to be a a reasonableness behind the engagement plan there's there's not uh um if if the focus is on stakeholder input period and not on ensuring that the work gets done it's incredibly time consuming to move the ball forward to ensure that academic achievement is improved on the behalf of all all students so there has to be reasonableness and balance time to get the work done one example one example that that i can given i did this for 15 years we call them school site chats and i went to every school one time per year we only
053had 24 schools but i went there and i would open up with one or two highlights everybody was invited classified teachers and we would ask the principal to leave only the principal was not allowed to stay at the meeting and i give one or two highlights and then after that i'd say i'm ready for the good the bad and the ugly and just answer questions sometimes one board member would go with me sometimes two sometimes three sometimes five or six or all seven would show up i never knew which board members were going to show up they knew the calendar and we just held those regularly listened to staff the next time i went i would highlight what they said last time what was done and then we'd go on to the good the bad
054and the ugly so that that's an example of getting uh directly with the with the staff at the schools there's all kinds of examples out there one more practice i think i should have mentioned earlier is that the use of i'm going to call and i'm not sure if you have some form of this or not so um but a community advisory committee with which the superintendent met monthly and on that advisory committee was a parent representative and a staff representative from each school in the district plus at large members appointed by the superintendent and we met monthly and it was a good opportunity to listen to what concerns were coming forward and as we worked together over a nine or ten month period and actually several years because some people returned the following year
055good relationships were developed and it proved to be a very valuable source of getting on the ground and listening to people and find what's going on so i think if you can develop these systems out there that can gather this in a in a meaningful way and it's going to involve work by the superintendent and work by the board but you're doing that all now it's just a matter of organizing in a good way and if you get those practices in place believe me that some of the contentious issues around this will start to go away okay thank you for that i would also like to ask on a point um where it says that there's a lack of agreement about an organized way for the board to conduct in-person and or virtual meetings the
056two are not mutually exclusive i feel completely clueless on this and i'm not really sure um exactly what this means would you be able to elaborate on that well you know part of this is a a covet situation you know and who's comfortable now meeting in person in in and zoom and all we wanted to say is that going forward we've learned from the zoo meetings that in some ways we can increase community participation because it makes it easier for some people to observe the board in action they don't have to get a car and go somewhere but you never want to lose the value of in-person meetings either and there was a point in the past where we thought the debate got a little bit too much it's one or the other but going
057forward we think that some attention be giving as we're doing tonight uh some kind of hybrid model that encourages participation from a wider group of people but protects the health of people you know the way this covert thing is going i honestly you know we don't know when we're going to be out of it completely and probably some people are going to continue to be uncomfortable with coming to in-person activities and something like that so but there were a couple of things that happened in the past that was no we should be in person we should be in zoom i just say it's not an either if if you're going to uh do uh high level discussions allowing key personnel negotiations things like that probably the in person is better if the hell if there's
058not health issues that are jeopardized by that the only other thing that i'd like to add to that is that i'm working with quite a few boards here in the san joaquin valley and quite a few of them raised the question of we're requiring our students to come we're asking our students to come in person and our teachers and our classified employees you know why why are we not doing that same model for for our board meetings so i'm not advocating one way or the other here but i that uh that question has been raised quite often in some of the board meetings that some of the board and districts that i'm working with here in the san joaquin valley okay thank you that's all for now trustee smith falls thank you very much um
059can you hear me yes perfect um when it talked about recommendation number one in the governance handbook the committees that are going to be formed that committee should be elected among the board members correct the board and take a vote probably be a good practice i think you know as the board president could appoint to and then the board if the board doesn't agree with that they could challenge the ruling of the chair so whatever is comfortable with you but the idea of this whole thing is to get buy-in from the board to this document it's such a critical document so however you choose to do it keep that in mind that we don't want people ticked off with the process before the process has even started the hard work so do it in a
060way that's comfortable you electing by the board seems fine maybe there's just only two of you three of you he has to be two you wanna yeah so would your recommendation be to start with volunteers and then if no one volunteers go to the the way of an election okay that i think that could work i i also trust the board chair to um but i think there's a little homework you do in advance of that but uh i think the process given this board the circumstances is in it's better to ask for volunteers and then do an election if necessary okay it's just important that the whole board agrees to um the two people who are going to be moving on the committee yeah and that the conversation is the full board not just
061about who's going to be on the committee but the full board what has the conversation about what what the charge will be given to the two members of the committee and that the committee will then do the work and uh work with um i'm assuming it'll be jim and then we'll come back to the full board so it's it's not the work of this the subcommittee to go off and do everything on their own it's got to be a sort of a accordion you know start with the full board go to the subcommittee go back to the full board okay thank you for that and then on recommendation number two and recommendation number three and i think maybe one more we keep hearing uh district strategic plan right so we hear district strategic plan is
062that the current plan we already have is that the one we're develop developing based on the equity audit or is that a whole different plan what plan is the district strategic plan that we're talking about based on my conversations in ours with the superintendent we think it's the second of the two hey an updated strategic plan so the one that's going to be developed out of the equity audit that we had by um dr hurst i forgot the name um illumination that's not right aluminum collective illuminate egg collective okay so when we're looking in finding two we're talking about that strategic plan developed by the superintendent from the equity audit and then building off of that strategic plan the 12-month agenda calendar do i have that correct yes okay and then my next question is
063when we're looking at number eight we strongly encourage the board to emphasize the importance of meeting as a group to deal with the challenging issues facing the district meeting as a group are we talking about a retreat a special meeting closed session what do we what are we talking about meeting as a group because if we meet as a group that's a board meeting right so and can you give me some examples of what you mean by when you say meeting as a group are you talking about a retreat are you talking about a special meeting what was that look like we think that it's important for this board and any board when you have big issues all of you work together on it not one or two of you going off somewhere and working
064with this group or that group but working together as a team with the superintendent to take this issue that can be in a public meeting it can be in a retreat it can be wherever whatever venue seems most appropriate juan or sandy did i get that right correct and and that's that and an example of that would be like the subcommittee for the governance handbook this is the board agreeing to these two people or this um doing this particular work so so two of you can go off and do work but it's under the guidance of the entire board with specific tasks okay and let me just ask one clarifying question with that when you're talking about to deal with the challenging issues facing the district so this is outside of the district calendar that's
065created or are you talking about this is inside the district calendar it just goes right along with the district calendar that we put issues on a district calendar that are challenging deal with the district and we need to come to those conclusions as a board to set the direction for the superintendent that am i clear now you got it okay thank you so much i believe that that's for mr christian yes sir thank you uh leadership associates i appreciate all that you have done so far um two things i want to raise um just looking at the documents say major findings uh number four where it basically number one it says the district lacks uh two key documents to guide the work of the board and staff and so can you elaborate on that uh
066yes uh sandy maybe you could talk a little bit about the importance of having a strategic plan to guide the work of the district sure sure you already have your l cap and uh trustee smith folds it and mentioned just a little earlier it can be um a little confusing if you're having this plan that plan so that there needs to be consistency there needs to be um all all of these um efforts need to dovetail together but the overall strategic plan especially given that you just had a very comprehensive um equity audit completed that that needs to be something that's going to be um a driver for a strategic plan so it's it's a uh going to be an updated um document but we'll keep in mind the other work that has been accomplished
067lcap is a major driver for the district and especially given that the fact that there's uh required input into that um process you've already had stakeholder input into the lcap process so you have you have a variety of of um of means to to access input input that you've already received through lcap and also through the stakeholder input for the uh that the search um completed but also there there could be you know other means of of input with the um engagement plan that that comes up the bottom line is there needs to be an overall document the strategic plan that's going to be a driver for the work that's going to be accomplished for the superintendent it'll help bring some um some congruence to the work that you are all about having congruency is
