WCCUSD Board of Education Meeting - July 15, 2020

001hi everyone good evening hey hi hi i'm superintendent duffy hi everybody howdy hi trustee bunnis trusty awesome okay so let's get started as trustee cuevas and trustee phillips join us um good evening everyone and welcome i would like to call to order the july 15 2020 regular meeting of the west country costume high school district board of education um thank you for joining us this evening i hope everyone is joining us tonight doing well at home and that their families are in good health and staying as safe as possible too we continue to meet the azum for all district and board meetings as authorized by the governors emerges the executive order issued on march 17 2020 the west country garcia high school district board of education will conduct board meetings via video conference and teleconference

002until further notice um before we recess to closed session i would like to remind the community that to be called to share their public comment they need to either raise their hand on the zoomap or press asterisk 9 of tuning in via phone via phone call followed by asterisk 6 to unmute once your name is called thank you everyone do we have any public comment before we uh go to closed session there is no public comment at this time thank you mr walton great so then we're going to recess to close session and we'll be back for open session at 6 30. thank you trustee cuevas is present superintendent duffy we need one third board member to join us so we can begin the meeting tracy panas has joined us and trustee lauda will be

003joining us shortly so that's trustee phillips okay let's get started good evening everybody welcome to our meeting i would like to call to order the july 15 2020 regular meeting of the west contra costa unified school district board of education thank you for joining us this evening please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you again thank you for joining us tonight and i hope that everybody who's joining us for a meeting is doing well and that their families are in good health and staying as safe as possible too we continue to media zoom for all district and board meetings as authorized by

004the governor's emergency executive order issued on march 17 2020 the west contra costa unified school district board of education will conduct board meetings via video conference until further notice again welcome and thank you for joining us this evening we continue to work diligently with a focus on serving students and families and i want to sincerely thank students families and staff for working collaboratively and tirelessly to create a framework on which to build an educational plan for the fall term i also want to thank every community member that tuned in and participated in the town hall on friday and offer their feedback via the thought exchange app thank you to all wcco students families and employees and community members for how you have continued to support each other during this time thank you to everyone working

005with urgency to ensure that children in our communities are safe and healthy during the summer months and thank you to each staff and volunteer distributing meals at school and community sites i would like to share some basic instructions regarding how we're going to use zoom today and involve members of the public we will have light public common via zoom this may result in some uncomfortable situations so we hope you will bear with us as we navigate issues that may come up it is our hope for members of the public to be able to participate and share their public comment with a board in a space conducive to a respectful public forum to all during the during the meeting all board members and the superintendent will be on video throughout the board meeting staff members are

006also present and will be on video when they present members of the public will not be on video and will be muted throughout the meeting unless they have raised their hand for public comment in order to comment on an agenda item at tonight's meeting members of the public should raise their hand by pressing the raise your hand button on the zoom app or by pressing asterisk 9 by telephone when the board reaches the item on which you want to comment if you are calling in with your phone when your name is called press star or asterisk 6 to unmute your phone when we get to the item a member of district staff will call your name comments will be restricted to the amount of time allocated by board policy your hand must be raised before

007the first public comment is read on an agenda item after the first comment is read there will be no additional public comments accepted in order to be recognized to speak you must be using a first and last name thank you now we'll share these same instructions in spanish can we please have rocco thank you yes president hernandez jarvis president trustee laura present trustee panis trustee cuevas here trustee phillips president trustee uh student is our student trustee vazquez zamala with us tonight president welcome um thank you welcome trustee phillips and trustee uh sun trusty vasquez thank you mr duffy uh mr duffy do we have a report of closed session we do have a report out of closed session tonight in closed session the board took action to appoint the following principles 4-0 with mr phillips

008absent and daley mallard as the new principal of highland elementary school and david ranch as the new principal of madera elementary school congratulations to those two leaders and we look forward to working with you that is the report out of closed session thank you superintendent duffy and our next item is review of number of requests to address the board for comment on individual agenda items since we're operating uh virtually and having comments via zoom we generally don't know the number of comments and who's going to be commenting on what but mr watson i wanted to check with you quickly if we have any public comments send via email or any members of the community who have expressed interest in commenting on specific items i do know that we have one item uh from don gazney

009he would like to give his committee report this evening great thank you the next item is agenda review and adoption board members is there a motion to adopt the agenda as is or are there any suggestions or changes to be made obviously um i'd like to pull c2 c4 and c5 and mr jeffrey are we going to pull f4 we're going to pull f4 and i'd also like to recommend that the reopening item be placed immediately after public comment so we have a couple of guests uh for that also thank you president hernandez trustee phillips i would like to pull uh c11 and c12 c12 okay so the items pulled c2 c4 c5 c11 c12 and f4 and with a change of um moving the reopening presentation to immediately after public comment is there a

010motion for that so moved by trustee pandas second that seconded by trustee lada can we please have a vote beginning with our student trustee oh yes yes lara yes yes and then this drive is yes motion passes unanimously to adopt the agenda with the changes thank you board our next item is the approval of minutes two sets one from june 24 2020 and the other from june 30th 2020. are there any corrections or clarification board members would like to make at this time uh yes president hernandez jarvis so item uh f1 um and i believe this is from the june 10th uh minutes um where we were talk or i was talking about uh county board of education hearing in manzanita in the sofa um i just want to add uh the word alleged uh

011to those minutes uh before the uh comment about the violations uh not not the violations the comment around um charter schools not um serving children with special needs so it should say something like allegedly not doing that and trustee phillips or clarification did you say for the june 24th or june 30th i mean uh meeting minutes for the june 20 i think it was june i thought it was june 10th but i mean i could go back and because it's item f1 on june 10th so maybe it was the 24th that um i got them backwards but i think it was the 10th okay and i don't think um let's see so are you so you're talking about it in reference to the to the june 24th minutes two comments that you made there or

012the the actual june 10 set of minutes so no the comments were in regard to the selfa uh item and i think that was on june 10th but i don't have the minutes in front of me right now okay so then jarvis the sofa item is f1 on june 24th 24th okay thank you for clarifying i'm gonna look at it right now really quick okay so let me let me know that down thank you and you said f1 yes f1 trustee pandas thank you thank you trustee pandas jesse phillips um any other changes for the june 24th minutes is there a motion to just approve those just very quickly um i was present for some of the meeting before i had to leave for a family emergency on i believe the 20 okay it's there

013um i just thought i had stayed longer than what's identified in the minutes it has me absent starting on c i can't remember anymore but i just remember it was 10 o'clock at night so can we just have an additional note in there after item since it looks like it has me not present after the last item that i was present so um jesse says i voted yes on some of the sea items these were the extra items i guess um can we just actually have my absence identified within like when i had to excuse myself after what item it was we can do that we can go back to to look at the recording and okay and do that so identify the absence after the last item that you were present for 24th set

014of minutes as well correct yeah i know i remember we didn't get through much it was a very long meeting but i certainly want to identify uh the time that i actually exited for a family emergency yes thank you thank you are there any other changes and notifications to the set of minutes i'll mostly in june 24 minutes as amended motion made by trusty pandas secondary trustee cuevas trusty ladder i think i heard trusty cuevas before okay so can we please take a vote beginning with the student trustee yes whoops yes drive this yes motion passes unanimously to approve the june 24th minutes with the amendments uh to include the words allegedly not in the comments around uh the in the comments around charter schools and the special education services that trustee phillips made and

015to identify the absence of trustee club um after the last item that okay madam chair i just realized that it's it's in there it was just buried in the text that i i just whizzed by it because it's just one sentence but it's in there miss close excuse yourself in the meeting for the evening at 10 05 pm so we can strike that part of the motion thank you for noting that okay so the june 30 june 30th minutes are there any clarifications or corrections to be made by trustees it seems like there are none if is there a motion to approve that set of june 30th minutes so must move by trust upon us i second that motion can we please have a vote beginning with the student trustee yes lara yes oops yes

016hernandez jarvis yes motion passes synonymously to adopt the june 30th 2020 minutes as they are thank you board up next we have wccsd public comment so at this time um just reminding the public if if you want to make a comment here for something that's not on the agenda make sure that you raise your hand by pressing asterisk nine um on your phone if you're connected via phone call or by clicking on the raise your hand button in the app president hernandez jarvis we currently have five members of the public who would like to speak i would remind the member of the public with the name fuentes that we will not call on any member who does not have a first and last name so if you would like to speak on this item please

017log out and log back yet immediately thank you thank you mr walton and since we have five right now um since it's less than 10 it's three minutes per speaker and then we can please have the clock that would be great thank you the first uh speaker is jamila folds miss faults good evening mr walton i don't know if i'm uh need to speak at this time or um furthering the agenda may i ask you a question are you going on the agenda does it have about the town hall the district town hall meeting that took place on july 10th uh it does not have a there is an item about the return to school but there's not an item about the town hall specifically okay i think i i think it may be prudent

018for me to speak during that one instead of this one is that okay yes ma'am it is thank you very much the next public speaker is willie robinson mr robinson yes good evening president hernandez jarvis board members and superintendent i am want to address the matter as it relates to the resolution that was passed i don't know the number of it but i did submit to the board through the president a letter from the branch and it was regarding the matter of school safety and in listening to that meeting that evening i had reflections and we did address it and sent through a letter i could read the letter at this time and i pro and i will unless there's some objections okay so the letter reads and it's to the stephanie hernandez javis board

019president and the as board president and to the ford members and superintendent it says the richmond branch of the national association for the advancement of colored people applauds the west contra costa unified school district for its increase of 1.5 million to the budget category practice for african american student support and services pass the nacp looks forward to the additional increase to the past budget to match the public commitment made by the board of education nevertheless the naacp still expects the west country class unified school district to keep our children and grandchildren safe while they are at school referring transferring the school resource officer's budget to the past budget does not relieve this west country cluster unified school district of its responsibility the naacp fully expect the west country classic unified school district to develop and

020implement a comprehensive and effective safety plan to keep all students and staff safe before schools reopen sincerely submitted by the president willie robinson thank you and i would like make sure that this enters into this record of the board thank you mr robinson and thank you for reading um the letter and i do want to apologize for not having uh read it in advance at another one of the board meetings during public comments so thank you again and we will work in collaboration to to make sure that we do have all the safety measures and the safety plan in place now thank you the next public speakers tj warfield ms warfield hello me again gotta say i'm rather disappointed that i have to come to you again about another california education code being violated specifically

021around gender equity um i sent an email um to the director of equity as well as ccing tom panas and you stephanie and i forgot to see you mr duffy but this weekend the the summer uh courses were published and there's a class of mr business kid which um the overall class was renamed to just business kid but all of the the um supporting materials and the the workbook and the book say mr business kid which um just reinforces the the gender stereotypes and the california ed code was it five one five hundred forbidding instruction that promotes or reinforces gender stereotypes mr business kid tells boys that boys should be in the business world and no one else should girls don't belong there it reinforces with girls that they don't belong in the business worlds

022and they can never expect to you know run a business and own a business themselves so i'm extremely disappointed that someone in the district thought that this was a good curriculum to for the district to promote out of all of the other similar types of curriculums out there that they chose mr business kid um and especially after last week that was you know that the the dei conversations continued that it just the district you need to get your stuff together this is getting ridiculous thank you thank you for bringing it to our attention the the next public speaker is leslie reckler good evening everyone can you hear me yes we can great thank you good evening to everyone my name is leslie reckler and tonight i announce my candidacy for the west contra costa unified

023school district school board area 5. i'm a parent with kids enrolled and graduated from wcc usd schools i believe parents should guide the education of our children working together with teachers and administrators we can achieve great outcomes for our kids many of you know me as a long time district volunteer and fierce advocate for parent equity i was the president of the bayside council of ptas guiding parents in their to school and student advocacy i'm secretary of the gl caps committee and along with the executive board and our wonderful members created a collaborative and organized team that is getting results i've been involved in district policy work and helped to write resolution 49-1718 establishment of a positive school climate which eliminated willful defiance suspensions and established practices to improve campus conditions for our most vulnerable

024students i've secured resources for this district as well most recently i was an argument signer on measure r and helped secure 575 million dollars so that we can continue to rebuild our schools i was part of the hewlett foundation deeper learning grant writing writing team that won 1.2 million dollars for our district so that we can continue to innovate our teaching and learning practices reaching those furthest from opportunity additionally i have 20 years of professional expertise in transparent responsible fiscal management i am well known and trusted by parents district staff teachers and principals the stakes for this district have never been higher the next few years are going to be tough and leadership matters we need to work together to ensure that every child has an equitable safe healthy educational experience during this unprecedented time

025and that all of our schools are equipped to provide each and every student with the support they need we are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy and suffer from a crisis of lack of public trust in the district's fiscal management this is a time for leadership that brings our teachers families students and communities together a time for fresh ideas and solutions i am so honored and humbled to be endorsed by the united teachers of richmond the west county labor coalition teamsters 856 janet abelson mayor of el cerrito sitting board member consuela lara and many others fresh energy new ideas collaborative leadership visit my website leslie for wcc usd to learn more parent driven student focused thank you and good night thank you the next public speakers ever fuentes and at this point i will not

026uh we will not accept any more raised hands for public comment uh everett fuentes yes hi my name is edward i am uh thankful for the platform you guys have provided me today um i'm a parent of a elementary school student at washington elementary and i've been so far attending the last board meetings in regards to the opening of schools for this fall uh and i've you know heard a lot about the hybrid system and a lot of data in regards to um kids and and uh and the thoughts of parents and the confusions and and the uh the worries that we parents have but one thing i i haven't heard the board talk about at all are um basically how in the world are we going to keep our schools clean and sanitized um

027and i i asked this this question to the board because even before covid19 started and we knew about it my son's school had hygiene problems we brought this to the attention of the principal um at that point in time and it took maybe a month before something was done and even after that particular um task was put in place we literally saw that it couldn't be a hundred percent effective um again i've heard a lot of a lot of other um worries about books and virtual classes and things like that but with the kids that have to go to school and be present with teachers i think it's very important for the board to highlight exactly what their plan is in regards to that the other thing that i want to bring to your attention

028as well is that there's a lot of talk right now about kids not being vulnerable to this disease and i completely agree with that but i think we've known that from the very beginning when this came out that kids were not as vulnerable as older adults and the elderly um and that's in right now i think that's the school board is missing the point as far as opening up so early when numbers are going backwards instead of improving um we all know again like i said that the kids are not vulnerable but it is from kids to parents to the elderly that it spreads um and so with that said i'd like the board to really really consider showing parents what the plan is in place to show consistently show that schools are being kept

029clean with the limited staff that we have already had and how we can move forward from here thank you mr walton is there another speaker sorry that's my my apologies i was on mute um the last public comment is don ghazny um and mr ghazni if you can go ahead and unmute thank you thank you very much i apologize for this and please correct me if i'm wrong but i don't believe that you were allowed to use public dollars to allow people to campaign uh and this has nothing to do with miss reckler but to have every candidate get up on and use our our publicly funded uh zoom meetings to do their campaigning i always thought that was a contradiction and not allowed again correct me if i'm wrong but if we need to

030check into it and if it's true we need to make sure it doesn't happen again thank you mr gaussian for bringing that to our attention we'll look into it and we'll follow up thank you that concludes public comment thank you mr watson and thank you to each member of the community who shared their inbox with us tonight um since we just wrapped up public comment that leads us to our um next item discussion item one framework to open schools on august 17 2020. great thank you very much good evening uh board members uh community staff um so tonight i'm gonna talk a little bit about our framework to reopen schools um many of our community had a chance to hear about this framework at our town hall on friday and that was attended by over

0313 000 people between the town hall and the facebook live and i apologize for folks who couldn't get into the zoom but were able to get into facebook live so i'm going to share some similar content and items as we shared at that meeting but it's going to be more condensed so there was a slide deck attached to the agenda originally that's very comprehensive and then i will be sharing a number of slides that is is a bit slimmer this evening but mostly taken from that original deck we've also had a request from trustee phillips um to invite um john joyah who represents us on the county board and also a member of county health to share with us and we were able to have that at our friday town hall and really happy to

032see um our representative joya here this evening and thank him for joining us and also louise mcnitt who is from our county health department and so before i go into my presentation i wanted to just welcome them and ask them to just share a little bit for our community a little bit more of what's going on health-wise both in our immediate community of west county the county also and any sort of other relevant pieces of information that we need to know this is information that's helping to shape our decisions i get a chance with the county health team at our county superintendents meetings to listen to them to hear what they're sharing to get timely and pertinent information so it's been a a great partnership all the way through as everyone's trying to answer very

033difficult questions so i am going to turn it over to uh mr joya and miss mcnitt to frame a little bit about what's happening health-wise and then i'll get into our reopening framework thank you superintendent duffy um and good evening board members we will be brief because we know you have a a a long longer presentation and want to hear from the public so i just want to start off uh and thank uh board member phillips for inviting us and thank the whole board for for having us talk during uh these very challenging times we know that you all are under a lot of pressure as are um all the families that in the district so i want to start by just thanking the partnership that contra costa county has with the school district because

034the most recent test site that we opened uh in richmond is at kennedy high school which uh is great it's uh it's being fully utilized our goal has been to increase testing in fact uh the response has been so good that it's and you'll hear this more from the health officer a number of issues uh regarding problems with with the testing kits statewide as well as the large number of people who are seeking to get tested have resulted in delays in getting test results which hopefully will get fixed soon statewide the county has spent over 100 million dollars since the start of the pandemic to sort of address this in many ways from health to social services to renting 600 hotel rooms to move homeless individuals to avoid outbreaks there is a um a alternate