068going to be really really important right now there's a sense of um lack of congruence i guess you know there's things that come up here and there but it's not it's hard to really ensure that you're going to be laser-like focused on student achievement for every single child if you've got all sorts of things going on here a strategic plan is going to help you ensure that that the staff can stay the course and ensure that the the major goals of the district are going to be moved forward and just to add to that briefly going back to board agenda items sometimes a request for a board agenda item will come up and good question will be well how does this tie into our strategic plan that can help resolve whether that item should be
069put on a board agenda or not is it tied to our strategic plan or not i i've seen a number of board agendas that are organized around the strategic plan um i mean you yeah i think one of the things it's i know it becomes it can sound real but reading your mission and vision as you do mr phillips is really important at that it sets the context for the work and i've i've seen agendas in a number of districts most strategic plans will have i'm going to say five or six major strategic goals each of those that's an agenda item on every board meeting anything related to goal number one do that anything related goal number two and the big danger of strategic plans is they get done and they get filed and they
070don't aren't they aren't embedded into the actual work of the district in you know especially at the board level and if you can structure your agenda around the goals and your plan and that's every agenda is like that once a while you have a special meeting with focused on a particular topic that really you know that really can accomplish some of what you want to have happen with organization of your meetings and agendas okay and and the other question i'm just going to ask that what other board that's out there is similar to the way we function you really want us to answer that [Laughter] that might be a tough one to answer it it is it is it is a hard one to answer because every board is different um there are boards that
071really work well together stay laser focused on their goals and that's you know i i've listed a few districts a little earlier tonight that are examples of that and they're different kinds of districts uh there are also boards that nobody even speaks to each other it's hard to get acquirement meetings anything like that i i would characterize and i think i'm speaking for sandy and juan uh that west contra is a board with unfulfilled potential and it's the the pieces are there and we just got to get them together get it organized and uh i i think there's great hope and promise it's also important to keep in mind that this board has not been together as a full board very long and you've had coved so you know it's it's um it takes time
072and commitment that you invest in each other and in your continual development individually as trustees and collectively as the governance team okay thank you that's all right thank you sir trusty uh yeah so my first question would be um why weren't student trustees included in the con um in the set of interviews the student trustees were not included because of the personal nature of some of the conversations so in the future will student trustees ever be considered to be interviewed without the personal questions at all that's up to the board and then um my last question would just be in cabinet leadership will they also have an audit report for them or will they ever be interviewed possibly in the future we recommended one of the recommendations was a management audit focused on the district's
073organizational structures particularly around the cabinet and direct reports to the superintendent relations between the board the superintendents the answer to questions is assuming that that recommendation is acted upon that that would happen okay all right thank you those are all my questions thank you very much and if i might add when we first met all of you when we first started working uh with west contra costa one of the things that um really struck us was the the real value that was placed on student voice school districts talk about that all the time but we saw it we saw it and and and that the that the student trustee was involved in the actual selection process the supernova was something that we have never seen before so just wanted to share that with you so
074you know that we work with um school boards and school districts up and down the state and it's something that is uh a beautiful thing here in west contra costa that student voices is um valued at a very high level things can always improve no matter uh at what level you're at you can always get better okay that's all my questions thank you thank you very much i have a few questions and i'm going to be a little vulnerable tonight and take this as an opportunity for feedback and personal growth so starting with finding one and then you have example one the board seems not to agree on the role of the board chair or understand the parliamentary procedures which allow for an orderly conduct of meetings and i specifically want to ask in [Music]
075i know that this audit wasn't about me but in reviewing kind of my role in what i have been doing in your work did you find that i personally have a misunderstanding of the role of the chair i we talked about this a lot mr phillips and um [Music] i don't think there is agreement our concern was that there does not appear to be agreement among board members as to the role of the chair and sometimes actions are perceived as arbitrary and not based in in that's not what our bylaws say but then people can't cite a particular bylaw or something like that it's the confusion around that role on the part of all your work to bring the board together uh and deal with a lot tough issue has been very important but sometimes
076actions are proved perceived as arbitrary or capricious and not based on what our protocols are and that that ought not to be an issue at all for any board what the role the chair has that ought to be clear everybody understands it and if there's a ruling made or something like that there's is a parliamentary procedure to challenge the ruling of the chair uh you don't have to go back and forth to get angry you just there's a simple process that you follow and that's one of the things that led to our thought about uh some kind of a parliamentary person that can help you get on track here i think once you can do that it's going to be fine it also um was apparent to us that this board is very very new
077very very new so understanding the role of the chair because um you will not be the chair forever and ever and ever you know other other board members are going to step into that role everyone's going to need whoever is in that position needs to know that that the board chair cannot rule unilaterally that the board chair does have some authority and does have some responsibility but the entire board has to be taken into consideration you know unilateral decisions are not are not okay but it is again we can't emphasize strongly enough a very new board so there's the fact that you asked us to do this as a board the fact that you um are wanting to to do whatever it's going to take to improve the functioning so that way this board can
078uh raise a level of its effectiveness is something that uh gives us all great hope so it's it's important that the board chair whoever is in that position knows that they cannot rule unilaterally that the group the entire it has to be a majority of the board that agrees to move forward on whatever decision is going to be made just so i'm clear when you talk about rule unilaterally um you're talking about like policies and and what what are you does is that what you're talking about like the chair can't decide the policy for the district by his or herself that's right it's going to be the majority of the board well and on a more i mean this this is based on something that happened there was a a bit of a brouhaha over
079how many questions a board member could ask and there was a ruling of the chair on that there was some you know that got contentious but there there is a procedure to deal with that if the board does not agree with the ruling of the chair and keep it orderly and just challenge the rule of the chair if there are three people that agree to that then the rule of the chair doesn't stand and the other thing that's important to keep in mind is in in whatever decisions are going to be made going forward that that the board is always looking to demonstrate what civil discourse really means good point and what a democratic uh representative group does when they're uh functioning at a very high level it's absolutely expected that people are going to
080disagree with one another from time to time that's healthy very healthy but civil discourse is absolutely critical professionalism is absolutely critical and um the fact that everybody's opinion is is uh listened to and respected and and that there's it's important that there's no backdoor deals being made you know that that there's discussion among the board and and there's going to be some times that the board share whoever the board chair is happens to be uh trustee phillips now but it's going to be somebody uh else at some point in time you know one what the board chair doesn't uh hold their term as a life term so whoever's in that position they have to really respect the whole group and understand that it is a representative group but there are times that the board chair
081is going to have some responsibilities and it's it's okay to uh to disagree how how it's done how that disagreement is expressed is really important for the health of the entire district thank you i'm going to go on to major finding three and again i'm trying to take this as an opportunity for some personal growth uh and feedback from myself as well um so finding three example two says the board lacks knowledge of and respect of the parliamentary procedures which should guide the conduct of board meetings and my question to you is in your review of my work um on the board did you find that i exhib and i literally mean me personally um exhibit a lack of knowledge and respect for parliamentary procedures uh i we would not and i know this might
082sound a little invasive okay but this is a board issue and every board member shares responsible i don't know but our sense is there's never been an in-depth discussion among all of you about what are your parliamentary procedures how do they work and how should they guide our behavior now to the extent the board chair has a responsibility for initiating that conversation then some of it probably falls on you uh but and that may have occurred we're just not aware of it nobody told us that and uh in fact there was some confusion at some point about which parliamentary procedures we follow so i think in terms of the role the chair reminding people that we have a set of procedures that we follow to to do our planning and conduct of our meetings and
083we're going to respect those procedures and if there's a question let's deal with it one of our recommendations is to have a parliamentarian and our strong belief is that for a period of time not indefinitely it would be advantageous to the board to have a third party person not aligned to any board member who would be there not to engage in policy discussion that is not the role of the parliamentarian but just to ensure that once the board agrees upon protocols that the board is abiding by those protocols as the board engages in its business if somebody forgets steps out of their role is not in in alignment with the board particles that have protocols that have been agreed upon in the parliamentarian and a very neutral manner just points out out of order so