035care facility as some of you know set up in richmond at the ford building at the crane way to handle 250 beds if that is needed and you'll hear more from the health officer that the hospitalizations percent of people testing positive and the number of cases is going in the wrong direction those are all increasing this is happening statewide which is why the county delayed some of the reopening plans that it had and had to reverse a couple of the recent reopenings and the governor has done the same statewide and ultimately it's going to take a while to turn the course on this and the health officer will explain that and so your action to do um uh distance learning is is is a prudent one with regard to protecting the interest of of the

036health and safety of families how you best do that is obviously a determination you're all going to make and one of the things we are also really focused on is the um the large number of cases in the latinx community the latinx community is about um 50 to 55 percent of the cases where we have data county-wide um is in that community and that's double their rate of the population that is also true in richmond and san pablo and i was just on a call today with a number of community leaders and our health department to really work on a strategy with regard to outreach and prevention and care in the latinx community and i know the school district has offered assistance in that area to the extent we may need to communicate with families

037and parents and we appreciate that so i i will stop at that and i'm going to introduce dr louise mcnitt who is our deputy health officer who's going to talk a bit more about where things are headed from a health standpoint hi good evening everyone um [Music] thank you mr joy i think you gave a really good summary already so i'll just highlight a couple of things um i think as you're all aware the cases have been going up in the county as they have been in california and in many other parts of the country um one of the big challenges that presents to us um with the amount of testing resources that we have right now as it makes it longer for people to get test results and the longer it takes for people

038to get test results the more difficult it is to isolate um people who are sick and quarantine the people who've been exposed so like mr joya said it's um i think it makes the decision to do distance learning a very reasonable one because it does hinder our ability to do very aggressive contact tracing and contact investigation if we're having to wait so long for test results to come back um the number of cases has definitely gone up you know since the end of june it luckily it seems to be not increasing very dramatically we've had probably about 50 to 200 cases a day over the past couple of weeks and our percent positivity rate has increased also but is remaining steady about eight percent um really the important thing i think for students and staff

039who are members of your school community is to remember the prevention messages um i think dr rohan um who's probably been with you previously says it very nicely and succinctly space face hands home so remember to maintain six foot distancing cover your face when you're out in public frequent hand washing and staying home when you're sick i'd also like to add to that just based on the types of cases that we've seen recently and the settings where we've seen outbreaks occur is for people to keep in mind that they need to follow these practices anytime they're outside of their home and interacting with people who are not their household members so we've seen situations where um at religious gatherings or gatherings of extended family um that outbreaks have occurred and we really want to reinforce

040that these measure measures need to be followed at all times when you're not when you're outside of your household and i'm considering the long time that it's taking for test results to come back people who are sick need to stay home and if you have family members who are sick and you don't have a test result yet or if you can't get a test to be very careful about you know staying home as much as you can and also following the social distance and face covering guidelines because we we know with this virus that even people who don't have symptoms are able to transmit it so i think those are the main things that i wanted to share but i'm happy to take any questions thank you so much for the overview thank you thank

041you very much uh both mr joya and and dr mcnitt and um we hope to be able to have you back again and as we get closer to school oops sorry my video's not started sorry i didn't realize that um as as we get closer to school to have you back and to continue to you know help inform um what we do so thank you for giving us a little bit of an overview of where we are and i'm going to just dive into our presentation so thank you again thank you okay um so tonight we're going to share more about how we are working to reopen our schools our first day of school is august 17th and that is the date we are working towards so i think we all know this that we

042are not going to be opening school as we know it as you know it and we are going to be launching a distance learning model with a phased start to in-school instruction so that is really what we want the community to be aware of today and now that on august 17th we are starting with a distance learning model and we will begin to phase in students in a phase two when we believe that we are ready and i'll be talking about that through our presentation we do want schools to be open and we really need for schools to be open but we've got to do that safely for all students and employees we know that remote learning distance learning is not an equal substitute and not an equal substitute for many of our most struggling

043students so we really do want our schools open but we just do not believe we can do that yet so what have we been doing so we've been doing a lot of strategic listening from the time we ended school and we obviously did a lot of strategic listening through school and we then moved into a space where we began to conceptualize this framework and that's what we're calling it a framework because the actual day-to-day plan minute to minute plan hasn't been fully fleshed out or finished and i'll be talking about that later but it is a framework and so here we are sharing that framework with the board with the community where we're going and then we spend the next you know four to five weeks filling in a lot of the details and i'll

044talk about that we give our plan our framework to the county with as much detail as we'll have on monday and then we'll continue forward so our aim was to create a framework that was flexible adaptable and nimble enabling us to be able to do online learning knowing that conditions are constantly changing could we come in could we go back home could we come in could we go back home could we have some kids in some kids home flexible adaptable and nimble and that's what we've been working on we have a set of core values and guiding principles that are in front of you and our key is to make decisions that serve to support the safety of students strengthen social emotional health promote equity overcome the digital divide adequately feed our students create a

045culture of connectivity provide families with options inform our stakeholders and provide the proper pd to staff and parents so we have been triangulating these input streams we've had a task force made up of some 50 members with smaller working groups underneath we've done surveys stakeholder views we've done so many different ways to get input even last week's town hall we had a lot of input from the thought exchange there and so that's how we've been triangulating this and then working back through our cabinet team to be able to put this all together so the biggest takeaways from all the strategic listening from our students from our teachers from our community has been safety first then we've heard keep a focus on equity avoid student learning loss be consistent predictable proactive in communication and i'm going

046to talk about that later in terms of creating a very consistent schedule for students and families consistent in applying and describing the instructional model focus on social social and emotional learning and oops sorry i'm covering that ah sorry and grading an assessment sorry folks should have options for pass no pass and a to f and i know many of our students are talking about that right now with each other about what they would like to see in terms of a grading system further takeaways are making sure that relevant curriculum and pd is focused on anti-racism culturally responsive pedagogy and relevancy in classes so we know now is an incredible time in our country where social movements are happening across many states and in our community and we want to make sure that students have time

047to talk about that and teachers have time to work through that in their classes and in their training we've heard about specific groups like special education and english language learner working groups to create optimal distance learning components of the plan for these very special groups we heard create uniformity in technology platform so really for families making sure and students making sure there's consistency they have one platform that they can use while teachers are able to have the flexibility with their apps that training and pd is tailored to the needs of parents and teachers so that we give appropriate training to our parents so they understand and that we really engage in a willingness to make it work so our key question to answer was could we create a blended model using online instructional delivery both

048synchronous and asynchronous with some in-school instructional support that it can accommodate stay-at-home learners and serve high needs students and families so to answer that question we saw four options the first option was that all our schools would reopen the second option was that all our schools would be closed with a hundred percent distance learning the third option was a hybrid model where students would split time in school and distance learning something like half the students in the am half in the pm or half the students on monday tuesday the other half on wednesday thursday the option that we are choosing is a fourth option which is an online option with student support hubs so this is a blended instructional approach where all students use distance learning all students begin with distance learning and we begin

049to phase in some high priority students once we understand the capacity we have to be able to serve them and once we define the exact safety conditions that need to be in place for anybody to come into our buildings so as you see here we are thinking about this in terms of phases phase one is distance learning for every student phase two is a tiered system where certain high needs students who we believe will not be as successful in distance learning as other students will come in and be our first group that we take care of inside the school buildings and we would call these hubs because they may not look like your traditional classrooms with the same students in different grade levels then we would look at phase three and phase four where we

050would begin to bring back more students and then we would begin to bring back all of our students but right now august 17th we are starting with phase one if we can get to some phase two we may do that and i'll talk a little bit about what might trigger that you'll see the terms health trigger and the capacity trigger what might trigger us to be able to do it so this is an idea of a hub where once we're ready to be able to bring some students back we look at those with very significant needs wellness technology english language learners special education nutrition attendance academic needs etc that we're able to bring back so you see here another diagram of what this looks like distance learning on the top students are learning at home

051the bulk of our students are learning at home and then we have some student support hubs where we can bring our students back how does it work again all instruction is delivered through distance learning the classroom is with the teacher the teachers can either be at home or in the classroom with limited high needs students and we'll talk about again what triggers the ability for any staff to come into a classroom and students are admitted to these hubs with all of the social distancing standards in place we have to look at our capacity how many staff members whether that certificated staff or others could come in and support us inside of the buildings a little bit more about it means that again we look at our capacity and we also are going to have to

052look at workforce demands we will have to think about need for coordinated intervention for personnel for high needs students and we want to make sure that anybody who's in those hubs or in those buildings is really qualified and of course we would collaborate with our unions to reach consensus and resolve staffing and workload issues what we see here is that most of our stakeholders favor distance learning but before i go there if we could go back one slide the last bullet that i have here is really key we have four major labor unions in our district and they represent the bulk of the employees in our district and they do an amazing job making sure everybody is well taken care of and well represented and we collaborate with them and the key will be how

053we collaborate and work together going forward to make sure we're all on the same page at our last meeting our last town hall we had the opportunity to hear from parents community and students and tonight i wanted us to be able to hear from our largest labor union the united teachers of richmond and to be able to hear just a minute from their new president marissa glidden on how we are working together moving forward to create this collaborative agreement to get us where we need to go the teachers did an amazing job of pivoting super fast in the fall we know it wasn't perfect and we learned a ton but they did an amazing job of creating some incredible classrooms for our kids and we heard about all of the successes and we heard about

054some places we could do better so i thank all of our teachers and i'll turn it over to marissa if she's on with us for a couple of minutes to just share a little bit about how we're going to collaborate and move forward you mr duffy as mr duffy said i'm marissa glidden i am the president of united teachers of richmond representing 1700 educators in our district um i want to echo what mr duffy said and emphasize the extraordinary work that our educators did during this unprecedented crisis not only did educators flip their entire classrooms but they also were dealing with their own personal challenges teachers go to school for years to learn how to be experts in the classroom and overnight they were asked to learn how to do that online to serve their

055students many educators also handed out food to make sure our students were well fed they taught each other and collaborated to figure out the best online learning tools they spent tons of time talking to families coordinating with parents um and serving the social and emotional needs of their children so i really want to start by saying thank you to our educators for serving our community during this difficult time um i also want to emphasize a few things educators have said that they um want to emphasize moving forward one they want to emphasize health and safety they appreciate the district's plan to emphasize health and safety they also want to echo that and say that the health and safety of our students our educators our communities and our families should always be the most important thing

056when we are making decisions number two our educators want to emphasis emphasize equity we serve a very diverse district with lots of different needs and challenges we must ensure the safety of our most vulnerable educators and our most vulnerable students it must be safe for them as well and third our teachers want to emphasize learning and professional development they are so eager to work to become experts at this they are the professionals when it comes to education and are looking forward to their voice being heard as they move forward thank you mr duffy i don't know if everybody else can hear you but i just want to confirm with folks if they cannot hear mr duffy either no we cannot hear thank you miss logan is his connection is he still in the meeting i

057lost connection for a minute can you hear me yes okay sorry i didn't get to see uh marisa finn there so thank you very much so we can bring that back up right so after we did the town hall on friday we polled folks and what we found out was a majority 53 percent of the almost 1600 poll takers at the town hall said distance learning will work for them six percent said absolutely not and then a group of folks somewhere in the middle so we believe that the community at the end of the day is behind this move to start in distance learning and although i spent a lot of time talking about what those hubs would look like those hubs only go into effect when we believe that it is absolutely safe enough

058to bring staff and students together so now what do we do we're shifting from the input phase to the implementation phase so we've sunseted our task force and we are moving into small implementation teams with smaller membership so we can start hammering out the details we'll drill into the key components of the draft plan and framework submitted and work through fleshing all of those out and we'll negotiate and talk with our labor organizations and hope to have those agreements done by august 1st so key to opening school and to making all of our stakeholders and community feel comfortable with what we're doing is creating the framework for the instructional week we've heard from multiple stakeholders what they want in that week what this instructional model should look like and that's where we will be working

059with our unions to build that collaboratively we know inside of that framework we need to have reconstruction we need to have some type of homeroom or advisory or connection to our students for social emotional learning and personalization we need professional development time for staff that's both professional development around technology content academics and we need time for professional learning around race equity diversity etc we want to make sure our staff has daily planning time and we want to make sure there's office hours for one-to-one interaction for any student who needs it we want to limit the number of classes taken on a daily basis and we want our assignments linked to a common platform with flexibility and we want to have virtual forums for student to student interaction so we want to make sure that it's

060not just time with adults but we actually build time for students to have with each other so these have been some of the key takeaways that we have heard in our listening sessions that will get built into what a consistent week looks like additionally we've got to build in social opportunities for clubs athletics training and support for parents time to contact counselors and time to discuss issues of race equity diversity and inclusivity with students and staff again saying the same thing in a little bit more of a detailed way we want to make sure we have clarity in this plan around direct instruction daily that would combine asynchronous and synchronous teaching that's both around the academic content and social emotional development we want to make sure there's ample time for teacher professional learning we want

061to make sure there is ample daily planning time to support lesson design this is a new world that we're entering so teachers and staff really need that time to make sure what they're delivering is high quality and excellent and again on the office hours really making sure that students have an opportunity to talk in small groups or one-to-one with their instructors to make sure things are clarified for them anything that they don't understand and just making sure there's connection with adults we want to limit the number of classes as i said that students take in a normal day we don't feel it's realistic to simply mimic a six or seven period schedule for students online so we'll find exactly what the right quantity is and create a schedule that that reflects that we know many

062of our middle and high schools are looking at either a three what's called a three by three or four by four block where students would take three or four classes each day but not the traditional six or seven that they would do in person we've heard loud and clear that students especially would like their assignments linked on a common platform so whether we're all using the google classroom we're all using seesaw that there's some common platform where teachers and students are able to exchange information assignments etc while teachers and other staff have the flexibility to use many different apps within their instruction again really figuring out how to build a student to student time whether that's clubs whether that's um you know time to government etc and we're looking at dramatically focusing the first weeks

063of school on student interaction social emotional learning and determining where students are academically so we do not intend day one to start hardcore content we want to make sure everybody's okay we know where they're at we've checked in with them we're building community we're seeing what students need and we're diagnosing them academically phase one again distance learning details of this our distance learning program needs to be finalized through nego have to stop and have around what that week looks like everybody's got to agree and i think we have enough data and enough collaboration that we can do that multiple negotiations the next two weeks and the goals to work towards completing our necessary mou's which are memorandums of understanding which would reflect these agreements and announce the format the week of august 1st if not

064sooner this will allow parents to know what the schedule is clearly and allow us to provide the appropriate staff development to teachers i can tell you as a parent myself and my wife who's a teacher we are eager to know this schedule for our two kids so we can start to build around and plan around when our kids classes are and that helps us build our schedule of work etc so it's i understand it both as superintendent and i really understand it as a parent the need for that consistency phase two this idea of returning to in-school learning at the student support hubs this is very very units to negotiate the conditions that will be necessary to begin implementing possible phase two options again we'd call that a trigger what are the conditions that would

065trigger the allowance of students back into the buildings what are the health have to be in place we heard a caller earlier today say can we see this deep cleaned every day etc we need to make sure we're all on the same page about what needs to be in place what we're going to do as a team and a staff and what the conditions that is absolutely key right so i i don't i won't read any more text on there but just again reiterating that we will have a working agreement that we will make plenty transparent about what has to be in place in order for people to come back into the buildings how are we thinking about back to school and what's our real orientation toward back to school so traditionally we've done a

066back to school night you know a few weeks into the school year we're going to work to do that much earlier and hopefully be able to do that before school starts so we can give as many families and students and others as much needed information about how we're going to do our work you know what the technology is going to look like what the expectations was we think about going to back to school we're focused deeply on social emotional learning really making sure our students are doing okay socially emotionally their mental health is in good shape we're thinking a lot about equity and how to make sure the students farthest away from opportunity are most supported we're thinking a lot about relationships and we're thinking a lot about our distance learning methods not necessarily the

067curriculum content immediately but as we get back to school this is how we're thinking we're wanting to make sure we're troubleshooting problem areas and really being agile to make the adjustments that we're screening and evaluating our student needs that we're creating student engagement activities for our students to feel excited about coming back to school proud to be back to school feeling really good about environment generally training for staff and parents on distance learning so again we have a framework the framework is a phase one framework that starts us with distance learning and only when we're ready moving into phase two um and then from there um working out sorry and not from there but to get there working out the details of phase one what the instructional week looks like and phase two and i'm

068told my internet's a little spotty so i'm gonna try to change that up um while we i think take public comment and then go into our questions you mr duffy and so before we have a board discussion we're going to have public comment and hear from members of the public uh so again i would remind people in the audience to make sure that you are using a first name and last name and that you put your hand race then you click on the button if you're using the zoom app or if you're calling them by phone that you dial asterisk 9 and then when you're called to unmute by pressing asterisk six and we do have translation available so if you need to have translation um for um i don't see it actually right here

069mr jeffy can you confirm that we have the translation button available yes we do have the translation button available president hernandez jarvis great thank you so much mr walton thank you so we can begin with public comment and my apologies go ahead no worries thank you sorry for interrupting so if there's more than 10 um public speakers there will be two minutes if there's more than 15 public speakers it will be one minute per speaker we currently have 11 public speakers with their hands raised at this time thank you so um two minutes please the first uh public speaker is claudia burgos miss burgos hello can you hear me yes we can thank you good evening uh my name is claudia burgos i'm the director of legislative affairs and community relations at ac transit as

070we all work through these really difficult times all public agencies including ac transit have been impacted by the pandemic since the shelter in place uh order went into effect we've seen ridership reductions of over 70 percent we've implemented measures to protect the safety of both our operators and our um which includes not collecting fares since back in march uh which has resulted in monthly revenue reductions of about five million dollars a month um so i wanted to just deliver uh to the board of trustees and also to the families that are tuning into tonight's meeting that ac transit does have some measures that are in place and we expect that those will still be in place um when the new school year begins and it's really important for administrators and families to be aware uh

071the first is that we do have social distancing requirements on board our buses which results in very reduced passenger uh limits and we also require all writers to wear masks and then the third is that the bus schedules for the upcoming school year have already been set and they closely monitor uh last year's school schedules the next opportunity to make changes is going to be in december so um it's really important that as decisions are made in terms of um what the schedule is going to look like for the next school year that the transportation options are taken into consideration so i want to just elaborate a little bit more on the social distancing limits um we are only able to carry 10 passengers on a standard 40 foot bus and 16 passengers on a

07260 and on the longer 60 foot articulated buses so anybody who has seen buses with students you know that we carry more than that so i just wanted to share that message with the leadership and the families um to take into consideration as you move into your plans for the next school year thank you thank you so much ms burgos thank you the next public speaker is jamila foltz miss foltz good evening board my name is jamila smith foles i'm a veteran teacher who has been in education for over 15 years i was one of the few stakeholders that got the golden ticket and was able to attend the zoom district town hall hosted by the district on july 10th i was so excited once i got in because i knew i could not only

073bring my concerns to life but the shared concerns of others sadly this did not happen i would like to take just a moment to provide the board with a quick summary of points of growth that i hope that you as a board would take back to district leads first being mindful of wording the district advertised the july 10th event as a town hall the dictionary defines a town hall as an event at which at which politicians or public officials answer questions from members of the public this definition was not met on july 10th state coders did not have the opportunity to ask questions what parents guardians teachers administrators and students got was a presentation second be sure that all voices are represented at the decision making table this is the basic requirement for equity i

074did not see a teacher rep on the panel i also did not see student representation from the schools located in ward 1. wart on the panel ward 1 encompasses hercules panel in parts of richmond all voices must be heard and all experiences valued finally please be committed to putting and keeping the power with the people keep the district accountable to the people that they are charged to represent thank you and have a great evening thank you the next public speaker is bobby davis mr davis bobby davis you can unmute we will try to come back to uh bobby davis the next speaker is heather mann hello my name is heather mann and i am a teacher with the district and i wanted to just address the um move into the phase two with the hubs

075i'm also the mother of two special needs children and um and staunchly anti-racist educator and i have some very serious concerns that following the model of going to the hub although i know it is being done with the best intentions in the world we will end up with the most demographically challenged students being our big test group that is the one that's being used kind of as the test for to see what happens there as and i don't want them to be our science project and every time i think about these hubs i imagine them being their our science project and it's really unsettling for me so i just really need to put it out there and i wonder if we had people auditing us and seeing what we were doing from a scientific perspective

076this would not be approved so i really just want to make sure ethically that we're being conscientious in our decisions that we're making thank you the next public speaker is estella de paz mr pass mr paz you can unmute thank you mr walton um good evening president hernandez jarvis board members and staff my name is estella de paz i'm the school side council chairperson for hercules high school i've been listening to many parents these past few days after the return to school town hall and many welcome the project framework that was provided uh providing that traceability as i've urged this district to do has put our community at least on the same path so that we know where we're heading and we've got a way to get there i think parents are now very hungry

077to spare specifics so that they can react and make their own plans and make their own decisions so they can move their lives forward i'm also hearing a lot of questions around how what and when so the implementation plan mr duffy that you are talking about is definitely something that they are really really waiting to hear um before we go to that plan though i'm urging you to think about risk management strategies here's why please remember remember this number it's 640. according to the cde data quest we have got thirty two thousand hundred and forty three students enrolled in westcott across the unified school district on friday you said approximately twenty five percent which is eight hundred eight thousand thirty five will probably be using the um will you be using the hubs according to

078dr radhakrishnan we have in west county an 8 to 100 ratio doing the math we have got a potential of 640 of our community members teachers staff and students who might actually get infected please please this is a sobering number we need to manage risks we need to have earth airtight mitigations and we need to have measurable managed and communicated information about how we're proceeding thank you very much and good night thank you the next public speakers uh yanag burrell good evening board members i am iana burrell and i wanted to bring to superintendent duffy's attention there was a report that you shared a couple maybe about a month ago and you mentioned that over 750 students were not accounted for during the distance learning between march and the end of the school year and

079looking at the presentation i don't see any accountability for that how are they being brought along were they being brought along why did it was just crickets no one heard from 753 students so while there is a plan to go into distance learning again what's going to happen with that chasm is that chasm going to grow is that gap going to get wider are those individuals giving attention i did remember you sharing that there would be some early intervention for those who were not connected but not sure where that lands 753 is a very very large number of students to be not accounted for never checked in and i do know that upcoming i believe after this there's a digital divide presentation but that is something extremely concerning thank you thank you the next public

080speaker is francisco ortiz good evening board members and community my name is francis cortes and i'm a fifth grade teacher at ford elementary and i'm here to advocate and to reiterate that as a district we cannot put our students we cannot put our educators and our families at risk our communities are facing a surging health crisis as covet 19 rates have skyrocketed in the recent weeks we cannot put our students families or school stuff at risk by returning to in-person teaching the safest and most educationally enriching return to teaching and learning is essential for the well-being of our school communities and i'd really like to echo what ms mann said earlier about our most vulnerable students are english language learners our sped students who might be at uh pose at a higher risk during the

081implementation of uh the phase two i would also urge for your consideration that we must meet the following public health and school safety conditions before bringing our school communities back together in person uh some public health conditions to consider is that we should have a low level of covet 19 community spread including sharply reduced cases and hospitalizations for at least 14 days in our county another one is that we should have frequent testing for students parents and educators with a strong contact tracing program for our schools and for school safety conditions we need to have a layered defense against covet 19 with full implementation of proven prevention measures including six feet distancing reduced number of contacts adequate ventilation face coverings personal protective equipment hand washing cleaning uh symptom screening and protection for all of those

082who are at greater risk thank you and good evening thank you the next public speaker is justin trujillo uh hello can i be heard yes hi my name is justin trujillo i am a an upcoming junior at panel valley high school and i this whole distance learning model i think that there should be or i haven't seen much representation of how arts education and vapor will be implemented um previously when we had distance learning from march until june it the curriculu the way the curriculum was taught wasn't very it just obviously wasn't the same would be in person for example you know music classes you can't perform as a group or pottery or it's just it wasn't the same and with this new uh blended model i think that there should be may possibly be

083able to have small groups of students come in and you know do art or even like outdoor music rehearsals where distance learning or social licensing can be enforced even if this isn't immediately when we start school i think that there should be some form of arts education in school thank you and good evening thank you the next public speaker is kelly hardy good evening can i be heard yes yes thank you i'm kelly hardy i'm the parent of a rising third grader um i emailed a letter with some recommendations about distance learning to the board and the superintendent yesterday it was signed by 350 other west contra costa unified parents i understand there's an amazing amount of issues that everyone's dealing with right now but i urge you to move faster to get to the

084detailed plan we parents really need those details in order to be able to care for our kids as best we can such as what the triggers are for moving to different phases what distance learning is really going to look like and how it's going to work better it worked for very few kids in the spring and my my kid had a fantastic teacher for second grade and i know that teachers were working like crazy we're working overtime not faulting teachers i'm just saying that we need to make sure that this works for lots of kids not just a few i would note that teachers and the district are represented in these negotiations to hammer out these final details but parents and students are really not represented um i know that many of many of the

085teachers and the district staff her parents but really need you to think about the impacts and think about things like getting families the the class assignments um which class their kids going to be in earlier uh we usually get them you know the weekend before school opens and if we get them earlier we may be able to make arrangements with neighbors thanks for moving forward towards more details and i really appreciate all the work thank you the next public speakers andrea garcia perez hello can you hear me yes we can hi good evening everybody i would just like to echo to please include a teacher in your town meeting um i saw that there was no teachers on the friday meeting so please include one next time and since we are going to do the

086model of kids staying in their homes i do have some propositions there are parents who do not have means to get the meals for the kids in the pickup such as they don't have means of transportation i would really like if there's a survey to provide them to know where can they have pop possibly like a meal on wheels type of situation in which for those parents who can't have transportation if you can provide that meal for them now the other thing is that i did hear about the latinx community having the highest cases in covid they are one of the communities who are considered essential workers i think that in order for them to be excuse me treat it equitably economically sometimes they go to work sick because they don't have that economic surplus

087that they that other people may need so if you if there's a way to help them economically that would be very good for that community thank you so much and thank you for your time thank you the next speaker is robert gerson mr gerson yes thank you can you hear me yes we can thank you all right uh thank you um board members i am a 19-year veteran of the school district and um i am a parent of a of a child as well um so that of course means that having this high distance learning plan is very helpful um so that i can be able to have my child um get the help that that he needs uh i would like to say a couple things um one is some have been mentioned already

088like the um about the town hall so i'm not gonna um not gonna keep hammering that home um i do wanna say that worker um we need to work with um companies and and localities to help with flexibility so that um that our families can have their children at home and not have to worry about child care um because so we as since we do have um so many that may be um essential workers also i would like to say that i don't recall hearing in the meeting on friday um much about mass use it's possible that i'm forgetting certain details but if those um if that was not discussed on friday it would be helpful to really have that um idea nailed down as well um because that is an another really important part

089of containing the the virus thank you very much thank you the next speaker is zulan harrison ms harrison good evening boy thank you and i just wanted to say thank you for having curriculums in our school good to hear that parents say that we have curriculums that celebrate all children in our school so thank you for um doing that that's very important to me to have little black boys celebrated that have businesses i like that and i also want to say my concern is when we re-enter back into school what i didn't see is how the communication with parents that have special needs and how that's going to look and really i just want more information on the children that have been left out a lot of black students haven't been engaged in the district

090before the pandemic and now the defending has happened their their their parents and the students that haven't been engaged i want to ensure with asset and with meeting with deffi that we continue to address this issue because it's not come to a set method that we're going to ensure that all children are educated and have equity and equal education so those children are very important that we get information on how they're doing where they're at and what we need to do to ensure that this continues the engagement continues not just for an answer but to continue before we can get the outcome we want to close the achievement gap thank you thank you and our final public comment is from jennifer beck miss jennifer peck ms peck thank you so i wanted to actually build

091on the comments of justin the student from panel valley who spoke a little earlier around developing creative options for bringing small groups of kids together in safe ways per county health guidelines where circumstances really demand it and i'm hoping that the district is going to consider in the early phases of this putting together protocols for the option of bringing small groups of kids together with teachers or in peer groups um in small groups in the same way that we're seeing our city park and rec departments do this i have seen it in our parks um around el cerrito all summer long where they have small groups of kids in pods it's all in very close partnership with the county health agency i'm a parent at el cerrito high school i am really witnessing the damaging

092effects of the social isolation i think we all really recognize also the challenges of effective teaching and learning in this environment as a parent i really understand the need to start school in an all-virtual format and i support that decision but i do think there should be options if teachers choose and want to bring small groups of kids together parents would have to agree and opt in on potentially a weekly basis or some kind of periodic basis in partnership with our city parks i think there's lots of parent and community volunteers who would help on the logistics of this i think it could be a very good solution in the interim while we wait for it to be safe to bring everybody back so thank you for all of your work um mr duffy i

093really appreciated um the presentation earlier it was much more effective coming from you than it was from the consultant last week it was much more clear thank you very much thank you and that concludes public comment on this item thank you mr watson and thank you to each member of the community who share their input with us for this item so we will begin our discussion and i i would request um if we can go in this order soon trustee vasquez trustee vanes trustee cuevas trustee phillips trustee lara and then myself at the end and uh if soon trustee vasquez wants to go last that's completely fine too um it's up to you thank you president hernandez jarvis um i can go first great thank you um yeah so i just want to say thank

094you to everybody who's been on the task force who's been helping with that um and thank you to yeah thank you to mr duffy and to everybody who's also been um really good including me as well as i've said before i feel really strongly that students should be involved in all of this especially high school students um this is for us and we're not stupid um so i think it's really important that we've that we do that and that we've been doing that um so thank you to all of you guys for doing that um one thing that students working on right now are one thing that we've been really discussing a lot lately has been grading um and how that's going to happen um i think that's that's something that's really important to us

095as students right now especially uh ones who are about to go off to college soon um i think because we're thinking about what's next for us right now our next phase and all of this is really important for us to for us to really understand what's happening with our grades um because it's going to help determine what we're going to do later on right um and so and with the students what the the task force right now really wants is a little bit more time to discuss grading um and how that will be done with other students um students of color and people with other backgrounds because right now it's majority it's pretty much it's majority white and uh majority from el cerrito high school because i go there so i know more people from

096there um so we're trying to find ways to include more people from different background um so that we can make sure that the grading system that we talk about and that we want fits everybody the best um so that's what the biggest thing that we're doing and i'm just hoping that um even though it may take a little bit of time that we have time to or that we give like the other students enough space to really think about that but not only just think about it but actually implement maybe some of the things that they're talking about um because i would hate for him to us just to talk about it be and then um go to the adults and be like and the adults be like oh actually we've already we already know

097we're gonna do we've already decided um without the students so that's what we're working on right now and so yeah again thank you to everybody who's been helping out thank you to everybody who support youth in all of this um yeah i think that's it thank you uh cinderelly vasquez for your input and for bringing up that we need to continue to work and focus on grading and with a student voice at the center of it thank you um [Music] trustee panas thank you president and london jarvis um i'd like to thank the staff mr duffy for your presentation certainly like to thank uh mr joy and miss mcnitt uh for their comments this evening and uh trustee vasquez sumala and the students after doing a lot of work and i've been talking to them

098a lot about how that goes now they are just doing an enormous amount of work and i really appreciate what they've done and i'll just throw in regarding the grading like this is so important i think we need student input here another option the students might want to consider is like a pass slash never took the class option so i want to thank mr duffy very much for your focus on social emotional learning um we can't forget about that like it just seems like kids are sinking deeper and deeper into isolation uh spending more and more time on their devices and just suffering from the lack of social interaction that we have so our focus on that is really important um it's imperative that the safety of our students drive our decisions and our families

099are are really worried that they still don't know what the fall looks like and i know mr duffy's trying to get there as fast as he can you know everyone is saying the sooner we can get a plan in place the better um and there just brings them more every day we don't have a plan not we're gonna have one tomorrow it's just more stressful you know when i think about the fourth option that we're going with here the uh the student support hubs option um you know we are talking about bringing our neediest students onto campus and with a lens of equity but the same time i get extremely worried about having kind of our most underserved students homeless foster low-income special education students here like we need really strong triggers that we religiously

100follow um if we're gonna start having people on campus you know i look at this and it's all about am i gonna put people in harm's way or not and so those triggers are vitally important that we're really clear that we're not getting people back together until we're positive they're safe so there's a lot more work we have to do to be able to implement that plan effectively um you know like and also you know we're gonna say what if a child or a staff member becomes ill or gets or gets gets sick at home um do you know we we're gonna have to be talking about what do we do in those cases as well and as a board we have to protect those who are least protected you know there's certainly families who

101have feel they're gonna have no choice but to bring their children to us because they have to work but risking a child or families or a staff's life should not be an option for us so we just have to exhaust our options to protect our most underserved um and it's not like we're overflowing with money here so we're going to be really careful about what we do and how we're spending money because we just don't have a lot of room for maneuvering on that um you know speakers have mentioned a couple things and i want to bring up the subject of you know ventilation as part of this whole thing here and we seem to have a number of schools where we get reports that ventilation is not very good and i don't know how

102we can change that but obviously ventilation in schools is an important part of of any plan for bringing students back and we have to make sure we're doing if we start to bring people back we do that at schools that have good ventilation um mr duffy i wanted to ask you about athletics did you send out a note a while ago that we're going to start to bring kids together for you know non-contact socially distance workouts etc we've got the cif deciding on july 20th what's going to happen with sports um can you talk to us more about like if we're going to continue with that plan for letting the kids work out together or just because of new rules from the county we won't be doing that thanks mr panis um i'm actually going

103to ask dr wold to jump in here he's overseeing athletics this year and i know that team has been working through a potential practice schedule for some of our teams uh social distancing i know we have some new county regs so and ask dr wool to to chime in on where we have left that right now with with our athletics good evening so we did start a pilot this week for those that it's completely voluntary for conditioning only no students or staff can go inside any of the buildings we can't use the locker rooms or anything else it's just for small groups under a very specific set of protocols no touching no shared equipment to allow them to try to get out on the fields and see if we can indeed develop a configuration that

104would allow for us to continue as we get more cif guidance our goal is that we don't want to eliminate the possibility of doing athletics even while we're in this close at the same time we're not moving to do anything that's contact are going to put students in danger or staff in danger in any way so we're trying the pilot with conditioning groups of 12 no contact keeping the social distance of six foot outside in a voluntary basis as we're waiting for the cif guidelines to come out in the next week or so um and if the cif says no false sports will we stop that or we continue this this pilot we would follow along with the cif guidelines and then work to determine what is the best way to keep those athletes connected

105to their coach in a virtual mode there there's a possibility cif may push the fall sports into the spring and consolidate things we're also even looking at should there be the ability to have sports and not all leagues stay together can we consolidate to provide options for our students so we're continuing to look at every potential option to ensure that our coaches stay engaged with our athletes and we are keeping all coaches on payroll we're making sure that they are staying connected with their sports thank you uh mr duffy could you clarify asynchronous versus synchronous models yes so synchronous means that the teacher and students are learning together synchronously so a teacher is teaching and students are part of that class that's what you would know sort of as maybe live live instruction asynchronous is