084that way the board can regroup and and get back on track it's just a matter of ensuring that there's orderliness and things are moving in the way that they need to be moved the board agendas are far too dense there's all these sorts of things that are going to help this board function at a much higher level to have agendas that are reasonable in length that have the most important topics on those agendas for discussion that everybody agrees to those agenda items there's several all of these recommendations are going to help to improve the effectiveness of the um board and the governance team and finally it's it'll result in what you all have expressed such strong and deeply held beliefs in that you want to do everything you possibly can as a team to ensure
085that practices and um [Music] and programs and structures and systems are improved to benefit every single child in the entire district that is only going to happen if the system is running at a higher functioning level and that will happen starting off with a more effective governance team we would fully acknowledge that having a parliamentary a third person is not usual practice so it's a short term to try to get things on track if there was somebody on the board that the board had confidence in that could fulfill that role that's an option but it doesn't appear to us to be that way right now um you know and i can think of a couple boards in the past that and this this is a kind of a hard one but good really good boards
086i work with there was always at least one board member and i'm going to use the term served as the conscience of the board and if things got out of line or somebody said you know and it can happen also this person had a high degree of credibility with his or her colleagues and he would just say you know wait a minute let's pause this is not the way that we try to you know remember we're modeling how we want our teachers to act people to treat each other this is not what we do in in a very soft way but i don't right now we haven't seen that on your board so that's an outside person to kind of help write the course for a while and it might only be three or four
087meetings the other thing that we uh i think is important to mention is we understand that there are grant funds that are specifically intended to be used for governance work so we mentioned also that we believe strongly would be extremely helpful to have every board member and the superintendent have a coach and to have a parliamentarian all of those things can be paid for through the grant funding that's specifically intended to be used for governance work i had a coach for 14 of my 15 years as a superintendent and use them every single year that's tremendous value someone you can talk to someone will listen someone will point you in the right direction sometimes just say hey think about this or did you think about that it's a wise investment very very thank you very
088much those are my questions so we're going to start over thank you so i have three questions left next one is on recommendation number three more specifically the reports um right now as you've probably seen in our board meetings we have a very lengthy superintendent report which really has become our main item on our agendas because of covet um but we'll be looking if we were to adopt this recommendation how would you suggest then that we deal with the covert updates do they become discussion items uh that would be one way they you know that's an important ongoing issue it ought to be called out as a separate item on the agenda if you're going to act on something related to covet it's an action item if you're going to talk about it it's a
089discussion item but the reports should be in our judgment should be much narrower and that's board and superintendent reports uh sometimes we've seen where you know it an item that should have been called out on the agenda as a specific item gets covered in the superintendent report but it's not always listed as an item so we would tend to recommend the reports be much briefer be focused on activities that you know they've been going on and that the items that weren't discussion or action be pulled out as separate items i've seen quite a few boards also on their agenda items have a for lack of a better term a time limit you know for this item we suggest taking 10 minutes for this item 15 minutes uh sometimes the discussion could go a little longer
090however some guiding point as to time constraints because time is very valuable and you have a lot of important work to do and you have and good discussions about a particular item will usually lead to good decisions but they need to be very focused and people need to be reminded that there's just uh so much time in a board meeting to be able to get through the entire agenda so that's important that's that's something that you ought to ought to consider at the beginning also yeah another uh point with regard to the timing of board meetings we've strongly suggested that you shoot for uh completion by by 10 30. it's not always going to be exact and the reason for that is is not at all arbitrary you have hugely important responsibilities it's not you're
091not going to be at your optimum decision making level just from sure exhaustion you're going to 11 30 12 or whatever you know crazy time it might be you know it's it's number one not respectful of um of your community or staff to keep people up at who knows what all times of the uh of the late evening and it's not the optimum time for you to really have all of your wits about you to make serious decisions you know it's just um staff members have to um be up early and back on those campuses you know parents who are are engaged in the meetings they've they've got work it's just um with with more effective planning of board agendas and also with um more adherence to board protocols and and there's all these things
092that that can create a more reasonable time frame for important work the mission critical work of the district to be done thank you um the next question is on recommendation number four who would you recommend that we hire us a parliamentarian would we utilize one of our district lawyers or would you suggest that we contract with a consulting firm like what would other what do other boards do in this situation well as i said most boards would have somebody either in the uh the the superintendent's office or on the board that would be able to do this it may be that there's some i would guess that within your community are probably several people that are pretty good at this stuff and there may be even somebody who would volunteer to help you out during
093this time so um certainly your attorney could help but you know the price tag with that is a little bit higher and uh i suspect there probably are uh in fact in in talking to you individually one or two of you had some thoughts about that there are some people in the community that could do that so that might be your first first step just to see whether you also consider contacting the county office of education sometimes they're very helpful right it's just important that the person be um neutral not somebody who's aligned to any any particular board member or two or more that makes sense thank you um my last question is on recommendation 5. so how do you balance the the need for us to get information from the community around an item
094that we're going to see the following wednesday right and allowing the district to bring us the feedback from the community does that make sense so so i reach out to the community quite often to get information how to vote on something right and sometimes the turnaround has to be pretty quick the district can't always send a survey on a monday and get it back on wednesday right so how do you balance the need for a listening tour or for feedback from the community and the boards not doing it themselves well you used an important you know the board and you know one of our concerns about you know the way it's been operating is it's too individual in in different people and i understand that different people have different contacts and all that but uh
095if there can be a formalized way for the board to get the information it needs from the community now having a structured agenda knowing when big items are going to come up there should not have to be a lot of this last where did this come from and how should i you know what what are your best thoughts on it uh there's a little bit too much of that seeming to happen and we think if you can get your agendas more structured the 12 months agenda calendar that can help with a lot of this uh it it is important that we we do this that we listen and everything and uh but if you structure this a little bit differently and the board provides more opportunity for you know maybe through a a town hall
096meeting i think something like a community advisory committee and i remember uh our board members always came to that meeting and they just kind of sat back and listened to the dialogue from the different schools and everything that was a big help so i i think there's some systems you can put in place that would minimize the need to do what you're talking about sandy or juan do you i would agree with that jim it's um the structured agenda calendar is going to help tremendously and you know the other thing too is it's um it is absolutely essential to honor and genuinely respect stakeholder input but you are a representative board you were elected to represent your constituents that doesn't mean that you have to tap into them weekly or tap into them you know
097they they voted for for you and it's it's important to to um know that you don't have to tap into them for every single decision at the same time you also want to ensure that that you're in touch with with the needs of the community you know so that there is a fine balance it's just important to not have it be um consuming so much of um your time and the staff time that you don't have the time to get the actual work done for the staff to be able to get the work done because there's the you know the board works at the policy level and the staff works at the implementation level thank you sorry for interrupting you sandy that was my last question thank you very much trustee reckler is there a
098timeline to complete all of this that you guys haven't had in mind yes uh the answer is yes and we think uh in our lifetimes uh well the the strategic i don't know what the framework is for the strategic plan we know it's uh there's a firm that's been contracted to do that and that's moving forward uh the 12-month agenda calendar should probably follow that but there isn't anything that prevents you from developing a calendar between now and the end of the year also so we think that most of the items in this should be done within a three-month period especially the agreement on the protocols and the consequences and and that that be agreed upon and put into writing governance handbook as again as mentioned earlier is a major priority okay thank you next
099question was uh in a previous conversation there was a recommendation that reclair smithfolds works on the governance handbook but i don't see it here um is there a reason that that was eliminated yes we we thought it'd be better for the board to make that decision about who's who's supposed to do that we didn't want to prejudge that okay okay and then finally if you could talk a bit more about the management audit [Music] how long does that take what's involved when should it happen and approximate costs if you know and is it something that the board decides or is it something that the superintendent decides um it could be done either way in terms of the board of superintendent uh i've gone through two of these and they were both at my request as
100superintendent because i wanted some advice outside advice on organizing the reporting structure in the district it seemed inefficient to me and i called in this case uh was at that time somebody the state department sent a team down to help with that the ccee um you can do this kind of work and also figma can i mean i'm looking for ways that aren't going to cost you an arm and a leg and uh cce has funding to do this i think thick map does uh and the scope was intended to be primarily focused as i mentioned earlier in response to irene's question on the the the district office organizational structure uh the number of assistant soups associates the titles the reporting structure how many separate people or is the superintendent evaluating directly and those kind
101of issues around district administration how are we managing this district at the district level and i know the equity audit talked about the with the work of some of the a couple of the department's business and hr particularly in terms of uh uh the work that's being done how well it relates to the equity missions of the district but this this is a more narrowly focused uh with if you use one of those organizations it should be something that could be done within a three month within a three-month period if not fast i think it's just you know and it should be something that superintendents comfortable with he should be directly involved in talking to the people and basically you know i need some help in taking an independent person to take a look at
102how we're organized what would your recommendations would something like that now i would add that that your your superintendent is your ceo of of the entire organization so the recommendations i would i would suggest would come from your superintendent that you work together as a governance team so you're having conversations on a regular basis as a governance team and um as individual trustees certainly going to have conversations with your superintendent but recommendations i think should come from the um from the superintendent yes and then the board discusses it's much easier if you have one person as the point guard and that would be your superintendent right and um could that happen now or would you wait until the equity analysis is complete what would you think chris i think once the equity audit is complete
103okay thank you i don't have anything else thank you i have a couple um when we're talking about number six and now that the new superintendent is on board and given the turnover and key leadership and staff positions and it goes on to talk about the management audit and then it says this audit should focus on the district's organization structures including reports to the superintendent interactions among the board superintendent administrative staff and the roles and responsibility of the administrative staff would those turn around and then be once those findings come through once those findings come through through the audit does that turn around and impact or affect what we put in the governance handbook or what would be put in the governance handbook and i'm talking specifically about when it says interactions among the board
104right so would we then have a policy or a part of the government handbook that says the superintendent interacts with the board by fill in the blank or the board is informed about something that happens when fill in the blank like is my question clear or not yeah yes and i think the roles and responsibilities of the board and superintendent in that area is part of the governance handbook how those communications occur agendas are built and all that is part of it and that's part of the district admin at organizational structure to make sure that work happens the board gets the information it needs and in a timely way so that it can make the important policy decisions it has to okay and then my second question is there's there was conversation about um what
105happens if policies and procedures or protocols are not followed at the board level and there was mention of there would be consequences can you give me some examples of what those consequences would look like and consequence may not been the word used but the reaction if something is not agreed upon policy is not followed what would be a an example would be uh you mean how it would be handled or an example of the behavior oh not an example of the behavior but an example of we policy was set rule was established rule or policy got broken what's the next step so it's that hey yo we talked about this and now you're not doing it and it's just a verbal is it you know hey you're censored is it hey this happens what's the
106how does that look that next step and is that next step outlined in our governor's handbook i'm assuming that's a yes but what was an example of what that next step would look like i i think it's a caution from uh probably the board president unless the board president is the effect you know i mentioned earlier somebody on the board is the conscience of the board and that's something the board could decide but if there's something that happens that's contrary to the protocol the first thing is a question you know hey we don't do that or that's that's not consistent with it if the behavior continues and then that's a different thing then it starts to escalate maybe there's something in writing that occurs uh you know you want to you know we don't think
107you have a situation that's that's even approaching that censure you know stage and anything like that but there are boards uh trustee smithfolds where there's somebody that is just they're so totally out of line and they're denigrating to staff they're you know that's a particular offense that we see in some boards we work with is ones after another the staff is denigrating that's you know we don't treat people that way in public meetings we don't want students treated that way in a classroom so if that that would be an example of something we see a little bit more often if somebody starts to chew on a staff member or something like that i've had to intervene as superintendent a couple of times and i turned to the trustee and i said you know if you
108have a question for that person please direct it to me i'll respond and i wanted to get the staff person out of the out of the line of fire and then i could deal with talk to the board i wouldn't i wasn't reluctant to have a conversation with a board member but usually the board president did that in our district we uh some on a few occasions uh there was some issues that needed to be addressed regarding the particular behavior board member we had a seven member board so two board members were selected through discussion between the board president and myself or the clerk of the board if it was the president and they would have a a separate meeting invite them to coffee and have a conversation about their behavior or their actions in
109your particular case you only have five board members so it could be one board member having a conversation with that particular board member one-on-one one-on-one to try to you know just get him to understand the inappropriateness of whatever is taking place there was a one incident long ago early in my superintendency that was was pretty um it was it was it rose to the level that that created a real high degree of concern for me so i asked for recess and asked the two board members in um who were of concern to meet me in the closed session room and we just i just asked everybody just bring the level of rancor down and just reminded reminded them with all due respect this is not how we agreed to conduct ourselves as a governance team
110and it's detrimental to the entire organization to have that kind of uh really bombastic language being used in open session or at all so it just required a little break a little time out to just take a deep breath and say we we need to be better than this and it it never happened again it never happened again and it was um something that you know nobody was censured but we had to we had to call out and there were a couple of other times that board members had to be reminded that there were certain things that we had agreed upon as an entire governance team that everybody we had lengthy conversation about it we all agreed upon it and even if not every single person was really gun hole about it the majority of
111the board agreed on it and everybody else said okay i'm a member of this team and that's how democracy runs so that's that's how it it ran but over time it just got better and better and better because in the beginning we were all very very new we were trying to find our way and as we um became more experienced and more sophisticated and what it really means to be a high functioning governance team it got so much better and it had a wonderful wonderful result on um on student achievement you know which is the number one priority kids well-being and their and their achievement thank you for that that idea about a recess is really important when she said once when the temperature starts to rise it's okay just to let's have a recess
112and just kind of ratchet things down a little bit that's a very effective strategy thank you for that my third question would be you said there's always a better way or every board can do better engaging its student trustees would you suggest that when talking about the governance handbook and if there is a part for student trustees right like if you're talking about student trustees if you're talking about even in the bylaws if you're talking about student trustees if you're talking about the interactions you're talking about all of the things that go with our student trustees would you suggest or how would you suggest making sure that that input is there is that an invitation we're talking about student trustees now and the way that student trustees are sitting at the board interacting with the
113board making sure that you're getting everything that you need would that be a way to invite student trustees in to make sure that we are doing what you said which is doing the best version of making sure that we're including student voice in everything that we do a section in the in the handbook about the role of student representatives would be very important to have and you've had you know your current student board reps you could you could ask them what what do you see as your role what the challenges any suggestion you've had several in the past it might be good to send them a letter and say you know anything you could share with us about this what you learned from that experience something we could have done better but the big confusion
114is that you the five of you are elected board members and you have fiduciary responsibilities under the law students are not elected board members they uh they don't have to answer to a constituency run for election they're not held liable or responsible for actions or anything there's a big big difference but getting their voice in the right way uh on important items things like that is really critical to the role and you might wanna you know i'm i'm not sure how your student reps are selected or rotate or anything like that but you should talk about this in the handbook and how you work effectively with your student reps okay and so all right especially because they are elected so we have a student kind of off council my name is naming it wrong but