106a term we use to describe when the teaching and learning aren't necessarily happening in a synchronous fashion so that could be a teacher has recorded a lesson for students to do on their own there is a resource they're supposed to go and watch on their own time so the asynchronous um is not necessarily teacher and student doing the same thing at the same time but you get the flexibility of time out of it does that help yeah that's that's helpful um when august 17 rolls around are we going to be having meals at every school um when august 17th rolls around are we gonna have meals in every school if we are in the distance learning format uh phase one we would not be serving meals at every single school or pick up you know

107not necessarily serving but pick up pick up um i will also turn that over to dr wold i believe right now we if we are staying in phase one we would not be moving to a pickup meal service at 55 sites we'd maintain a set of central sites possibly expand so exactly our goal is to continue we're in what's called the seamless summer program right now where any individual under the age of 18 can receive a meal starting august 17th until the federal government changes the regulations we go back to the normal national school lunch program where we would have to have student id they have given waivers for parent pickups and so we're working to see if we're going to get waivers to continue with consolidated sites or whether we're going to have to

108have something at each site for pickup we will absolutely have meal service we will absolutely make sure that our families are eligible we're already beginning outreach because we have to get new applications every year and this is important for all families to hear many folks their financial situation has changed because of the pandemic who didn't qualify in the past now will qualify we want to make sure we capture that information this summer so that should the us department of um education not grant waivers we want to make sure every child that's possibly eligible continues to get fed so we'll have more information in the next couple of weeks as we're waiting for usda to give us out okay okay thank you so mr duffy i'm just wondering do we currently have a an idea for

109a plan on how we're going to keep the public up to date about our progress on the school reopening and also is there going to be a like in the past we've done it where uh people can send in questions and they're posted on our website and answers are posted yes so that we still have our hotlines and website um access up so people want to email us questions but as soon as we finish that instructional framework which i think is what everybody's after right now that would go out in a community letter from me and use all of the usual um logistical resources to get those out through schools etc so as soon as we know for example um you know core instruction is going to take place on monday tuesday 9 a.m to

11012 a.m or something like that whatever the the final detail is um that will go out immediately so parents can plan around that um and we'll use like i said all of our usual vehicles we also have a board meeting on the 29th we have a board meeting on the fifth so we have two more board meetings before school starts um so will you you know once we have that defined that's key information for everybody and we'll aggressively get that out i know there was a comment about the town hall that it wasn't really a town hall and i'm sorry if it was mislabeled we wanted just to make sure that for the many thousands of people who are tuning in that we had an opportunity to share here's where we are here's the framework

111we're going to open in distance learning and really make that information clear so we'll continue to make sure uh everybody gets the information in a timely way okay and i've got two more questions at once um and then i'm done i'm i'm just wondering if we're planning on creating any guidance or if the county is planning on creating kinds for parents who want to get information about how they can bring small groups of kids together for social and or purposes and also a recent ed source article talked about how some districts are really examining as a preliminary way of returning to school some sort of um safe outdoor outdoor education protocols to uh facilitate getting kids together perhaps with teachers in that case yes so that's a the your first question is a good one

112um you know we are not providing direct information and i can work with our county to see what we can provide around this i think really what you're talking about this sort of pod idea right which is a number of families just stay together and i know for example a number of our family friends are talking together since our kids go to oakland unified which will be starting also in distance learning you know about okay are we gonna share five different homes on five different days and pod up in that way so that you know our kids rotate between five houses or something like that i don't know where we're gonna land on that but i think that's the idea that a number of families are talking about um in terms of these pods the

113other question about outdoor education definitely exploring that i think we want to look into what we might be able to do in small groups outside i think all of those safety protocols come into play of course um but we have seen students go to camps throughout the summer there's a lot we've seen that's been successful so we do have to look at that and see if there's anything we can do for a staff member or group of kids doing something for some time outside thank you that's all my questions i appreciate this thank you trustee panas thank you madam chair thank you mr panas for your comments thank you staff for your presentation and thank you community for your comments i've been thinking a lot about this in relation to decisions that we need to

114make and uh one of the things i do want to let everybody know is that i'm going to be pretty consistent with my belief that we are in a pandemic for an infectious disease that has no cure uh and no vaccine right now and our obligation to provide education for students uh i'm only interested in doing that in the absolute safest way given everything that's happened i just need folks to know i will not be supporting physically opening up our campuses or bringing any students back for individualized attention unless we have a point and reach a point where this is no longer an infectious disease and some kind of vaccine or some kind of therapeutic options are widely available and the reason why is because i've sat in this seat for a number of years

115and we make very key decisions key decisions that do in fact have impact on families lives most importantly on students lives and the lives of our staff but i never imagined that i would have to sit and make a decision that would be one that has uh immediate like within weeks two weeks of somebody coming down with this disease passing away life and death implications and so as a result uh i want to remind folks that when we're talking about and there are plenty of rules that are out there in terms of how to keep each other safe through a pandemic but no guarantee that that in fact is what's going to stop this because we still see spikes in the infection rates right now and so i want to remind folks that some of

116our schools in particular the schools with the highest needs students already serve a significantly number of students are overcrowded to begin with schools like like like downer over 630 students uh or between more than 600 students schools like dover 681 students the school like bayview even 529 and this is for you know demographic data on our school enrollment uh it may have changed it changes a little bit but this tells you the the the clusters of students we're talking about schools like um let's look even at helms almost a thousand students that i've got to bring into this one place together tell me a place that is saying make plans to figure out how you're going to bring a thousand individuals together and keep them safe so i feel that our attention needs to be

117spent on perfecting on improving and getting better at distance learning because that is the way to keep everyone physically safe and i'm interested in putting our energy there and i know that's going to disappoint folks depending on what your perspective is and that's what i've said many times is great about our country our country there is room for everybody's opinion there is absolutely and i wish there was room for everybody to actually sit and have a vote on this board but it doesn't our organization of our democracy doesn't work out that way it's five people and i happen to be one of them which means i have a greater responsibility than those with opinions for keeping everyone as safe as possible in terms of this pandemic and so i appreciate uh the focus i do

118think we need to talk about how we're supporting for better outcomes that we are making sure our delivery of distance learning is high quality that it is structured that it provides routine that is both uh for the most part live since we can talk and have live interaction and then the supports that happen are really about how we're supporting parents and students to be able to adjust to that delivery system and providing supports to them even the notion superintendent you talked about oh our families a couple families are getting together and making decisions that is a personal decision that you are making for your family that i will not be held responsible for but the decision i make here on this board and you should make those decisions for your family and folks should be

119empowered to do that but the decision here where we hold the trust of 28 000 and maybe we we didn't do a good job but we i talked about where are they we still got to do better but i know for a fact that i'm not going to contribute to bringing kids back together and putting them and their families and their teachers and their staff in dangerous situations knowing one the state has not provided more money to even buy one extra cleaning supply other than what we might be getting from the first um the first um stimulus around this we still don't know where that's going to go but that is to make up for what we've already spent on this pandemic to this point so i know for a fact that i can't afford

120to keep people safe at the levels that i would want my own family to be safe and so just logically i need to fall back on the one the methods that will in fact increase the the possibility of safety for everyone and so i just wanted to make it clear to the community that i do hear you i do hear your perspectives i am listening to those of you who say well what am i going to do about child care and what am i going to do about the fact that i don't think it's such a big deal i respect your opinion and i appreciate you sharing it and i'll take that into consideration with all of my um information that i'm using to make this decision but i will be completely transparent in terms

121of letting folks know that i am not in favor of doing anything other than distance learning until we are out of this pandemic thank you trustee phillips uh thank you very much um first to uh all of the community members who have participated on the task force thank you to staff for working on this and leading this effort and i also want to say thank you to supervisor joya and the deputy health officer for coming um to this meeting and also to supervisor julia and the health officer for coming to the last meeting to give us some more context as to what's going on in the county and our community in particular i want to start by making a comment around the social safety net this is a great example as to why we need

122a social safety net in place before the emergency actually starts uh what's happening now is across uh america across the state across the county uh we have all of these local agencies scrambling to put things in place because frankly the social safety net that we should have uh in this country has been slowly uh and sometimes quickly torn out from under us uh we are a school district and some of the things that we are being uh required to do are asked to do because we care about our community uh are not things that are necessarily in our bailiwick and i want people to remember that as we move forward uh i want to talk also about the presentation that we have tonight and the slides in particular i've been reaching out to parents i've

123been reaching out to staff members um and i don't think that for the most part um they're that far apart uh when i talk to teachers when i talk to classified folks when i talk to families i am hearing consistently uh from them that they want to stay in uh distance learning uh now i'm not saying that i haven't heard anyone say the opposite but i am hearing overwhelmingly uh that they want to do distance learning um and that includes uh from our families so with that i'm gonna i'm gonna ask my first question because i was a little confused when i watched the town hall presentation and today mr duffy some things are a little clear are you saying that on august 17th that there will be absolutely no students on campus i am

124not saying that 100 but i believe that is where we are going to start the only way there would be students on august 17th is if we negotiate successfully conditions that make clear how students and staff can return to school that is clear and negotiated and agreed upon brought to the board all agreed and then we determine from there we are going to bring back some small groups of students if that were to happen before august 17th there's a possibility that some students could be there i don't think that's likely and also if the board were to give us a direction to say we don't want any students back august 17th we'd have to take that direction but i think we've put some preconditions in place that say specifically we'd call that phase two before

125phase two can happen these things have to be in place and i'm not sure we can get there by august 17th um so you know i don't think so but there's always an outside possibility that we're able to get that agreement and together we all decide that this very small group of students should start together okay thank you for the clarification and i think um folks in the community were hearing kind of two different things um that we weren't going to have people in there on the 17th and then that we were and it sounds like so i'm just gonna say for myself uh i am opposed to uh anyone being there on august 17th and what i would ask from this board and i'll explain why uh and trustee cuevas actually hit on quite

126a few of the points already uh but quite frankly uh in a nutshell i've set up here on this board and i've said multiple times to the public that um i will treat your children the way i treat my children um and that that is the best that i can do um so even if i make a mistake you know that that mistake was made out of love um my children will not be at school on august 17th they won't and they won't be at school on august 17th because i believe that it is dangerous and i do appreciate what lost learning does but i appreciate the loss of my children uh frankly even more they will not be there um and they fall into some of those category tier ones but they won't they

127won't be there um and that's a personal decision that i'm making for my family my wife and i and i feel that is necessary share with them i'm not going to pretend that um so i'll be doing that um as far as the triggers are concerned uh my internet just kind of chopped up a little bit can you guys hear me yeah can you hear me okay so as far as the triggers are concerned um i do not believe that we should be using triggers uh because triggers are automatic and this is a very fluid situation uh we may have some markers that we look for [Music] um around bringing children whatever automatically yeah your connection um broke off and then your speech sped up after everything to try to catch up what you had

128said would you mind repeating that you uh um what what i was saying is that triggers are automatic and i don't think you use triggers in a fluid situation as you have to be able to maintain flexibility so i think any triggers that we're using should be taken off of the table and that we should actually be doing this uh frankly uh what is actually for direction to the superintendent is when staff feels uh based on talking with the county health experts that it is safe at that time to bring something back to us um that is detailed um and that is a a a fleshed-out plan because what i'm seeing right now to be honest with you i i think a framework or a conceptual idea is a really good uh way to label

129this but i can't uh potentially put somebody in harm way over a framework over a conceptual plan so when we get to the point where you all think mr duffy it's safe i need you to come back to this board with an actual fleshed-out plan that says this is how we're going to do it this is why we think it's safe and like trustee cuevas said that we have the resources to make sure that for example the schools are even clean are clean to the standards that they should be because if you recall even before this started happening you know we've been running a skeleton custodial crew for a long time before this started happening i was complaining about lack of soap and bathrooms before there was even a coveted issue that blew up so

130none of those things have been addressed um and we have to address them because that's what's going to keep our kids safe the last thing that two things i want to bring up and and i'm going to stop but on tier one with the first phase in um which under your uh idea mr duffy could potentially be on the 17th and i'm asking the board to say no to that but tier one is almost it's like that's like 80 of the school district falls under tier one so tier one is high absenteeism underserved which i'm thinking like low-income children right spad students foster youth homeless etc and it literally says etc it's like 78 of our school children are all free and reduced lunch so when we're so when you have a situation where like

131almost everybody eight out of ten people fall into tier one that's not a phase in that's everybody just come back and that's not um that's not saying so i i personally think where we should be focused on and i think trusty cuevas is right we you know we had to pivot very quickly uh in the spring to try to put on distance learning um and there was some successes there were failures too and we need to make sure that we're offering our families in my opinion uh a very high quality distance learning um option um i mean i guess option is the wrong word cause i'm saying that's all it should be but that we're doing it in a very high quality way um the other thing that i wanted to say is i know

132that we have some connectivity issues with some of our families um and that we're working on that and that we probably won't be able to resolve that problem completely by the 17th i was talking with a teacher today and she told me that what she's been doing with her students because a lot of them don't have internet access or even if they do it's on their phones and it's very hard to do work real work on a phone um she's actually been on the telephone with her students um and that they've been doing math and all sorts of things essentially what some classrooms are doing in in zoom um they're doing it on the phone and so if we can figure out a way to incorporate for example freeconferencecall.com maybe it's not that but that's

133what i use so i'm using it as an example but some kind of phone system where we can get a lot of people um on a call at once because where all families don't have internet access or reliable internet access most people have phones now um and if we can figure out how to get them um you know the hard copies of the of the work whether it's their books or whether it's printouts or whatnot when we can get those to them our teachers can actually do a lot of this over the phone and i think we'd be able to pick up a lot of the students that we're missing because we've been solely relying um on the internet the last thing that i would like to put out there is we have a lot

134of work to do before august 17th and i think that is making everybody um nervous and and rightfully so because we want to do this the best way that we can because we want our our children to not suffer during this period of time so i'm going to throw something out there that i haven't heard us talk about but i know one school district has done it um i think that we should actually consider delaying the start of school um and how long um would obviously be up for discussion but if we push the start of school back two weeks or three weeks that would give us time and when i say us you know i'm giving credit where credit it would get staff time because i'm not the one negotiating with the labor unions

135for example but it would give staff time it would give the bargaining units time to actually sit down together and work out a thoughtful plan that addresses some of the issues that were brought up in the spring but that we may not really be able to address because if we just move forward with the august 17th date um we're really we're going to be just like racing to get something done and it may not be the best for everybody so i would like us to um to just summarize i would like us as a board uh to direct staff not to have students on campus on the 17th when uh staff feels that it is safe to then come back to the board with that and a detailed plan um about how to move forward

136and to make the decision then and not to be working off of these triggers and then the last thing is for us to consider actually delaying the start of school uh so we can actually um take the time that we need to develop a robust plan those are my comments thank you very much thank you trustee phillips trustee lotta yes uh thank you very much uh thank you mr duffy for your presentation i think that was what people were looking for some more specific details and of course more to come and i have to say i think the direction is pretty clear uh from this board that safety is number one and that we all feel like we're dealing with life and death of our children and we don't want anybody in danger or employees

137nobody we don't want to put anybody at risk so i have to agree with you know everything that everybody has said before me and um you know one of the things in thinking about um social emotional learning when i was at helms i taught at helms and i taught seventh and eighth graders combination and eld ones and twos so on occasion i would have a student two years in a row and i have to say that you know that's called it's legit it's called looping but you know it would just kind of inadvertently happen and the connection i would have with that student the comfort the trust they knew what i was you know about and i knew their parents already so there was it was really like an immediate connection and we all felt

138comfortable with each other and i had an opportunity to do that quite a bit and so i'm just saying that in virtually when students are placed if that's at all possible uh that when we look at social emotional rather than having a brand new teacher all over and you don't know who especially the younger the younger students um but middle school high school also so it's tricky i know and some people might not want to do it but i'm just saying that socially emotionally it was it was really um effective and helpful and so that's one suggestion uh when the person came up talking about the arts the the comment about the arts and also pe it reminded me back in the day i don't know if they still have them we used to have

139curriculum committees and so we'd meet with you know i'd meet with the eld teachers from across the district who were teaching at my level or my yeah grade and we could compare and we had you know we met regularly and it was very insightful there was a a lot of learning that went on there and collaboration and collaboration so that's kind of what that made me think of is the arts pe if they can be creative down the line down the line not right away but setting some things up uh even virtually even uh virtually uh so i guess the last thing i want to just say is that there's some things that have to happen the constant communication um mr duffy you've been a very good job with that and you've got to keep

140that up people need to hear from you often about the progress about the updates so that they can feel secure and what's going on and what's happening there should be no surprises we don't want to move too quickly here um and the other key word to me that i like hearing is collaboration that all of these moving parts these individuals are collaborating together and negotiating together for the best possible plan that we can get and i know we can do that we can do that so i'm i'm very hopeful that we will be able to to get to that place eventually and um you know eventually this thing will go away we don't know when but for all of us safety is first we really want to protect our our community so those are my

141thoughts thank you very much thank you trustee lada um i want to just say that i really thank everybody who has been involved in the process of creating this framework and pushing for this work to be done in a sincere and urgent way um i want to make sure that we emphasize hope i know that these are really bleak times for many families but i want us to not lose sight of the hope that is within all of us and within every decision that we make to keep everybody safe and i want to begin again by thanking every single student parent community member family member teachers principals district staff and community partners for the work you have done to create the framework and move forward with the work of the educational plan and its implementation

142now i want to thank dr radha krishna mr joya and ms mcnitt for their presentations last friday and today i believe that the task force has identified school reopening needs and explicitly verbalized priorities prioritization of these needs and the next phase really is the the planning process that we need to have in working with the smaller groups from the from the implementation task force to create a detailed thorough plan that will actually systematically meet the needs identified and shared with the community already and do so with with equity as the guiding goal and expected outcome i believe that we still need to hear more from stakeholder groups especially those consisting of families of english language learners of latinx students of african-american students of special education students and students experiencing homelessness to to make distance learning

143work for them this fall and what we have right now i i do want to reiterate that it is a framework for distance learning and so now the work that we have to do with urgency is to make sure that we outline the plan that's going to be implemented and share that in a timely manner with a community and have all the important details and and key parts clearly in place um i have a few questions i have um about eight questions to be exact um so on page 37 of the presentation i just wanted to clarify this for the community um it says instructional aids child care credential staff before and after school workers as well as other staff will be available um when this was being put into the presentation mr duffy can

144you clarify what is meant by child care credential staff because i think it's not um 100 clear and if it's making a reference to providing child care for essential workers or for who in addition to the student hubs um or if it's directly referencing the student hubs that just wasn't clear to me yes members of the community i think what we're saying there is that basically anybody who's going to lead kids inside of a hub needs to be fully credentialed but is that as a credential teacher or as a like daycare provider license um not as a daycare provider license no but it has to be somebody you know within our system who has the appropriate credentials and that's what we still have to determine um what we can do and what we can't do

145especially if you know in that model the majority of teachers are teaching at home so we can continue to work to clarify that and clarify that language but the spirit of it really was that you know we would make sure folks had the proper credentials to be in front of kids and i was specifically thinking about k-12 credentials okay thank you for clarifying and then and was it and it was in reference to k-12 credential staff that would actually be teaching students that was the intent not like as child care teaching students or supporting students right so if you were um if there was a teacher teaching from home and somebody was taking care of eight or ten kids into the school they would have the appropriate credentials to be able to be in front

146of those students um so and so more like more like supervision that was the the thought behind that like having in-person supervision for students in distance learning yes so if teachers are teaching at home and i need i'm going to we're going to have a group of let's say 10 students in a group that they're with you know if it's uh if it's with an after-school provider that person's appropriately credentialed if it's with um a certificated person that that person is appropriately credentialed so that we're not just bringing kids in in front of random people to take care of them and go online thank you for clarifying um i think that it sounded at the beginning when we started having a discussion around having support in in terms of very small cohorts and students that

147would be in stable bubbles um i know that that was something that was being explored in other school districts as well neighboring areas and other parts of the state um and i think that the more i thought about it you know while we think i think that it's a good intention i think some of my fellow board members and and public speakers have brought up the idea that it may actually have a desperate impact on already disproportionately affected um populations in in our county and so i have concerns that it may actually exacerbate some of the very things that we're trying to work um to dismantle right i think that there was talk about you know having a lot of other invisible you know barriers that are built into the the impacted socio-economic backgrounds of

148our students and not just medically um but also for staff and their kids and and you know for for family members who don't have medical insurance but who may really need support with a child so having to have that make you know to make that tough decision between like if i have the ability to send my kid to be in this cohort and and just almost like the illusion of safety too um and it's just really it's a really hard i think it's a really hard dilemma because we know that some kids will also be staying home without parents and and i know as a child too i know a lot of people have gone through this too when they're little that their parents are working so they have to watch their little siblings or

149they're just watching themselves and it's a hard reality for so many people and i think that if if we try to go forward with having student hubs we also um put at risk a lot of the people who are going to be sending their kids there and if they don't have medical insurance if there's language barriers if there's um i feel like there's good intention but we can actually exacerbate things by doing it so i really want us to look at this carefully and not put you know specifically marginalized communities already at risk of medical racism and ableism in a position where they cannot look for themselves once they are affected by it um and so i you know i just want to share i don't want this to be a trigger for everybody but

150i just want to say that i did find out a few days ago and i think i shared this with you mr duffy about um a teacher in arizona who who contracted this from you know teaching in a distance learning environment and there was three teachers the three of them became infected with it and she um was hospitalized for two weeks and she actually passed away and it was you know i i just i cannot i feel like we cannot have um the lives of on any you know of anybody on us on any decision that we make we have to make it in a way to protect lives and to to to reiterate that we're doing everything in our power to to help everybody get through this um as healthy as possible and and

151i um so my next question is asking about the role of instructional aides and support staff i know that there's going to be conversations with unions and with different workers in our district so i just wanted to hear more about how we're going to maximize the capacity of support staff such as instructional aides to to assist in breakout rooms and one-on-one check-ins with students and in a weekly academic and even social emotional support um so what is that what is that work that we're going to be doing what is the vision behind that yep and again you know we are at a sort of a framework phase we're not at here's the assignments of everybody minute to minute but instructional aids have historically you know been assigned to either the student that they work with

152one-to-one and they would continue to be assigned to that student or they're assigned to a particular classroom so they're assigned to that teacher and then from there the teacher would work with that aid whether it's for a student or for the class and determining really the best use of that instructional aid you know in a breakout room etc and similarly with support staff if you are a community outreach worker and you work at a school you're still going to be assigned to that school and you're going to be working with your school leader to determine um what that's going to look like we will however have some district protocols around how we're doing attendance how we're outreaching to kids how we're doing you know truancy etc and communicate those out to all the community workers

153for example um but we'll keep the support staff if they've been site-based or you know connected with a school or a particular student they will stay in that way thank you and i've had a lot of these questions um you know that are either a combination of my questions and and then and other things that people have asked me or just questions that community members have asked and they keep on repeating um so i'm gonna some of them are gonna be more detailed than others um so with this one i was just thinking about how are we going to also leverage virtual volunteers because i don't think that we necessarily did that um during the emergency response that we had the last few months for distance learning but how do we leverage virtual volunteers that

154are already registered with our district and new ones too who would want to to support that because i understand that there's going to be limits on on the time and on the work that aids may do but how do we then bring in volunteers that are batched and ready to go and want to support that too that's a great question and that is new territory for us that we have to continue to figure out um so similarly we'd make sure you know anybody who's volunteering is um appropriately uh screened so that they can volunteer with us even though they're not in physical contact there's still some things that we need to know uh before you're around our kids even virtually um you know and then once we do that i think similarly you know we'd

155leave that to the discretion if this is a a parent or volunteer helping out in a classroom we'd leave that to the discretion of the teacher or the school if they're working school-wide but i do think you bring up a a very valid point it's just like how to continue to leverage volunteers and i know that's something we've heard from the board in the past mr phillips etc just to make sure they're in there so i would be happy to bring some more information back about how we're thinking about virtual volunteers what they might need to do to pass kind of muster to be able to work in our spaces um and then what that might look like yeah thank you and i would really appreciate that follow-up and i think that we can also

156envision how we can train volunteers who are already in the system and have been volunteering at schools to to you know understand the needs the virtual needs and also maybe even create like a database of volunteers or if it already exists have them match up their abilities and interests of support with the teachers and school sites that are requesting those types of support so that it can be like a match and i think that there's nearby districts that do similar work like that so maybe you know having community engagement reach out to them or something that will enable for for that type of communication to happen so so people are matched up with who they need and what they need um so please do you know circle back with us when you have some more

157updates on that and um in terms of accountability you talked a little bit about tracking participation and doing attendance differently so um my thoughts on it is just really to push um to have you know frequent interactions with kids to make sure that they're um being reached and i know that there's a lot of feedback from community members and from parent leaders on how to reach them and i think that there are some great ideas being um presented and i'm excited about listening to how we're actually going to reach every student because i think that it was unacceptable you know that we had hundreds of kids that were not reached and and the onus is on us to reach out to them and to get to each of them in a timely manner so how

158are we going to ensure that every single student this time around is actually reached every single day and and you know not for over two days you know just as if we were in regular um insight in person learning on site like we would check in on them if they're missing you know one day if they don't go with two days then that's like we have to check in um so how are we going to ensure that in a systemic way is it going to look like excel sheets that are shareable and easily accessible by authorized staff on campus is it going to be because i know not everyone's going to have a chance to go in power school or access to barber school yes so i didn't include and i know there was a

159speaker tonight who asked about the students we hadn't been able to track down and i actually have information about that in my superintendence report um and all of the the work that the school community outreach workers have done through the summer to track down students um i think the big difference will be how we take attendance we really were taking that basically once a week through one class and we will be doing that more frequently if not in every single period especially at the secondary schools where they do have multiple periods and different classes um so i think the change in the attendance taking will be very important for us and will solve you know i think three quarters of that problem and then we'll take what we've learned from this year around who are

160the students that have been missing why have they been missing and i think we're getting even stronger at dealing with those issues whether it's a internet access a chromebook a food whatever that is i think it's really making sure we know the root cause so we can deal with it not just throwing blanket solutions but what's really going on with this kid what does he need or she need and getting after it so i think we've done a really nice job pivoting and quickly figuring out what was happening with all these students we just have to take that learning and implement it thank you um yeah and i think that what we're learning i know that i recently learned that the majority of or not the majority half of the students were not reached and

161you can um correct me if it's accurate but the half of the students that were not reached uh were english language learners that's correct and that data will be you know we'll have that data in front of us um some of it we've heard has been uh translation issues and just communication issues uh with with students who don't not necessarily spanish speakers also we know we've had a lot of our recent immigration of students who speak indigenous languages you know so making sure we have actually translation in some of those other languages to be able to connect to families is important and i'm just having yeah and i and i think i would really um sorry i think everybody froze i don't know if that's my connection uh i'm okay miss laura do you want

162to take over here for a minute while we i'm back i'm back okay so sorry i don't know what happened my computer froze and then everything went away and now we're back um sorry about that so i i just wanted to um you know i didn't get to hear the very last part of your i think of your answer mr duffy but i just want us to stay very um sharp on what systems we're going to create so i would really like to see um explicitly what what kinds of systems we're going to be using at the at the site levels once we have the presentation on what the plan is going to look like when we begin schools when we begin classes um and in what you know non-traditional ways of reaching students um

163we're going to embark on as well because it sounds like a lot of these students may need additional um outreach that is not traditional um and that is not effective with um you know with with them as as you know their needs are not being met so i i'm i'm really uh looking forward to having that conversation and just having a lot of transparency about the work that we need to do to focus on english language learners um in this work um and then let's see let me find my okay and i'm guessing that parts of the negotiations are also going to um include how to maximize the the you know the services of scouts of a psychologist um and everyone on board in addition to to teachers to to support that work of checking

164in with students and ensuring that everybody is reached too yeah yes thank you and you were alluding a little bit to this and talking about uh social emotional learning um supports for students and having like support groups having a time that is not academic but that is actually to support the development of children and their peer relationships and just having that time to to connect with others um are you are you thinking about also having um safe virtual spaces for parents uh that are you know specifically um based on their interests or the groups that they identified with uh such as having african-american latinx ell special education um affinity groups so that we can provide that kind of like safe confidential space for them to talk about what's working their experience what's not working and

165and just have have a space that's for them and that's not necessarily um with the pressures of other other people around but just something you know that they can't have as a community even if it's virtual yes i i mean i think we can start also to build off of the committees that we have established inside of schools already you know really making sure there's functioning apacs which are the african-american parent advisory groups the um the um ah why am i forgetting the um the elacs excuse me our english learner advisory councils you know just that those are all up and running in the virtual environment um so people have those spaces to connect um and i think we just have to work with our parent community and see what else they need they've certainly

166asked for you know more training sessions um you know around the tools hearing earlier from schools and uh school leaders about what's gonna happen uh during the year um so we'll continue to take our cues from them also about you know what they need thank you and and i think that also um we need to look i think these are gonna be areas that we're going to be looking at very closely and i just want to confirm that with you too um can everybody hear me still yes but then no okay so now she's frozen okay mr duffy did you finish answering all of her questions i think i answered the ones that i heard my sense was that there are a few more i did want to take a moment um to mention that

167we will you know move that task force into four working groups so this question of like how fast can you move the work um and they will have one parent and one student on each of them but we're going to try to be agile and move and get these details um hammered out and again for people who are really interested in that report about sort of the the missing students or the students who didn't attend regularly through the spring i'll be talking about that in my superintendence report that's good that's good and i think you have a lot of different ways to communicate with us with the uh presentations and uh i think that that's your uh communications that you also send out to everyone so we can get those details there as well and

168she's back thank you thank you so much um i am so sorry i my internet seems like it's um disconnecting so i think i will need to be updating that um soon um can everybody hear me again thank you so i i don't know if everybody heard what i was saying but i was talking about how i think that we need to make sure that in in talks with uh you know everybody who's going to be on board with distance earning our teachers our administrators we need to have um a set of understandings around which assessments will be most useful which are going to be the essential standards and skills that are going to be um you know taught knowing that we cannot go for every single thing right now but we're really going to

169have to focus on what are the most essential things that kids on specific age groups need to be able to do and learn and and how to work as a team to do that um at a site and and across schools in the district and in making you know assessments that are doable and useful for teachers and for parents too to to really support students during this time academically as well as social emotionally and i think also you know to keep in mind when you have uh conversations uh mr duffy um with uh labor partners and with everybody about the need to ensure that we have equity and how we provide um a synchronous and synchronous education i think that uh trustee bonus was talking a little bit about that earlier um and making sure

170that there's an understanding if you know if it's going to be seesaw if it's going to be dropbox if it's going to be google classroom files uh what are the the actual accessibility points for content for students who cannot participate during the live sessions or who may miss one um i hope that everybody is able to participate and that we can find live sessions um that are either you know in the morning afternoon evening and just something that works for kids um but i really want us to make sure that we have these conversations and and have mutual understandings with everybody who's going to be doing this work um and in the last the last question that i have is about anti-bias anti-racist classroom management in a virtual setting what is that going um to

171look like and do you have do you have a vision that you're sharing with people about that um in the weekly focus in virtual education that's a great question so the way we're trying to frame it is that we would have weekly time uh for all of our staff to do professional learning around um technology you know traditional content etc and we would have another block of time where staff would do professional learning around issues of race and equity and inside of there you would you know tackle questions like discipline disproportionality and that's a place i think we would have to talk district-wide but i also think schools are going to need to talk to each other as a new school community about what discipline really looks like in the virtual world right um so

172we're making sure that we're not just snapping off somebody's screen because we're frustrated with their behavior the same it would be of just like quickly kicking them out of class and we're working through that but i would say that's also really new territory for us and it's a place that we're going to need to collect data to understand how many kids are being disciplined in the virtual world because i do think our students have so many more options to not attend or to leave or to turn off like they're much more in control in that way of deciding you know when they're going to engage and not and i think with that we really need to understand from our teachers um how they're dealing with discipline inside the virtual world what they need from us

173and then where where the hot spots are you know are there a set of classrooms that are really struggling with that and how can we help but it is i think it's a new area for us we're really getting good at dealing with a lot of that work in person um and now we have to to make that shift thank you yeah and i just want to remind us all you know this is my last question and i just have a few more comments before if anybody else has any other um follow-up comments they would like to make before we finish this item but i think that the work that we're doing here is work of you know about racial justice and we know that communities of color are being disproportionately affected and kids of

174color too are also being disproportionately affected by school closures and the pandemic um i think that making you know priorities and practices that really benefit kids such as having designated yield the instructional time to ensure that we have a focus on english language learners making sure that we have social emotional learning opportunities and connections accessibility reaching kids in non-traditional ways hands-on learning kits or weekly or monthly sets for for younger students especially um equity and scheduling classes too and just systemic understandings and supports and expectations for all sites you know i think that we're going to have to provide a lot of support to sites and site leaders and i think that you brought up a great point about how our kids you know um disciplined in the virtual world i actually don't know anything

175about that and and i have not you know in in my short experience doing distance learning this past few months that's not something that um had come up as something that that people are collecting data on yet and so i'm i'm really looking forward to understanding you know what the impacts are and today i was just reading about um a high school student in michigan who has actually been jailed now for almost a month i believe for um not meeting her probation requirements um because she was not checking in via distance learning and because she didn't attend for a few days uh her probation officer actually said that she was not meeting the requirements and i just think it's so screwed up that those are the the side you know the the unintended consequences i

176guess of of distance earning and how people may leverage that and i just think that so many of our teachers did an amazing job at reaching students and i i hope that we get to see you know what ways what things do they do to engage their kids and to make them feel welcome and safe to want to keep on coming back and hopefully we we give them a chance to share that as well um and so do you think that we're going to be able to have the plan i mean by the latest by july 29th to share at the special board meeting i am not sure i mean we will share with you everything we have at every board meeting but we are really hoping to finish that week because the following week

177august 3rd is when our administrators return so we'd like to put as much in their hands as possible that's complete you know and just as we have to fill in the framework kind of to this level then they have to go to their schools and then fill it in a bit more so we we want to try to get everything in their hands by the third so we'll present everything we have to you uh on the 29th and we have also a board meeting the following week um so we will you know do this basically um at you know all of the next coming board meetings thank you mr duffy and board members i will wrap it up right now in two minutes i promise i know i've taken longer today so thank you for

178your patience um and in closing you know my comments for this item i just want to say that my goal is to really keep children families and staff safe i want to ensure that any decisions that i make here will not put kids or adults at risk of contracting coven 19 and i firmly believe that it's my responsibility to do so while doing everything that i can at the same time to ensure that the educational opportunities and academic and social emotional programming for kids that we as the school district need to provide um is there to continue to support students and and help them really move toward uh you know pursuing their goals and dreams in life even in this time and as a teacher and as a parent it really does pain me that