115they are elected from that kind of office yeah but but that but that's a different election right they don't stand that's not a ballot you know from the community they don't have the responsibilities you do right they i agree with that i agree with that but i also agree that they do have a high level accountability especially our student trustees because they do really really well they have a high level accountability to their peers and bringing that voice to the board so it's one of those things that yes uh mr brown you are 100 right yes and right so it's a both and so they they do and if we're modeling it's modeling by inclusion right it's modeling by showing this is what we need to do so i'm i'm going off a little bit
116off the question the last thing is can you guys tell me what you know about the listening tours because i just want to make sure that there's a clear understanding and listening tours i'm putting in quotes about the listening tours what did you know what have you found out have you attended a listening tour what what is your understanding of a listening tour sandy you want to take that i would want me to um i'll i'll share my my thoughts what my understanding is is that one or two less than a majority of the board is conducting listening tours very very frequently the the idea of seeking input from stakeholders is absolutely essential how it's done that's why one of our recommendations is that that as the board you work with your superintendent to and
117actually we suggest that the superintendent come up with a suggestion a recommendation and then you guys all discuss it because the engagement plan needs to include the superintendent either the superintendent does it or the superintendent and and board members together do it but not uh individual board members alone and not on such a frequent basis and and then what what is what's the result of that what's done with that information you know that the superintendent needs to be uh a part of that and i have not had any conversations with dr hearst about listening tours i just as a former superintendent myself of more than 14 years i i would have found it very very very difficult for me to be able to provide leadership if i was not involved in those listening tours i
118was very involved in um high level visibility across our our district and felt like i was i was aware of what our people including our our kids and our classified staff and our certificated staff and the parents and all the people that we served in the entire community but i would have found it very very difficult from from my effort to help ensure that the system was continually improving if there were these random listening tours that were happening that was not in conjunction that's why we've also stretched stressed the importance of a strategic plan things need to be more orderly and more organized and more um more focused with with really a purpose a purpose behind so that way there's mission critical work that is going to ensure that every student is getting better and
119better and better services over time so it's it's it's something that um that just needs to be done in a more organized way and and not uh in in sort of a haphazard way and and maybe i've got it wrong on on what's actually happening out there so you know i certainly do not want to um [Music] share that that i think that i know exactly what's going on i'm just uh giving you my my uh two cents i think there's a tendency sometimes for these to result in to do to-do list for the superintendent uh and more more tasks end up on his desk and uh again just getting the information flow organized from constituents in a meaningful way where everybody's involved everybody's hearing the same thing they're setting priorities together and much of
120the work now in the district this is my take seems to be dictated by who's heard what from whom on what day and uh there's a better way to run the system if that's what happened so i thank you for that thank you for letting me know your understanding of what the listening tour is when it comes down to this uh discussion and board comments i would like to comment on what the what's happening and see if that gives you a little bit more insight or enlightenment to what actually happens at a listening tour thank you those are my questions but you see what we're saying is that you know we're recommending that the the plan be developed and how we can best secure information from our key stakeholders in the district and what we
121can we agree to that as a board rather than having it done by individuals on an isolated basis oh i yes sir i completely understand what you're saying i want to make sure that you understand exactly what's happening like what's actually happening at a listening tour so if that gives you a different perspective about your recommendation great if it doesn't great but i just want to make sure that the information is accurately portrayed to you those are my four questions thank you okay thank you rusty christian yeah thank you um you know just you know um hearing everything that's being said so far um you know my question is this you know um going back to the governance book um when we receive the training that the things that we need to uh enhance ourselves
122well we would hope so i think that's a decision you have to make wherever you need help um i mean combined with the coach i think would would be ideal because i think the coach could deal with each of you individually uh understand your perspective a little more clearly and be able to assist in support in understanding how to implement and how the governance handbook impacts the work that you do and how you do your work so it's a combination of a couple of different things mr christian not just the handbook in isolation okay and and then my other question is you know or when we are going to when would this be implemented you know they remember the old song please mr postman you remember that song please deliver the letter the sooner the
123better okay so that that would be our response to that yeah as you as you as you make decisions about the next steps kind of put a timeline to them so that you can move on them rather quickly the sooner you get to them the more effective your work will be okay yeah cuz i just you know want to see us you know run effectively and do the job and and and making sure we take care of responsibility and we can provide you with resources with protocols with draft protocols for you to look at and it needs to be your own but we can give you all sorts of examples so that way you can use that to get get the work moving and and believe it or not tonight is the first major step
124and the most important step looking at the findings looking at the recommendations having your clarifying questions that you're having you're going through this is the big this is one of the biggest parts of it all right thank you and it's also a part of um the first step in creating a more unified team trusty co um so i only have one more question of just regarding the questions again um will the interview ever incorporate questions about the basic understanding of the roles and responsibilities for student trustees ever um or is that still up to the board in what work are you talking about so just just um like will they ever be questioned or just have any um like interview questions about how student trustees should work um in the board like what can we
125do what can we not do um just more development on that and the bylaws especially um is there going to be any sort of like possibility of doing that in the future i think that part of the action plan moving forward which we're going to talk about would address that i think we mentioned earlier that there's some content in the governance handbook that it certainly addresses the question you just post and we would hope your voice would be heard in that and i think i heard you say jim a little bit ago that it would be advantageous to tap into some of the previous um student trustees as well so that way you have kind of some some history of of um your peers who have served in that capacity because it is really helpful
126to be able to hear specifically what the thoughts are from the student trustees absolutely and then would um students in our district also have a say um or just have like the ability to suggest what student trustees could do for as representatives i will um students in general who might not have the position um you know but are affected like will they ever have a say or possibly be able to voice their opinions on what we should be able to do i think that one you know i think one of the most important responsibilities and i don't know if this is clear or not for student board members is to do exactly what you just said is tap into the voices of their fellow students and set up processes to make that happen and sometimes
127i've seen that that's a little weak part if if the if the student trustees don't understand maybe their responsibility to gather information from their fellow students and how that can be best done and i think this the district can help in that regard but i i think that's a frankly i think that's an area where you all take the lead and figure ways to do that all right thank you thank all my questions thanks everybody board members um we've gone around twice um does anybody have any final questions i'm looking down the road mr christian um folks online co [Music] smith [Music] i do have a question mr phillips um would you like me to go now president phillips okay my question is when we talk about the 12-month board calendar are you talking about
128going from december to december because in december we elect uh newborn leader newborn leadership or are you talking about going from august to july or to june july 1st to june 30. okay thank you that's that's the school year that's the budget year and it should be aligned to that okay thank you very much okay um superintendent hearst i think that exhausts the questions from the board okay thank you very much sir that's all we have to present is there a board discussion let me just ask a clarifying question really quickly for context this is on for an action item [Music] what is it do you want to do you want a motion to approve all of these recommendations do you want i heard something about receiving a report which is different from approving the
129recommendations what dr hearst what is it that you you want us to do legal leadership associates was asking for the board to approve move forward and accept their recommendations and then develop an action plan okay so board i am asking for a motion i'm going to use the word adopt because i think that's what i'm hearing i'm asking for a motion to adopt the recommendation and to [Music] i'm gonna ask one more clarifying question this um action plan um i would like to put a time on it is there a time that you guys are suggesting that the action plan is brought back to the board for approval we were hoping that tonight you could at least on each of the if you if you adopt the recommendations uh then we would assume that follows