179we cannot open our school sites for in-person education and go back to school as we do each august um and and i you know i'm hopeful and i'm confident that we're making the right decision and that we won't be putting the lives of children and their families and stuff at risk and i you know i i i want to be honest as well like trustee phillips said i am not sending my child to school she will be enrolled in distance learning as well and her tk year of education will be very different than what we expected and it is a weird and hard time um for everyone and for some folks more than other more than four others and i i just want to make sure that i keep everybody that i can save um

180and school districts i think i i will always argue are the most important local agencies to be involved in because they have the biggest task in our nation um we're literally interested with educating children providing them with transformational learning opportunities that will impact their lives in the most positive and effective ways to support their dreams and goals literally school districts are tasked with and responsible for the overall shaping of our communities through the very education we provide to students in each neighborhood we serve um and if we don't rise up to that challenge then we really you know let communities down and and this is a huge responsibility in and of itself and on top of that now we have the responsibility to make sure that all children are safe from this pandemic and their

181families and staff and their families as well we are not county health officials we are not state health officials but we do know how to follow guidance by the cdc and we do know how to make sure that we protect them based on that guidance and we are advocates and elected officials interested with keeping all kids in our communities safe and minimizing and even eliminating the risk of cova transmission in our schools um i want to reiterate that no one is disposable here uh we are still having meetings via zoom to minimize and eliminate exposure for ourselves and for the community so we cannot send our kids back to schools only to have another emergency response closure and shift to distance learning if families and staff start to get sick and then have students again

182be pushed to an abrupt transition to distance learning again um i think it should not be a privilege to be able to stay home during a pandemic and minimize exposure but sadly it is and it is an imbalance of social and economic equality and equity that puts many working families and their children at a disadvantage my parents are considered essential workers and they have been working ever since things shut down they work in the food industry food service industry so they don't have for literally a day off um and this takes a toll on all of us it's heartbreaking to know you know that some of our own family members have to go out every single day and and be exposed and not have much of a choice for it and i i think that

183here we have a choice to make a decision that will drastically reduce the risk of so many families and students and staff and their families from becoming infected from covet 19. um other school districts are making this inextricably complicated decision as well and many similarly others completely differently and and if we cannot guarantee the safety of kids and their families and staff and their families then we cannot move forward to in-person instruction um and rush reopening and and i think that we need to you know have urgent work to continue and and to make both decisions that really focus on reaching every single kid literally every single child and in every family in a systemic way that works for them um and there's literally no no way around this responsibility and i keep on saying

184literally because i really mean that like we have to take on this seriously and there's no way around it and and this is something that we need to accomplish during the pandemic and and we need to make sure that we provide the safety the resources and the education our students need as children and human beings first and foremost and we have a responsibility in front of us and i want us to really work tirelessly collaboratively and with urgency to come back on july 29th that's really what i hope that we can see um and what i really want to push for at our special board meeting and be ready with an educational plan even if there's changes to be made i think that our community deserves to have um a clear plan and what the

185implementation is going to to look like and be shared with stakeholders and and that is my hope and that is my my outcome that i would really like for us to to work toward um if not sooner you know but but july 29th date that is something that i really um want to push for so thank you for for listening i know i took a long time today with a monologue but i really want to just really say that i think we need to do the safe the safe decision in this case we cannot rush anything and we cannot do anything lightly um so i if there's any other you know closing comments before we finish this i would like to just go back in the same order to student trustee vasquez trustee panas justin

186cuevas justin phillips trustee lara thank you man this is all so sad and depressing i want to change it up real quick i'll talk about some things maybe that are not as sad um senior activities is one of them uh this is a little bit off topic before i go back on topic but i think we in through all this we can't forget our seniors um and who will be moving on to their next phase we cannot hear you looks like your audio is on but we cannot we cannot hear you can you hear me now yes okay thank you so sorry okay ah sorry about that so one thing i really wanted to talk about with senior activities um i think it's important not to forget our seniors as well through all of this

187um we don't know how long this pandemic will be going on and one one idea that i wanted to share with with you all was maybe putting a group of students together from different schools so that they can collaborate instead of each school doing their own individual activities um students can work together to figure out what they want to do and maybe make it more of a district-wide thing than each school individually that way the students can still maybe find a way to have some fun activities for for the um as activities um seeing how we can't do the normal things right now and we don't know how long it's going to be going on um another thing tomorrow um myself and a few other students from el salvador high school will be meeting with

188our principal to be talking about um just things that affect just our school and not the district and i think that'll be an industry uh interesting conversation to have and i think uh mr duffy maybe that would be uh another interesting thing that we can um try and have other schools do as well so that they're working together with their own school because that is their own community as well um we are also some of us from all students are also trying to plan um a time to meet with teachers um to see what they think of all this um to see what their expectations are but to also tell them what we're expecting and what we think about this that we're all on the same page um again i think it's so important that

189we work together not only as a district but as our little communities our little schools as well um so mr duffy may be planning like that for other schools that could be that could be interesting um good idea internal sorry i said good idea okay um internal bias i think this we've been having this talk for a while now about racism internal bias um is there anything any can anything that's to be that teachers can take anything um in terms of internal bias or racism that will be done before the beginning of school year or at the beginning of the school year mr duffy yes uh but i also want to emphasize that through the school year i think is what's most important sometimes we do some things right at the beginning of the school

190year and then we never revisit them uh for the rest of the year so we're really trying to build out this block this training time but i don't call it less training right i mean it's training but it's reflection it's discussion it's engagement that happens every week for staff that they can do around race and equity around implicit bias and get into those conversations and have a really separate space to talk about the tech tools like google classroom or seesaw i mean those are they're really two separate pieces of work so our goal and and you know as part of this plan is to hammer out how much time we can do how often it happens uh but i definitely see space for us to do that especially with the teachers now i think we

191really have to think about what are the students need for those types of conversations and build that out because sometimes they just you guys want to have those conversations without adults and sometimes you want to have them with adults so we need to you know build both you know i think one of the hardest things for students before and after cover 19 started was the fact that we were always on such a tight schedule and we always had things going on every day so we never really had time to talk about things that are going outside of the school um within maybe our community or within our nation or country uh country or yeah um and so i think hopefully we do have time now or that that is something that we are trying to

192implement or making time for um thank you on the last thing i really i want to touch on real quickly before i'm done is the emotion the emotional well-being of students i know we keep talking about it but i think it's still such an important thing that i'll bring it up again um when i was talking with students before they um in the last few weeks they said that they hadn't heard of any resources um where they could that would help with their emotional well-being on throughout the summer so i think if we could find a way um to make that a bigger deal to make it more exposed uh so more students can hear about it um can reach out to it i think that would be that would be a good idea but

193i think just overall just being mindful that students have emotions and especially with all this change and right now i feel especially just nobody no student really knows what's going to happen for the year and i think that alone is really stressful especially for seniors who are trying to figure out what's going to happen for college i think just being mindful and aware that emotions are a thing and that yeah that that that needs to be taken care of so thank you um thank you president hernandez jarvis i'd like to thank all the trustees uh for their comments um that's president randall jarvis i certainly can't agree disagree with anything you said and i just was like i am just extremely extremely leery about bringing our neediest students our foster homeless language learners low-income special

194ed students together at our student support hubs um and i know that was conceived in equity but i just see to me i just feel like we're putting them in harm's way and these the people who have the least access to medical care the fewest options in general and i i just like i am so uncomfortable about that i and i i didn't say it before but i want to make it really clear that i don't think we should be bringing kids back on august 17th and i think it's going to be like a long time after august 17th when we should be bringing kids back because it's i'm worried about them and just as worried about our staff so um you know risking a child or families or staff's life should not be a

195choice for us but you know we're stuck with that so we have to do whatever we can to protect those lives we have to exhaust all our options to protect our most underserved and i you know to the extent we have i'm just thinking during while other people are talking like you know i'm still hearing about people who have to pay for their internet access and like just like we're not because we're in distance learning all of a sudden they have these new expenses and i just don't know if we can find a way to to pay for that but i just feel so much for these people like they because we're in distance learning they have all these new expenses that they have to pay um and as one last note mr duffy i

196i know that the berkeley school volunteers have been doing a lot of work around using volunteers in the coveted world and reaching out to them [Music] might be a good idea because i've seen some really good stuff coming out and so i'd just like to thank everyone for the conversation tonight thank you trusty bonus justin guavas uh no further comment thank you i think we've kind of all said the same thing at this point thank you trustee gloves trustee phillips just a few quick comments um one as we move into i'm gonna take off the trustee hat and put on the lawyer ahead and i do civil rights uh most of the time so i'm gonna put on the civil rights lawyer hat right um we're the school district so people look at it sometimes

197in a warm and fuzzy way um but we are also frankly the government right um even though people don't think of us that way we are um and as we create these uh zoom classrooms or we have already started doing it um we are uh actually looking the government right now has a uh the opportunity in a way that it has never had before uh to actually look into homes all across america so wherever there are schoolchildren um on zoom there are literally government workers looking into their homes and i know um that is less of an issue for some people but it is a privacy issue uh so one of the things that i would like us to do um is to really push for uh our families to know what their privacy rights

198are because we're basically videotaping the insides of their homes uh through the week um and uh for the families who are on zoom it would be great for them to actually put up that screen um where it's a static load like the static screen like trustee cuevas has so we can't actually see what's behind trusted flavors we just see that video screen and i really think that that's what our families need to be doing and i think that's what families across america need to be doing because the government uh and i'm not trying to sound like a conspiracy theorist or anything like that but i do civil rights work i do civil liberties or the government shouldn't really just be videotaping the inside of people's call that's what's happening in this new zoom environment so

199i would like some discussion around that for our families and how they could alleviate some of that even if it's just putting up the screen uh like trustee cuevas has the other thing that i want to point out very quickly is um our school district stretches over five cities right and it has multiple unincorporated areas and so i know we have people uh and communities within our district because it's so geographically diverse that have been affected by covet 19 differently and so trustee cuevas when she was talking she just listed a number of schools she just laid them out right and those schools are are in the community are moving towards awards that i live in right and and that award for that community um is the same community that the county health officer just

200talked to us about when we look at spikes around the county we look at bay point we look at richmond we look at san pablo and that richmond san pablo border frankly where i live uh is a hot spot for the county so if you live in you know hercules for example or if you live in el cerrito for example it may not be not it may not it it's not affecting uh you in the same way that's affecting other areas and so you need to remember i would hope you remember right like do unto others that there are communities within this school district um and that richmond san pablo quarter that is a hot spot for the entire county um and if we put those families in additional harm's way um that's that that's

201not okay and so i just want folks to remember your your your particular community might not be a hot spot but there is a hot spot for our entire county here and then the last thing i would like to say um president hernandez jarvis you asked about the the 29th uh being our plan possibly being done by then um if it's not um i i just want us to to think about the idea of pushing the clock back on the start of school and if we are going to end up doing that anyway then you know our families they have to plan and they have to plan around the decisions that we make on when school is going to open or not and we're going to have to push it back so we can actually

202do this distance learning thing right we should tell them as soon as possible you know not two weeks before the 17th because then they have to scramble to figure out what uh they're going to do and so i i really think um on the 29th is like two weeks before the 17th and it may not be done and mr duffy said it may not be done either i really think we really have to look at pushing back um and if we're going to do that it needs to be done as soon as possible because families have to plan thank you trustee phillips trusty lotto yes i have to say is that we have 156 oh 154 participants online right now and i would like us to respect their time it's 9 45 and we still

203have a huge agenda to go on thank you thank you trusty lada i have no further comments so it seems that we have reached the end of this item thank you to everybody who's tuned in at home and everybody who is listening um to to know what's going on and i i think every board member and staff member for the work that you've done uh to ensure that we make the best decision for kids during this time especially so thank you everybody and and with that we wrap up our first discussion item and because that one uh was right after public comment we're going to our consent calendar now and uh i want to know if there's a motion to to move that because we already had c2 c4 c5 pulled as well as c11

204and c12 i don't care i'd like to move the remaining items on consent calendar i'll second them motion made by trustee seconded by trustee penis can we please take a vote beginning with our student trustee yes yes yes yes yes motion passes unanimously to approve the cons the remaining consent calendar items that were not pulled up next we are an item d committee communication beginning with the superintendent's report thank you while that's coming up again we have been reporting on sort of distance learning from the spring every week and now we're shifting obviously to moving uh that to planning for the fall so there's some of the things traditionally we had in our covet update that are now in here and we can move this forward so i think we've covered so much in the

205last three and a half hours uh that you know some of this might be redundant and i apologize for that uh but we did hold the friday night town hall um this is the first part of the stakeholder input and the framework is complete um now we're moving obviously into the definer details just wanted to make mention i got out to our summer graduation today i saw trustee phillips out there um i don't know if any other trustees came by afterwards um but you know all the families were out there of students who needed those last additional credits to graduate um and you know just wonderful thank you to the staff and the families and the students and i'm glad we were able to put something together for these students to congratulate them our summer

206offerings continue to be ongoing we've wrapped up a very small literacy program for our rising fifth and sixth grade students and i'll hope to have at our next board meeting a summary of that which was been great um we offered some ongoing content and we had you know 1400 families sign up for just 400 spots so we're looking at how to increase those offerings and as some of you know a part of the situation with the state budget for next year is that they have moved away from the lcap requirement for next year but they have asked us to submit a plan called a learning continuity plan with some specific asks and that's due the 30th of september not going to get into that today but just to put it on your radar we will

207get schools open and build toward this learning continuity plan where we're able to share with the state all of the things that we're doing which you know none of it really will be new we've done a really good job of trying to be aggressive about making sure learning is continuous and we'll share what we're doing with the state through that plan you know this just came up but i really i wanted to make sure that this we we got to show this slide of just how much participation we had um in helping us get to this reopening framework helping us define the priorities that we want in the plan so you see 53 task force members 98 subcommittee members you know 3 300 student surveys 7 000 parent thousand staff you know focus groups 3

208000 people in the town hall so i think we've you know we can we're going to continue to try to get more but a lot of work there from a lot of people upcoming um as we've just spent a few hours talking about filling the opening of school framework with the detailed planning and negotiations two coming board meetings we're still working on staffing budget development on the side making sure we've got a teacher for every classroom um you know finalizing any last administrative positions and i did want to say you know we have heard uh from mr phillips and others who've asked us about our asset our online learning tools um and knowing that we're gonna go into distance learning for an even longer period of time i am going to work with our staff

209to just you know make sure we have the proper student online assessment tools including diagnostic and adaptive assessments and tools so i'm going to ask our staff to look at the tools we have and begin to bring in any vendors that we might want to talk about to enhance that so i will provide an update about that process in terms of just making sure we've got the technology we want especially if we see ourselves in extended distance learning so i'll keep you updated on that i wanted to just do a quick update on the distance learning non-participation of the 70 753 students that we uh felt did not attend anything through the spring so we started an outreach program through our scows calling contacting reaching out in multiple different ways and home visits and i

210wanted to to share on the next slide uh next couple of slides a little bit more of what we've learned and i think if miss logan is here she can also help share a little bit about um this data but you can see um first we reduce that number to 507 students just due to school ouch outreach one school was out being much more aggressive through school-based staff trying to track down those students and then through the summer we continued that work and that 507 has dropped down to 112 students and you can see the breakup of the 112 students there by ethnicity and race that we still haven't tracked down and we started some home visits late last week in early into this week to track down those 112 students and you'll see here

211a little bit what we learned about those students was 68 saw internet as a main barrier many of them had moved were flagged for more support given the complexity of their case many parents experience shame frustration confusion when trying to engage with distance learning some parents communicated they didn't know how to find teachers when they lost the contact information and many parents were unaware their child was not participating because they saw them on their chromebooks so all sorts of different comments were using to help us think through obviously and this goes to the last three hours of discussion but what's going to be in place for these students and then you'll see obviously taking those points and talking about what we need to do going forward so you know there are many opportunities for us

212to get better many opportunities for us to think about what we weren't able to do during those three months when we were in much more of a crisis mode and put those things in place going forward so i really thank the school community outreach workers marin trujillo and his team for helping us get after that this summer um that's my report for tonight i know we had a big report on obviously the opening of school so i won't take up too much more time uh this evening i know we've got other committee reports so thank you for allowing me to share that with you thank you suprent and duffy and if i may also request uh if you can please uh have staff post uh your superintendent reports because i think that they would be

213useful to have them um put on the with the agenda as a as a you know material or as an attachment to to this item and you know i would also request that we have follow-up and an update on the friday memo in terms of the 112 students that we still need to reach sure thank you and so the next item that we have is standing reports and after this one we will need to extend our meeting thank you i know we did have uh i think we had a card in from mr ghazni about his yes we currently have don ghazni and jose de leon at the moment if we're prepared to start uh don ghazni thank you yeah i got to tell you i'm i'm really proud of myself tonight i was involved

214with two zoo meetings at the same time and i did my own income taxes and i did miss a word of what you you guys said and the other people okay but i know that's what not why you stuck around tonight you know the citizens bond oversight committee met at their regular monthly meeting just two days ago while we welcomed our new members we made fellow well to another member vanessa hill has served us extremely well these past two years as the parent or guardian representative vanessa's expertise in finance has made her a valuable asset on our audit subcommittee and the annual report committee i tried to convince her to reapply but she needs to put her family first like many members of the district's committees and the general public as a parent and a

215member of the cboc vanessa was frustrated with the district and the district's leadership we will miss vanessa and continue our search for a replacement just a reminder to the board and the throngs of fan watching at home we still need volunteers to serve on the cboc to oversee the bond program if you'd like to learn more or to receive an application please feel free to call me at three 510-685-2403 email me at don ghazni d-o-n-g-o-s-n-e-y at comcast.net like most communities the west county community demands oversight of their nearly 2.4 billion dollar investment in rebuilding our educational facilities by the time the interest is paid on the voter approved bonds each and every member of this community whether they're a voter a non-voter a taxpayer or even small children they still get to dig into their

216pockets for nearly thousand dollars each to pay for the schools needed to house the young people of west kennedy west county as you make every effort to educate them with that kind of an ongoing expenditure it should be easy to understand why the people investing so heavily might demand oversight oversight is merely a set of checks and balances and when everyone is conducting their affairs honestly and above board there is nothing to fear the wcc usd board of education has always conducted their affairs openly and publicly individual members of the community might disagree with the decisions of the board or might feel that the board isn't listening but their business is conducted openly and the public is always encouraged to lobby for their preferences even if their lobbying is limited to just 60 seconds even

217though the board approves the nominations of the cboc members the cboc's responsibility isn't to represent the board it's to stand up for the people of west county to be their eyes ears and voices during the recent campaign for measure r district staff routinely used the cboc as an assurance to the voters that this set of checks and balances was in place and they could rest assured that their investment is safe the volunteer members of the cboc take this responsibility seriously at our cboc meeting last monday we had a 67-minute discussion about the need for an updated facilities master plan one of the 112 recommendations included in the forensic accounting investigation was that the fmp should be updated every five years even though the fba fmp was drafted in 2015 it wasn't until 2016 that it

218was approved the lengthy discussion by the cboc focused on making sure that the board knew that people were looking at the calendar to ensure that the update was progressing so the finalized update would be useful could be useful could be used before the measurer bond funds were allocated several members of the cboc also expressed their continuing disappointment in the district for their failure to be extremely explicit when it comes to bond measure ballot language so the public would know that some exactitude on with some executed on how the funds would be spent i suppose there will always be differences of opinion on whether the district should be allowed latitude about how funds might be spent 10 to 12 years after the bond measure was passed but as chair of the cboc i want to be

219sure that it's not just my own opinions that are reported to the board and the public just as the poor board may not agree on every issue every viewpoint needs to be heard another issue of concern is the normally scheduled joint meeting between the board and the cboc that per board policy is held in the third quarter of the year you might recall that we had a joint meeting scheduled for the end of march but because of the shelter-in-place orders at the time the meeting was cancelled when the board recently approved their schedule for the rest of the year the september joint meeting must have fallen off that calendar i recently sent the board and senior staff a formal letter asking that they work with the cboc to schedule a september meeting that invitation has

220so far gone on and said but it still stands these joint meetings are an important tool where the two bodies and the public that we all represent can have discussions on the critical issues of the day and without the looming clock that shuts down our end of the discussions when we come before you at your meetings as another reminder of extended invitation several times this year to meet with me individually so i might learn more about your issues with the cboc and the oversight of the bond program i extend that invitation again just because the board could not come to an agreement with the cboc when we proposed the amendments to board policy 7214.2 this didn't mean that the problems went away and lastly that same board policy says that the board will have a

221liaison at our meetings we'd love to have a representative of the board that wants to work with us attend our meetings and attend our meetings in a collaborative partnership as another reminder our next meeting will be hosted at 2pm on monday afternoon august 10th everybody is welcome thank you very much thank you mr cosney mr walton do we have any other reporting committees we have one more from jose de leon thank you mr de leon please unmute yourself um good evening board members uh actually good night for remembers mr duffy um first of all uh thank you very much for the work that was put forth thoughtfully in creating this plan i also want to publicly recognize all the administrators that took up um along with teachers that took up their their summer to be

222part of this ongoing project um and to remind that communications will be the most important part of all this and to make sure that the sites understand um so they can explain to their community when they get asked directly what is the next steps on in this distance learning um even though uh we are are sometimes on sites uh sometimes working from home we're always making sure that we can communicate with our teachers classified and our parents and students so but once again thank you administrator for the work you've done in collaboration with the different subcommittees and task force and um thank you very much and have a good night thank you mr leon uh trustee uh president hernandez jarvis can i just two quick things still in the standing reports i mentioned that the

223home visits started this week but they're actually starting next week so i wanted to clarify that i know our folks have worked hard to get agreement around what that would look like so i just wanted to make that clear and um also i know mr ghazni has requested a response about a joint meeting and mr ghazni i'll just tell you uh i it's on the list i owe you that call to set that meeting up so um we will get to it and i i apologize uh but um it's it's there and we will make it happen thank you superintendent duffy mr walton do we have any further committee reports we do not that concludes our committee reports thank you so board members i would like to to know if we um are ready to

224extend the meeting we have one more committee communication item and then we have three discussion items and then we have four action items plus the five items that were pulled from the consent calendar so i would say that if we have another hour and a half we may be able to get through all of those before that hopefully uh i'll move we'll send our meeting for 90 minutes until um that would be 11 30. i second that motion thank you trustee pandas can we please take a vote yes uh i will be voting yes but note i may have to log off at 11 o'clock so let's see how much we can get done yes thank you hello laura yes hernandez jarvis yes motion passes unanimously to extend the meeting for 30 extra minutes so

225we will go till 11 30. thank you our next item is d3 in memory of members of the school community thank you welcome as we often do the district would like to take time to recognize the contributions of members of our school community who have passed away and we request the community submit names to reported as a regular part of each agenda kennedy high school graduate and past board trustee and president randall randy enis recently passed away mr enis and his three younger siblings all graduated from kennedy high school where his mother was president of a large and involved pta randy was the center on the football team and catcher on the baseball team both athletic and social he graduated from contra costa community college in uc berkeley to become a social science teacher as

226well as social science department chair and ap instructor at kennedy in the then richmond unified school district in january 1970. he coached football and baseball and was joined by his father john enos a richmond high social science teacher in coaching duties he served as principal at gompers alternative education high school and portal of middle school as well as in positions of assistant principal after retirement mr enos continued service to the education community with a four-year term as trustee of the west contra costa board of education from 2012-2016 the enis family demonstrates generations of commitment to education and betterment of students with his father wife and daughter all serving as educators in this district i'd like to say on a personal note mr enos was part of the group of trustees who hired me in 2016.

227he was president when i came here and i got to know him very well i'll fondly remember him driving me around and proudly touring me of the district and his favorite spots and taking me to lunch at portamex and sharing just how enthused he was about the district and all of the students here he loved the kids and i just have such fond memories of him and he would come into the office after his presidency and talk and talk to me about what was on his mind and share thoughts and questions and um i really really will miss mr enus and my thoughts go out to the family and the friends of mr enos so let's take a moment of silence please thank you mr duffy for sharing um about mr arenas and the impact

228that he had in our community and in the district and all of the lives of students and of staff that he touched and just the impact that he had in you know um helping you become part of this community and i know that there's also board members who who knew him personally so i just want to also extend my condolences to his family and to to board members who had um you know a personal and a collaborative relationship with him thank you i know the family will be very appreciative of that thank you board members uh yes trustee phillips uh i just wanted to just take a couple of seconds uh and just publicly offer my condolences to the family um randy was a a booster i mean there's no real other way to put

229it he was a booster for the district he loved the district um and he loved the district because this deal was his home so i do want to publicly acknowledge the service um that he rendered um service that he rendered as a professional for pay and service that he rendered as a volunteer because he did both um he was a fine man and he is a big loss to our community um and i just want to say here and now that i i do appreciate him for what he did for the district but also um that he was really uh an open person i remember the first time i ran for school board uh sitting down and talking with him and virgil weeks and uh he was willing he was one of those people who

230um i guess he never stopped teaching right because he was willing to sit down with you and talk with you uh and work things uh through with you um and that just goes to show you know how big of a person um you know he really was so thank you uh for his work for his his service for his time and i want to thank his family for sharing him with us thank you trustee phillips before we move on to the next item i just want to make sure that i offer the space and time for any other trustees who would like to also share any words thank you trustees thank you so we are going to continue now with our second discussion item item e2 community connectivity assessment may i suggest that for each

231of these three items number two three and four we propose a maximum of 15 minutes if we can get through it number three might be 20 um but and i will be happy to keep time and let you know where we are we think we can do number two in 15 minutes um at the most so happy to keep time and i'll let you know where we are in 15 minutes thank you for the suggestion uh mr duffy i think that makes sense so let's begin with the item e2 with a 15 minute timer thank you great thank you good evening everyone um so we wanted to bring to you this evening a discussion around the status of our digital divide in our community and our strategies that we are pursuing and looking to pursue

232both on a short-term and long-term basis so i'm going to bring up first a slide deck bear with me a sec so status of the digital divide in our community what you see before you on the screen right now is a map of our students and our schools so our schools are the blue dots and our students are the black dots you'll notice that the black dots are concentrated primarily in the richmond and san pablo area this is data that we've collected over the course of the spring as families and then staff on behalf and community organizations on behalf of families indicated that families did not have home internet and needed support with a hot spot we continued to collect this data even as we provided hotspots so that we could really get a sense

233of where our families who have the most need when it comes to home internet again you can see the concentration in the san pablo richmond area although the dots are certainly throughout our five cities so in terms of what we have been doing about it on the short term is hot spots we distributed 1795 hot spots to students where when we learned that there was need those hot spots came to us through primarily through the sprint 1 million grant that we became recipients of several years ago and through that grant we've been able to equip many students with hot spots that said we we think that that it is still a good short-term solution um unfortunately the sprint 1 million program as a grant is sun setting so as many of you are aware sprint

234and t-mobile have merged the sprint 1 million philanthropic arm will be sun setting we will continue to be able to use the hotspots that we have in our possession that students have in their possession we just aren't able to acquire new and additional so one of the items that you had before you this evening on consent was the purchase of an additional 2000 hotspots through t-mobile those are not through a grant those we are purchasing the hotspots themselves we've been able to acquire at no cost for the device but there is a monthly service charge we were fortunate to receive through cde and a generous donation from google three months free so that brought the monthly down and so we are committing to a year of 2000 hot spots unlimited data at about 15 per

235hot spot per month it adds up it's almost 400 000 for 2000 hot spots we believe with those 2000 hot spots we'll be able to meet the need right now however we know given the economic situation based on the pandemic that the number will grow and it's it's difficult to forecast exactly how uh how much it will grow i also wanted to highlight thank you trustee phillips for bringing up um the hot spot need um certainly in terms of solutions i want to be sure families know that we do have hot spots in our possession right now so if you need home internet access for next year please let us know right now you can call us the numbers on the screen that's our it office we're open throughout the summer and we can arrange

236to get a hot spot to you so please let us know and we are happy to quickly support with that additionally in terms of um phones the ability to use phones to connect with learning and and for students to connect with teachers uh google meets and zoom does have the call-in function available in every single session so that is certainly an option for families although i do want to say that we want to support families and students to every degree possible to make sure that students can it can experience and engage in the learning 100 through the internet with video so again please reach out if you need a hot spot we also in terms of short-term solution continue to work with the city of richmond to pursue potential partnership opportunities the latest looks like

237the ability to install our super spots which we were gifted from t-mobile education super highway on the bookmobiles which could be parked around town and then obviously observing social distance so again we believe these short-term solutions are are good they will meet the need right now however they don't allow us to fundamentally solve the problem and and i recognize that we as a school district are also not in a position in and of ourselves to solve this problem 100 however we know that students having reliable internet connection is key for their learning in this time of dependent pandemic and distance learning so we need a cost-effective solution that will get all of our students reliably connected to high-speed broadband for the long term which is what we wanted to discuss with you this evening the

238long-term solution we believe that there are three different possible solutions that we could explore and wanted to get your thinking and perspective on these ideas the first is around advocacy the second is a community wi-fi solution which would need to be built out and the third is a procurement solution so in terms of advocacy uh the bill that seems the most sort of probable um and backed by the schools health libraries broadband coalition known as shelby is calling on congress to provide 5.25 billion dollars in one-time funding for schools and libraries to provide home broadband via ebrate so we receive e-rate funds right now but we're only allowed to use them for our schools not beyond this would actually allow us to extend those dollars use those funding to extend broadband into homes beyond our

239schools so our our suggestion uh our proposed next steps would be to bring a resolution to the next board meeting and in partnership with supervisor joya's office who is also on board to support this from an advocacy standpoint so i wanted to get your thoughts on that secondly which we'll explore a little bit more in depth this evening is the possibility of building out a community wi-fi solution three possible approaches i'm not going to speak more on this right now i will bring in um an expert that can share more about what this could look like and what it would take and then the third option is a procurement option which we are exploring um and this would be a way of actually procuring an internet that we would pay for families directly so our

240strategy here is how can we showcase the amazing ita academies at kennedy deanza and el cerrito high to bring in business to help us close the divide and support our cte programs so i wanted to thank specifically trustee lara for helping us to put this back on the radar and really begin reinvigorating our business to education executive board and we'll bring an update about this possible procurement solution to a for future board meeting so again high level this is not our work alone we cannot do it alone partnerships are key we want to bypass politics and connect our students to the most cost effective long-term solution and i want to thank all of our partners that already exist in this work i could just take a moment to call out the cities of richmond and

241san pablo supervisor joya's office trustee lara mr whittier and the whittier foundation the sprint 1 million project that's been um so journal generous with us and our students t-mobile and their potential new project 10 million which may be a new program to bring um affordable hotspots to families the ita academy specifically dr moore and ms perez and the students leslie reckler for her support with letter writing and grant writing through the plc education superhighway which is a non-profit advocacy group the generous donations of netgear att google cde and go public schools are partners in advocacy research so i'm going to stop there and turn it over to an expert in the field that we've brought in to help us assess what would it look like what would it take to potentially build out a community

242wi-fi solution so kyle are you are you with us uh yes tracy i am great so i will pull up um the document but you can go ahead and get started okay uh thank you board members and staff of west contra crosstalk unified school district it's an honor to be here tonight i just wanted to thank you guys for the opportunity to present to you guys some community wi-fi assessments that we found for you guys um a little bit about who we are infiniti communications is a firm located in bakersfield california that specializes in technology consulting for the k-12 market um we specialize in e-rate but we also design large network uh wireless and metro wide area networks and wireless networks for communities what we found and what we were tasked with was finding the

243most equitable solution to provide the greatest coverage and connectivity to the area of most need and moving out towards beyond uh and from that we were informed that you guys did pass measure r and that most of the monies to be used for this would be joined from measure r along with some other funding sources so i'll jump right into it we have a couple of different options that we found based on some of our scenarios and assessments that we did we did a very high level assessment we wanted to give you a very high level cost assessment for what things look like and what the different options available to you are and what that kind of looks like on a roll out um scenario one being lte or long-term evolution in the it's called

244band 41 it's what your cell phone uses on a regular basis to have communication with the internet your isp service provider being sprint t-mobile a t verizon whoever that long-term evolution connectivity provides you a rather fast speed um if you've noticed some people are able to conduct zoom meetings and whatnot from their phone with limited latency and acceptable connectivity so the district would in this scenario they would install towers on certain strategic campuses throughout the district and that would provide an lte signal out to student hot spots since the school has the district has already purchased hot spots the hot spots that you currently have upon further investigation obviously could be used and a sim card swap could be put in there that would then apply this to your district lte service so there would

245be no potentially no purchase of additional equipment beyond the radio towers there are however licenses that are needed to provide this type of service currently there are no available licenses uh for purchase licenses come in in a wave and they go up for auction in not yearly but i believe it's every three or four years they go up for auction there's rumor that later this year some of that lte bandwidth will be up for auction in your geographical area so while this particular solution doesn't fit you 100 right now today towards the end of the year if the lte spectrum does become available for purchase this could be a viable option for the district um what it does provide in this band 41 is the highest level of mobility available to your users because you're

246using those hot spots you're able to use it in your home you're able to use it in your vehicle you're able to use it from the library or starbucks wherever you're located at as long as you have sell signal in that location you're able to use it there so the coverage is fantastic it doesn't require too much on the front side but it does require that license which is the main prohibitive event for the district at this point because while you do own rf signal you do not own a band 41 license so there is potential to lease that but again that is an ongoing reoccurring cost to the district to lease that and with further investigation we can find out what that cost would be to the district but for these purposes and the

247purpose of this assessment we didn't dive that far into it to make contact with available lease holders um the some of the downturns to this like i said are the licensing and the cost of band 41 equipment is considerably more expensive than the other solutions that we're going to bring in however it's not the most expensive so some of the costs associated with this are a connection management system that manages all of the devices what they're able to connect to the school site equipment we estimated approximately 30 sites across the district would be sufficient to provide adequate coverage there are user endpoints which are required we estimated around four thousand uh currently um tracy mentioned that there's about three thousand students that need to have connectivity on day one um we went with four thousand

248just to be on the safe side as times have changed since the the last time that the packets were sent home for uh home evaluation and then of course there's always the labor cost to install a project like these our estimated total for a one-time installation fee for this project is just slightly over five million dollars uh for initial investment and then an annual maintenance and recurring costs of about fifty thousand um for your backbone equipment which would be the equipment installed on the campuses and then new equipment as it's required um as we're all aware kids um have butter fingers sometimes and so they may drop a device and it no longer works so the replacement of those devices as required right around 150 a piece so that would be your annual maintenance cost