130up with some designation of assignments on who's going to who's going to do what to get this moving forward and we were hoping that there was at least one action on each recommendation so it would be to adopt the recommendations and uh then to identify the specific actions the board is ready to move forward on we think you could do that tonight if you want okay i'm trying to figure out how to structure the motion right so i'm trying to ask the board for emotion so my motion that i'm asking for is to adopt the recommendations uh one quick suggestion would be that maybe we can ask dr hurst if he has a timeline that he would suggest because he would ultimately have to bring us the recommendations for implementation right um so maybe dr
131hurst has a thought on that timeline and then we can go with if we all agree we can go with that timeline dr hearst absolutely so uh last schedule board meeting i presented a timeline to the board at that time and i was talking about the strategic planning process we have actually started um having these conversations with our team now that we're back from the break and then i shared with you those conversations around the process will continue november end of november through december and we're starting the mission vision core values and the the statement anti-racism statement that's all part of the strategic planning process which also includes finalizing the equity audit looking at the goal goals and getting closure on the goals that takes us from january to february if you also remember i
132talked about what that would look like with area one two three four and five and doing three rounds maybe more for each and that takes us from january to february to the beginning of march that also includes conversations about our graduate profile that includes community conversations and then also the scorecard which incorporates also our goals and bringing that back to the board also so all that will take us to march so if you look at the strategic planning process what i share with the board we'll be finished with the strategic plan which is a collaborative community process by march time frame and if we're doing the 12-month calendar right after that that will be at the end of march for the 12-month calendar so i would say strategic plan beginning of march 12-month calendar toward
133the end of the march i would i would add to that that the governance handbook should start yesterday can i make a suggestion um and trust me right clear hi i'd just like to make a clarification that maybe i'm splitting hairs here but i'd like to clarify the difference between adopting and accepting i think i think that we should be accepting this and then adopting a plan that's based on this and maybe that's a little micro but i think there are some differences um in in those two words i mean there are there are differences and so um thank you um in accepting it we're not really doing anything right so this is how i see it so like for example when we get an audit report from the financial auditors right we accept the
134report we don't really do anything it's it's basically like we're receiving it um there are particular things on here that require some kind of action other than us just receiving it which is why i'm suggesting are using the language of dot but if folks are not comfortable with that that's that's fine but i just think there is a difference mr gonzalez one suggestion would be that we accept the audit and then maybe we move forward with the handbook committee handbook sorry the uh the governance committee um it sounds like there's already even volunteers um and then the rest maybe we can ask the superintendent to bring us a suggestion in january uh with action items on the rest of the recommendations that'll be one suggestion but if there are others definitely open and just for
135the record i wasn't hitting mr phillips i would he had a spider and try to take it off of him [Laughter] it's so kind yeah yeah see that's just what we were talking about that kind of contacted part of slapping your other board members around not good to meet you helping each other out i think what we need is a motion yes so is there a motion to [Music] accept the uh audit and [Music] to accept the audio starting i'll make a motion to accept the audit is there a second second lord is there any discussion okay we'll start in the same order thank you um first i just want to thank jim sandy and juan for your work with us i spent quite a few hours with sandy myself so i know all of
136you put in quite a bit of work with us so i just want to appreciate that um and i want to appreciate all my colleagues for being open to us to becoming better together because i agree i think that we can always do some growing um i appreciate all the recommendations i of course want it to be done correctly which is why you know i really a lot of this work's going to fall on the superintendent so uh he already has quite a bit so i want to make sure and be conscious of his schedule um i um would definitely love to see a little a few more retreats in the spring so that we can get to know each other a little bit more and understand a little bit more of where we're coming
137from and um discuss this work deeper and then you know i heard from trustee reckler that she's open to being a committee i heard maybe trustee smith foltz was open to be in the committee i am totally open with anyone serving on that and not being me so i want to say if it's you two thanks for volunteering um and last thing i had one more thing i apologize i really like this idea of structurally structuring a calendar i think that it would really benefit us in all the areas that i think that for me are where we're lacking so i really wanted to appreciate that and the parliamentarian idea to get us back on track so yes i'm open to all these recommendations just want to say thanks to everybody being open so i
138guess the next part of this for me is how does this get done and by and by and by who so just looking at this list let's just take you know the role of the board chair we've been over it twice i believe in governance sessions i feel very comfortable myself in the role of the chair i've read the bylaws so would everybody go through that training who could opt into that training what resources could they use to get trained is it csba is there a book is there like how can you know how can we what's the part of that action plan so that's that's one thing i'm thinking about um [Music] another thing that i'm thinking about is um [Music] so coming back to the the governance handbook where i where i do
139have to express some frustration around that i mean i could have started this on january 1st of this year and you know waited for the new superintendent to come on board waited for an equity analysis where we got maybe a two minute slide i don't know if there's more in the in the written report but it feels to me and i and i you know i i own some of that but maybe i waited for something i thought was gonna happen instead of just marching into it and moving it forward at least agendizing it for a discussion or whatever so you know i'm not going to wait anymore and i feel i feel that time was lost and i feel unfortunately that i kind of was waiting for stuff which is not my normal way
140of doing stuff so you know i feel kind of bad about that um some other things is you know like for a parliamentarian so who would do this there are there's a california state association the paler parliamentarians there's a national association of parliamentarians there's american instituted parliamentarians there's lots of parliamentarians who owns that to make the calls find out what they're about uh to to come and step in is there training on rosenberg's rules of order uh you know that's out there that people can attend those sessions so where i'm really going is you know what who owns the action plan um and and how does that get done so that's just a big to do question and you can answer it now or if we're just in discussion that's it i think the superintendent
141has a major role to play in this uh and particularly like securing the parliamentarian uh there is a i'm back to you mr phillips i believe there uh there is a motion made to by dimitrial and i'm not sure that got a second and then the discussion so i'm just trying to follow the normal chain on this there was a motion to accept the report christian christian trustee christian second did it easy second so then so the discussion part is on that motion to accept the the governance audit is that that's correct that's what we are supposed to be discussing right now okay and then the second part is the action plan to move forward just i just want to be sure okay we just want to we just want to talk about the action
142plan and then there will be another motion to put together a list or how to proceed with there would be a motion on the action plan okay you know to deal with the motion on accepting the recommendations as one motion the second would be to adopt a motion uh have a motion to identify an action plan which would include the following trustee gonzalez hoy had suggested um that superintendent hearst come back with um a draft plan so that way the items that trustee reckler mentioned can be considered so that way it's actionable these recommendations need to be put into an actionable form so that way the board can discuss that next level the next step because there's there are some things that need to move quickly like the the governance handbook that's going to have
143the protocols in there okay thank you so for my discussion item i agree with trustee gonzalez toy i agree that we accept we accept this we accept the findings right i also think that we should like trustee gonzalez hoy said we should move the item about working on the governance handbook so that can be done immediately and then we come back and we have more in-depth conversation about these other recommendations i don't suggest taking the recommendations tonight in totality i i suggest that we accept this that we got it we saw it we talked about it and then our superintendent is going to come back with more how it fits directly with our district and what we're doing but i do agree that we need to move on the governance handbook so with that i
144will be voting yes for trustee gonzalez hoy's motion with that understanding that i'm accepting this because we saw it i'm accepting that we've seen it and i would like us to move now and also the superintendent to be able to move with the strategic plan because he that's a calendar that's he already has a timeline for that so for him to be able to move with the strategic plan and for the board to be able to move for the subcommittee of the governance handbook those are the two things that i would like to the friendly amendment trustee gonzalezoi that's what i would like to add is the superintendent also moving that's it just i feel like we've done motions before and i feel like we're starting to act like we haven't um so and i
145don't know if it's because we've been talked about in some ways but we we do know a little bit about what we're doing um so just my recommendation would be that we do the motion that you made about accepting and then when we're done with that the governance handbook i'll just ask if there are some people who want to volunteer and then we'll appoint those people to an ad hoc committee to update the governance handbook okay um so the next person uh talking i think is trustee trustee smith folds were you done you're done i think that what i was going to add was that friendly amendment about it do we have to include the superintendent moving forward with the strategic plan or is that already assumed because he was already doing that so if
146that's already assumed because he's doing that then there's no need for my friendly amendment i will accept the motion as it's stated by trustee gonzalez hoy thank you um and yes he's moving forward with that the rest of the equity audit and strategic plan that doesn't change trustee smith folds i mean trustee i'm looking at you and i'm saying trustee smith trustee christian yes i'm i'm good i'm gonna say just push forward move forward so we can you know take care of business okay thank you sir um trustee ko yeah i would do the same just um vote yes as well to move forward okay thank you um so i don't have any comments on this part so board we're going to vote and the motion is to accept the governance board governance audit gonzales
147for yes correctly yes sorry my mouse was not connected trustee smith flows yes christine yes oh yes phillips yes okay so that motion carries now i'm just going to ask board are there any board members that would like to volunteer to serve on an ad hoc committee and i just want to say what ad hoc means it means it's temporary for something specific so it means that it is specifically to update the governance handbook and then when that work is done it it goes away that's what it automatically you don't have to vote for it to go away that's what an ad hoc committee is so um are there any volunteers to serve on the ad hoc committee to update the governance handbook do you want us just to scream out or are you going
148to go around um we'll just go in or people can say whether they want to do it mr gonzalez i would love to volunteer my colleagues i'll leave it there thank you trustee reichler uh if nobody else wants to do it i would do it okay it's my fault i'll do it if somebody else wants to do it i want to do it so i i i would love to do it thank you and i'll go the same thing because i'm in the learning process so it's going to enhance me more so so you're saying you want to do it yeah okay so we have and okay so we have two or three people who want to do it that's fine christian and smithfolds can do it okay so um normally what we do for
149these committees when we're all here is that the board president appoints and then the board basically approves so i am asking for approval to appoint um smithfolds and christian to an ad hoc committee to update the governance handbook so moved second okay it was moved by gonzalez hoy and it was seconded by smithfold ford is there any discussion all right yes sir thank you i just i wanted to ask about what's the question but i guess a comment if uh how do we include student trustees in that process um i i actually don't really know the rule behind that i know rosenberg's rules pretty well but i'm not sure how that functions um and i've would love to have their voice included and especially when discussing the student trustees so how would how would that
150happen are they allowed to have three are the student trustees not counted in that um that would not be a violation of the brown act oh okay then could i make an amendment to my motion and say trustee christian and smith folds and student trustees when necessary i don't know who seconded my motion but i did can can we just ask them to invite the student trustees to because it's a board committee can we just ask them to invite the student trustees and their work to come and sit with them and that's a great suggestion trust these myths interesting question if you don't wouldn't mind inviting them that would be my ass if that's okay thank you good suggestions okay thank you um is there any more discussion okay so seeing them boy let's fall
151don't tell us oh yes regular yes smith falls yes christian yes oh yes phillips yes so that motion carries as well um dr hearst we have done two different things um we have accepted the audit um we have now um installed a ad hoc committee to update the governance handbook is there any other um action that you want us or that leadership wants us i see hand going up for mr brown to take tonight i have no other action unless mr brown has something within the recommendation was the uh that the superintendent developed a plan for stakeholder securing stakeholder input there was not a timeline to that or anything but we think that that if you accepted the recommendations our assumption would be that's on his plate and at a time to be determined uh
152the discussion about the parliamentarian um that miss trustee reckler had some suggestions maybe she and the superintendent could work together on that to come back with a recommendation for the board i don't think these require action it's just uh just so that some responsibility is out there for following up on some of these recommendations and i don't know juan or sandy are there any others that you would pick out at this point um the discussion of a coach for every uh board member given that we understand that there's grant funding to be able to fund that that may be something that uh that the board doesn't have to this doesn't mean that everybody's going to be assigned a coach tomorrow but that that particular recommendation is um discussed and voted on so that way action
153can be taken steps can be discussed okay so i mean i did ask earlier the board wanted to adopt these recommendations tonight and they were pretty clear that they did not want to do that um that they wanted to bring them back um so you know um i don't know what to say about that they were they were pretty clear i think so uh but and then dr hurst also um talked about the strategic plan and how he's moving along so um i get it you're saying that you don't want the rest of it to be lost um i i totally understand what you're saying so um ford i i think that we based on what i'm hearing from you all have done our work for this evening [Music] i want to thank you all
154at leadership uh for your work that you spent not just on this process but really starting with this board the superintendent process you have been very helpful and you have been very thoughtful and i just want to say thank you on behalf of everyone for that work and we do really appreciate you and i don't think that um this work will be lost um i don't so and i hope that it is not thank you thank you thank you so can i make yes sir could i make a quick request to irene irene uh uh this is only because a long time ago in a galaxy far away i used to have almost the same color hair that you do and i love it yeah but i would like to brainstorm some ideas about student
155rep role sometime with you and uh dr herzog has my contact information so maybe that'd be fun to chat about that a little bit sometime thank you um hello sorry mr phillips we're cutting you off um i'll also be able to attach um the other student trustee um trujillo to make sure that if that's okay with you um that we could also discuss but thank you sure sure we'd like to just um express again to you our sincerest commitment to you and our deepest gratitude for the commitment that you have all demonstrated to really work hard to get better and better at being a highly effective governance team because of all these children entrusted to you that you care deeply about we appreciate being a part of this and chris maybe you and i could
156connect tomorrow the next day and just discuss next steps and all that thanks thank you everybody from from us thank you thank you again and to all three of you for your work um board we're gonna go next to item c which is comments uh from the board of education and future agenda items we uh are at 904. um this probably shouldn't be an a meeting that goes until 10 30. um if you can take uh five minutes a piece uh to uh make your comments uh that would be fantastic um i am going to this is much easier and i should have done this already it's just pulled up may we be excused yes sir thank you i'm so sorry for not saying okay thank you good night everyone bye-bye appreciate the work okay
157so five minutes i just pulled up the timer mr gonzalez boy whenever you're ready thank you um i'll try to make it short so we can get out early i just want to thank uh everybody for tonight's discussion i do think it's a step in the right direction i want to thank trustee christian and trustee medford for stepping up to do the adjunct committee i know it's not going to be easy so i just want to say thank you and trustee reckler you seem also excited for it so i want to thank you as well and if you have ideas please i would hope that our colleagues will welcome them as well because you've had obviously more serious thoughts about it um and yes i thought it was very fruitful conversation uh i did want
158to bring up two things um well one i want to thank dr hurst i've been able to visit a lot of schools in the last couple weeks with him and some of my colleagues and um it has been really eye-opening he's been at valley view a lot uh lately um and he's been doing a lot of work there so i want to say thank you we also visited bayview and i do want to say that i think him trustee smith foltz and i left very concerned i got really emotional while we were there because it was rough to be there from someone who worked there not too long ago five six years ago and seeing what the school is now they have really hard working staff a really hard working principal and vice principal and
159um the school needs a lot of help um so i do think that it needs to be a priority school for us five years ago the school was at 640 students they are now at 360 that to me is just i just couldn't even believe it um there was graffiti on the walls there were all these issues facilities got on it right away dr hurst got on it right away sent me kind of like a timeline of actions that they're taking but that school is fast majority free and reduced lunch students of color and and it just made me incredibly sad that it is not just our lowest performing school now but that it lacks so many supports um and it was i got really emotional just they've had a hundred percent turnover of a
160hundred percent in five years um that to me is unheard of i've never heard of a school that's had a hundred percent of staff turnover um that has become the lowest performing school in less than 10 years and has lost half of its enrollment um so to me that's why i got emotional because i felt like it was not on my radar and and um i actually apologize to the principal because i felt like we have not done our work to support that school so i just wanted to put it at the front of our work because it was very impactful to be there and really put things in perspective to me about the conversations that we're having up here right and all the time that we spent but we've gone how many months into
161the school year and i had no idea right so i just want to say thank you talk to her because he's right away on it he's been working day and night but um it was really hard for me to see that i just wanted you all to know uh the three of you who were in there four of you sorry trusty co um that um it was it was hard and i just wanted you guys to kind of know my experience of being there but apart from that i just want to thank you all for for tonight and i look forward to csva with all of you and continue to learn this week so thank you thank you trustee gonzalez hoy trustee reckler whenever you're ready thank you uh i don't have have much welcome
162back everybody and we'll be off to uh csba for uh the rest of the week and looking forward to that and that that's about it thanks so much have a good night so um trustee phillips are you ready so i want to say thank you to everyone i also want to say there are only 14 days 14 school days left in the school year 14. so we have 14 school days left until we are going to be in the school year 2022. so i want to say that because there's a lot to do and we have not put our foot off the gas yet and i don't think we're letting our foot off the gas anytime soon so it's one of those things that when we have these breaks take these breaks make sure that
163you're doing self-care that's for all our teachers our staff our admin our parents our students make sure that self-care is a number one priority in your life i had the pleasure of going to a school today i subbed a couple of classes and i broke up a fight they took me out they took me out it was rough it was a lot my knee hurt had to come home and soak my whole body in a bathtub but i have to say there what i did for just a couple of hours our teachers and our staff do every single day and have been doing it every single day for 180 days just this year and then all of last year if you don't know that experience and it took me a while i had to dust
164off the cobwebs when i went back into the classroom you know little kids were asking me questions had to remember quiet coyote it was a lot it was a lot but it was also a humbling experience because there's nothing like keeping your feet to the ground and being able to really understand the work of our teachers the work of our students the work of our our staff the work of our administrators the work of our yard supervisors the work of our css and csos so i would implore all of my colleagues i know all of you get to the school sites i would encourage you to continue to get to the school sites because it keeps us humble in the work of course we all coordinate with the superintendent on those sites but it keeps
165us humbled in the work um so i want to thank you thank you to the students that reminded me that i'm still able to teach about subjects and verbs which i did fantastically um the future agenda items that i would have to know or i would like to put on the um agenda dr hearst it says it's the same list but i just want to go over it for continuity the adult school the trade school opportunities period poverty standing reports student standing reports dress code numerical literacy and overall literacy gaps and strategies the equity statement and that enforcement public comment revision of the bylaws and governance handbook i can take that one off we have done that i am very excited to take that off the future agenda items because we have a subcommittee thank
166you trustee christian preschool and tka's transition program includes inclusion the virtual school remote working report cards are coming up again i still want to make sure that we are giving teachers the time and the space and the grace to be able to grade those and having a clear conversation about what a narrative report card is vaccine implementation mental and emotional health of all of our students and educators making sure that just an update that we have all of the drinking water and the refillable stations and students are being able to use that and staff is being able to use that the senior programs we come up with uh the funding for the rest of the year but we need to talk about permanent funding i think that is part of what we need to discuss
167um the site standards the site standard safety at all schools doorbells cameras training etc the teacher at administration burnout period subbing traffic and working with the city on our sites the 711 committee cboc applications survey to parents about the intentions in january and the clear safety policies around fundraising which we talked about last time once again i want to say thank you to everyone thank you to the students thank you to the little girl that took me out in the fight and let me know that i have to do a little bit more exercise that's it i'm working out now i'm gonna start lifting weights um i appreciate everyone please have a great night be safe and remember 14 days left and then we're into a new year so take care of yourself and take
168care of the teachers the students the admin and everyone that touches our students that's it thank you ma'am mr christian whenever you're ready yes thank you thank you i just want to say to uh staff um classified and certificated staff you know everybody has been working hard and diligently and i just want to congratulate everybody on their hard work um up to this point here um and so we still have a lot to do um i just want to say you know right before the break uh thanksgiving that did some visits site visits uh i went to lincoln elementary and was able to participate in what they had was a turkey trot um over at lincoln elementary it was it was kind of funny you know seeing them out there everybody all staff kids everybody's
169out there having a good time and so um um so i'll definitely be going back to lincoln uh doing uh visits and then also king elementary i went to king and checked on king and they're doing much better they have a program over there um i believe it's the peacekeepers um that are working diligently with the kids over there to bring resolutions to conflicts and so forth um but yes we just have a lot to do um and i just wanted to say you know to everybody you know you know keep up the good work and and so forth and uh also i just wanted to say this we need to start highlighting you know our activities what goes on at our school sites all of our school sites have different activities our high schools
170and so forth and we just need to start highlighting the different functions so the community would know what's going on um and how to uh be able to participate uh in these activities so um and uh that's it and everybody have a good evening thank you sir trusty co yeah so um i'll try my best to keep it short as well um just to respect everyone's time um but i am very happy that we did have this audit report um i definitely when i asked some of my questions i was left a little confused or not necessarily confused but maybe more disappointed um just because you know i believe that some trustees should you know have more of a say or if not more of a i guess responsibility and like what the bylaws should
171be for them um i know that when they were discussing they said something along the lines of you know student trustees should know um you know their responsibilities very clearly um and we should be able to like understand our roles and responsibilities but i know that when i came in and trustee trujillo we both were kind of blindsided we didn't really know much about responsibilities and we were left always asking questions of whether or not we could do something or say something so i would ask that in the future because i know that i think my term will end soon um that you know the future trustees or student trustees will be able to um understand their roles more clearly and then as for you know i hear that trustee gonzalez hoy christian i'm sure
172everyone else is also visiting school sites i know that trustee trujillo and i have also requested to be able to at least visit some school sites um with the superintendent or just with other trustees i know that you know we would also have to organize that but i would just like to be able to visit school sites and see um you know how conditions are like at certain schools right because when trustee gonzalez hoy mentioned um you know the elementary school that he visited i know that some of my friends went to that school and so i think it would be interesting for me to at least visit some schools and trustee trujillo would also like to do that um and yeah that would just be something that i would like to be able to
173do i'm not sure if that would be possible um but yeah that is just one thing that i thought was interesting and you know i would love to be able to visit um but yeah that's all i'd like to say have a good evening thank you thank you very much and it's my turn i want to take a moment to acknowledge that things have not always been pretty um and this is real life though so things are not always going to be pretty but i think that sometimes the fact that it's not always pretty sometimes takes away from the amount of work this board has actually done over the last year um this is my fifth year on the board and we've probably had two years worth of meetings literally within one year um and
174then those meetings were not just meetings for meeting safe um pretty much every time we get together because of the times that we're in and the state of things not just in the world but in our district as well we are constantly and repeatedly taking on uh heavy topics uh and working through them so even though things are not always pretty as we would like them to be and even though that sometimes i think has the unintended consequence of distracting people um and people not necessarily being able to focus on what's really happening i just want to talk very briefly about some of the things that have happened uh during this year because regardless of the um the narrative that all that happens on this board is that people fight and disagree and don't get
175any work done um i don't really think that that is true there are disagreements uh and sometimes again they have not been prayed at all pretty at all but a lot of work has happened so here's a list of some things that have happened this year uh one we actually have a positive budget certification which we did not have that happened this year um we had a series of study sessions where literally experts from across the country uh participated in informing on our community about code and quite frankly i think those study sessions were some of the most informative study sessions uh around the entire bay area if not the most informative ones we work directly with the county to secure covet 19 vaccine for school district staff we rallied together and partially reopened our
176schools in the spring despite going almost a year without really doing a lot of planning to actually do that it was a herculean task but it happened we passed really comprehensive charter school reform as far as our policies are concerned in this district we had summer school in this district and it was really creative because i really looked at it like it was really the first summer camp uh that a majority of our children were actually able to attend um we fully reopened our schools in the fall and it's not just that we reopened them in the fall but we did it safely in the spring and we did it safely in the fall that doesn't mean that there were not any hiccups along the way but the fact is that we did it in
177addition to that we authorized some new programs including arts and trades we actually started the process to rebuild lake elementary school richmond high school and kennedy high school um and these are projects that folks have been waiting for for literally decades um but it happened and it's happening with this board uh in addition to that um we and i know some people don't like this but we passed uh a set of covet 19 mandates uh to actually keep our community safe uh and we're actually conducting we always talk about money issues in this district but we're actually conducting a comprehensive system-wide audit to actually improve our delivery of services to our children and families and you just saw one leg of that tonight so um i could keep going but i only have five minutes
178there has been a tremendous amount of work that has been done uh by this board despite the hype and despite the disagreements and i really don't want that to get lost uh because it really happened and we now get out of time we get out of our meetings on time which people said couldn't happen either so with that i am done uh making my comments for this evening and i want to announce that the next scheduled board of education meeting is december 8th so with that uh you all have a blessed evening thank you for your time and good night you