249uh in scenario two where we evaluated the use of what's called the citizens broadband radio service uh what this is is it's a private lte network that is free it's called band 48 the license itself is free and regulated by the fcc so as soon as you register your license with the fcc no one else is allowed to use that license in the area um it's a very wideband spectrum and it is not available for commercial use so att um verizon sprint t-mobile any of those they're not allowed to use this spectrum they're regulated to band 41 which is our previous scenario but band 48 is specifically reserved for citizens non-commercial use so this is where we believe that band 48 can really benefit the district as there's no cost for a license um now

250the big differentiation between these two is while private lte is still a long-term evolution system it does not support the mobility factor that we see in the band 41 unfortunately it's more beneficial if that user device is stationary uh so in this scenario what we've done is we've moved out and we've uh included i believe you can scroll down just a little bit tracy there we go we included about 54 sites from the district would require some type of equipment to be mounted on it and what we're able to do from this is the minimum range that we will get out of this is a little over half of a mile from the campus and the maximum range that we get is five miles based on equipment that's installed so this provides considerable reach for

251some of the areas out in the panol and rodeo areas elsa bronte areas out where there may not be as many students that require connectivity but those that are out there may not be as close to the campus as they might be in richland or san pablo uh so we will be able to provide them connectivity from each campus um the benefit of this solution there's no license required the coverage is is ample and sufficient and line of sight is not required line of sight becomes a big deal in the next solution that we bring up so we just kind of include this in here this also provides an opportunity to partner with local businesses um so because of the way that this system operates um each campus emits a large radius of connectivity local

252businesses could potentially partner with you guys to provide connectivity in their place to bring in um patrons into their place of business and then increase their foot traffic as well caveats to this are while coverage and distance are excellent uh speeds are great but farther from the school the worse the connection will be that's just the fall off from radio frequency there's nothing we can do about that but that's why we include multiple sites to provide multiple rings and overlapping coverage there is the lack of mobility that we discussed is this system tends to work better when it's a stationary device not a mobile device and then the installation of equipment at a business partner or an exterior requires lease agreements we've worked with several other school districts in the past through these lease agreements

253with legal counsel so while it is it is a more time-consuming effort it's not impossible it's definitely doable so with this system we have the same kind of setup as the previous ones we have connection management school side equipment and then the user end points this solution comes in roughly about six hundred thousand dollars less at four point four million dollars annual maintenance is roughly about the same and the wireless endpoints are the same as well the final scenario that we went through is what we consider wireless broadband to the home um in this solution we put a point to point connection device on each school campus and a point device out in the community be it on a light pole or maybe on a user's home and that device requires line of sight back

254to the school site you must be able to see the path of travel for the information because if you try to send a wireless signal through a building it doesn't usually work out too well on a wireless spectrum on an lte spectrum it's okay but in a wireless spectrum it just doesn't work so the requirement for this is considerably more on the device side in the community however we're able to provide direct wireless access to each user's home and so it differs in the fact that you're not having to have a device for each student um but that device is now installed somewhere out in the community and provides a wireless access radius to the students in that area we find that these solutions tend to work better in high density population areas whether that's

255an apartment complex or something similar or condominiums things of those natures just a high density population a residential area these provide a lot of coverage over a small area and with very good speeds and very good reliability benefits to this again no license is required for these coverage from the school site to the user is measured in kilometers so we can actually go much farther but it does require more devices to provide that area of coverage mobility is if it's if you have strategic partnerships student can have access in more places than just their home or in the community area the downsides and cavias these are installation is required at the student's home or at a business partners location line of sight is required mobility is limited to spaces that have agreed to provide connectivity

256or the students home and the cost due to the increased number of devices required for this the cost is nearly twice as much as what the cost for an lte or a private broadband system is here we have the new equipment over a five-year cycle one-time installation is about a million dollars just for the equipment and then the uh wireless access points that need to go out is about seven million dollars worth of access points uh and then maintenance and wireless backbone is roughly the same as lte but the access points are more expensive [Music] and i believe that should conclude a high-level assessment of what we've discovered and what some of our options for the district are i'll go ahead and turn it back to tracy and if any of the board members have

257any questions i will stick around and be more than happy to answer any questions you might have thanks kyle um and just really quick if dr walt if you want to chime in briefly about um potential financing so the whole goal is to find a way to end that digital divide and so the idea is that you want to use one-time funds that are going to be long-term for that infrastructure so we would be able to based on how we've framed our measures access bond funds if that was a desire of the board to do the installation but not to buy the devices that are ongoing for the students those would have to be something that would be maintained in our operational budget so that's the difference between the lte and the wi-fi wi-fi our

258regular chromebook devices automatically connect to it but you have to pay more on the infrastructure side one time if you go the lte you're going to be paying less on the installation but you will have an ongoing set of devices that you're going to have to have that hot spot connection to make it work but either of them moves towards our goal of taking care of that massive number of black dots so that our students have access thank you so that concludes our presentation um would love to hear any comments from the board thank you miss logan thank you uh to kyle for presenting into um you know for just providing all this information i think it's really useful and eye-opening um before we have any discussion from the board or comments do we have

259public comment mr walton there's no there's one public comment from kate burkhardt thank you miss burkhart you can unmute yes can you hear me yes we can okay thank you very much many years ago there was a radio tower or a cell tower put on one of the campuses and that prompted lots of discussion and about the dangers of having cell towers on campuses that would affect the students at that site and maybe neighbors around it there's great controversy as to whether there's a potential of brain damage and all and i don't know if there it's ever been proven one way or the other but the board did make an agreement at that time that there would never be cell towers put on a school site uh i don't remember what the year was but

260it was probably in the 90s maybe 95ish or something like that but it what did create a great controversy in the district because of the potential health hazard to developing brains and development of of students so for what it's worth good luck thank you in 2003 and that concludes public comment on this item thank you mr walton um so board members if anybody has any questions or comments um it is 10 38 and i would like to begin with a suntrusty vasquez followed by trustee panas trustee cuevas trustee phillips trusty ladder and myself i know where it's short on time so i'll pass up my time thank you president hernandez jarvis i've got just a few questions so are the speeds comparable on the three different solutions so on the lte side of things they

261are what is considered broadband by the fcc so the fcc considers broadband anything over 25 megabytes per second um right now google has released a document stating that google meet their version of zoom requires a minimum of four megabits per second so uh the lte while it provides 25 is considered broadband wireless broadband uh to the third option there that provides more in the range of 300 megabits per second which is considerably faster now granted your lte speeds wireless speeds all of that will depend on the number of users on the system at one time okay um that leads into my second question but they all support the same number of users or i mean are you how are you sizing them so they will support the same number of users um or is there

262a limit on the number of users currently there's no limit on the number of users uh we sized it based on the maps that we were provided by uh miss lupin and the it department so in the areas where we have a greater need for coverage and greater need for user capability and user speed we did provide more of a blanket coverage of that area with multiple overlapping rings of coverage in the more remote areas where we may only have one or two students that were farther out from the campus we did not go and provide additional long distance or higher speed coverages they were on standard which should be at this point without further investigation obviously should be enough to provide them adequate speeds to produce content or do uploads and whatnot of homework

263thank you and if we were going to install these on campuses i'm just wondering how high uh they need to be i know some of you said had to be you said have to be line of sight and also like how prominent are the antennas themselves so the antennas themselves are not very large uh they're not well okay let me back up the scenario one antennas would be roughly the same size as you would see on a standard cell phone tower now because they are that band 41 lte signal uh now if we were talking about the cbrs antennas from band 48 those antennas are considerably smaller roughly 30 inches tall eight inches wide and maybe six inches deep they're not very large but we would put four on a stand creating a 360 degree

264radius pattern of that but they would be mounted 30 30 to 40 feet tall on a mast on the highest point on the campus which is usually the multi-purpose room or the gymnasium okay great um and we're assuming a service life of five years on this equipment we estimate five years we've seen usually on a seven to ten year scale of the availability five years is that rough zone of um you know how many birds have landed on it how many people have tried to hit it with a golf ball things like that okay i mean you seem you seem reluctant i can believe like to to tell us what the the cost of the license is but i mean those these are all like by auction when the spectrum becomes available so it could

265be um do we need more than one license or just a single license it's a single depends on your geographical area because you guys span five cities uh we would have to do a little more research into that to see which licenses are available in which cities uh and that's where the uh difficult part of that comes if you require more than one license to cover the entire geographical area of the district then yeah we would have to go out for more than one type of license okay and are you comfortable like saying what license is worth last auction you just want to completely stay away from that i'd rather steer clear of it because you're competing with some pretty big boys in the industry at that time so um that's where one of our

266considerations would be to potentially lease spectrum from somebody who may already own it they they purchase it in large quantities and yeah okay so like we could lease from somebody else okay those are my questions for now thank you very much absolutely thank you joseph trustee cleverest a quick point of clarification when you're talking about the um option that has the frequency transmitter in it you're not talking about radio frequency are you no ma'am no we're talking it's an lte frequency trick does currently own rf frequency for handheld radios communication um but the lte signal is on a different bandwidth okay i just wanted to um i was a bit confused but it did remind me that we haven't talked about the fact that we do have a radio local radio capacity that we haven't

267thought about using yet the district sorry i'm i apologize when we did do research the district does own currently seven or eight rf frequencies in the area and that's just something mr duffy i hope the task force will think about too that that might be a way to engage uh young children with children's programming or reading lessons and it's as simple as telling folks turn the radio on to this frequency so that's the only thing i'll say about that i'm going to go ahead and ingest more of the options and information that you presented thank you for your presentation on the broadband issue thank you very much yeah i just wanted to add obviously we're past our time but i think really as uh folks tracy kyle laid out sort of options we just want

268to make sure the board is okay with us continuing to bring advocacy forward a resolution around advocacy and continuing to explore these options um and then potentially bringing back to the board you know a stronger recommendation of one or two of these for the board to decide on when we get to that place thank you superintendent duffy and then um trustee i believe trustee phillips is next uh thank you very much um i do think this is something that we should do um we look around the country and we see people moving in this direction already this is something that they're doing up in seattle i know that's a city and we're a school district but i think that it's something that we we really should do i think to the extent that we can

269partner with our cities uh and with the county um i think that that would be uh fantastic because i think this is something that the entire community could benefit from uh not just our students um as we do move forward with this though i i think that we need to take into consideration that in our school community we do have uh students who need to take advantage of something like this but we also have staff um who are disconnected um and that this is something that should be able to uh benefit them as well and that's certificated but that's also classified so i would like to keep all of those folks uh in mind um i know you're going to do some more research and bring some things back to us um i do like

270the idea of basically broadband wi-fi for everyone uh who is within our our service area and like i said i would like to see us partner with um our cities um so it ends up being for uh everyone this is really a space where we could collaborate and do some some good so thank you very much thank you trustee phillips and um i just want to let everybody know that uh student trustee vasquez needed to head off right now um he let me know that he was really tired and that he has to get up early and take care of other stuff so i just wanted to publicly let everybody know and thank him as well for his service and being present today um trustee lara uh no just uh thank you uh veslogian and

271mr gilmore if this is very exciting we're making progress and thank you very much for bringing it thank you i also want to thank ms logan as well as having um mr kyle here with us explaining the differences between the options and just what um we we need to think about will be the best most efficient and affordable and you know short term and long-term plan that will benefit um all kids during distance learning so i thank you for for being present here today for explaining the options and i look forward to learning more and and making an informed decision on how to move forward thank you i'm bored i appreciate it thank you have a good evening thank you miss logan and so uh mr duffy right now you don't need a specific directive

272from the board correct no uh i don't and miss logan if you need anything specifically just let us know otherwise uh we'll move to our next item thank you so our next item is e3 parcel tax discussion yup mr walton's going to introduce this one for us thank you mr duffy um good evening board president hernandez jarvis members of the board uh colleagues um the item before you is a discussion about a potential parcel tax measure on the november ballot and as we um i believe it'll be coming up in a brief moment or are you talking about the slide dab yes the slide show i'm sorry it is in the folder or i can share it tracy i can grab it real quick give me a quick sec i'm almost there okay if it's

273a presentation can we um have it added to our agenda i don't know if it was if you know i don't see it on there so i would really like for us to have it so that the public can have access to it too we will definitely add it to the agenda thank you but the as i mentioned the item before you is a discussion about the potential of putting a parcel tax on the november ballot um next slide please currently property owners in the district pay 7.2 cents per square foot that raises about 9.8 million dollars to support students in this district i would point out that senior citizens and disabled property owners are exempt from this levy next slide please a quick quick overview of the budget adoption expenditures for that 9.8 million

274dollars you can see it follows the it follows the items that are outlined in the measure t uh parcel tax measure that was passed in 2016. uh uh one big piece of it is that the district did in past years come to an agreement to share the parcel tax with the charter schools in the district that's about 1.3 million dollars next slide please quick history of our parcel tax measures back in march of 2004 measure j actually failed the first time the district came back in a special election in june of that same year and passed measure d measure which was a five-year measure measure d in november of 2008 was another five-year measure uh measure k uh lost in june of 2012 but measure g did pass in november and then measure t uh

275most recently in november of 2016. next slide please so the why we're asking for uh the possibility of a parcel tax on the november ballot um just real quickly dr walt has shared this slide several times if you look down to the 2 20 21 22 projected revenues you can see that the projected revenues are below the levels of 2016-17 and that's projected for 21 22 and 22-23 next slide another site dr walt has also shared the big number is that over two years uh the next two years uh total reductions could be uh 32 million dollars and that's an estimate so obviously there's a large um need and uh the parcel tax could go uh a ways towards helping uh fulfill that uh fulfill that need next slide back in october of 2019 the

276district did contract with god be consulting to do uh surveys uh regarding a bond and a parcel tax in either march or november uh the slide in front of you shows the uh results for the parcel tax um if you look in the november uh um uh it shows that we are short obviously a parcel tax needs to have two-thirds vote uh votes and in uh october of 2019 it did the the polling showed that we would be uh come up short by about 10 percent next slide please um by the way the previous slide indicated that uh that would be an ongoing parcel tax um the eight-year option limiting the parcel tax to eight years would um have a little more support but not much uh we'd still be short by by about seven

277or eight percent here as well um 58.1 percent of likely november voters would uh either definitely yes or or probably vote yes on a parcel tax next slide to be clear and in full transparency this would be a second parcel tax that uh would have property owners paying about 14.4 cents per square foot again senior citizens and disabled property owners would be exempt this would raise approximately 20 million dollars a year to support students in the district next slide thank you um quick timeline uh today's july 15th is an opportunity for the board to have a discussion and then on august 5th uh the board would uh we would bring this back for the board to make a decision on whether or not to place this item onto the november ballot um then august 7th

278would be the deadline to file any measures that would appear on the november ballot there you can see the vote by mail mailings from the county off uh county registrar the voter registration deadline and the last day to request a vote by mail ballot and november 3rd would be election day next slide and that concludes the presentation if there is uh if the board has any questions or if there is a desire for discussion now is the time and we do have some public comment thank you mr watson for the presentation um can we please have the public comment sure the first speaker is leslie reckler mrs reckler hello good evening to everybody um many of you know that i'm completely sports blind and i cannot match a ball to a sport and but i

279do know what a hail mary pass and this is is and this is a hail mary pass where you're just going to fling this thing down the field and hope you hit a goal um touchdown there we go um however that being said we have only been able to pass these in presidential elections we're in the presidential year and if we're going to do it this is the year that it needs to be considered i will support you in this and i will try and get the bayside council of ptas to support it as well if that is something that you would be interested in i do want to remind the board that we have a structural deficit according to the american institutes for research getting down to facts published in 2018 based on 2016

2802017 data we are underfunded by at least 10 000 per student to provide an adequate education not even an exceptional one just an adequate one so that's 2016. you know we're we're deep in the hole um so once again i i do put an offer out to help you in the advocacy around this um i don't have a lot of you know i don't have a good feeling that it'll pass but we you know you you won't win it if you're not in it um additionally i'm hoping you'll ask some costs about how much it'll you'll ask some questions about how much this would cost and how would it be funded thank you very much thank you mr walton i couldn't hear you my apologies the next public speaker is don ghazni thank you thank

281you very much yeah i if you don't if you don't live here in richmond chances are you weren't paying attention to the social media sites here in richmond uh that were right before the march 3rd election i was spending all day and half the night seven days a week feeling the negative comments about measure r i mean we're talking in the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them and nobody was speaking in favor of it what they don't trust the district they don't trust the board and they feel that they're being taxed to death and so seeing this uh another measure in the same year being passed i think it's a hail mary is a being polite way of describing it i think it's just a very tough sell and you've got to ask yourself

282who are you going to get to fund the campaign at least on the parcel tax you've got the the building trades unions you've got architects and engineers uh you're trying to finance it they don't have a skin in the game when it comes to uh to a parcel tax so where are you gonna get the money to to finance a campaign for something like these are things we're gonna have to consider i support it i mean the need is unquestionable and uh but it has nothing to do with it actually passing i mean even now i probably spend eight or ten uh comments a day that i'm i'm trying to explain to them about where the money is going who's spending the money why it's why it's going where it's going people don't understand because

283we're not doing a good enough job of communicating what the board actually does because right now i bet you don't have nearly as many people at 11 o'clock listening to this as you would have had at 6 30. because that's when you're trying to tell people about this it's not going to go over all that well so before you uh you take a vote on this at a later meeting i just hope you you think about it long and hard thank you very much thank you and our final public comments from kate burkhardt miss burkhart yes thank you very much kate parker richmond resident you've got to remember that the big thing that is on the november ballot as far as propositions and so forth is the schools and community i would hate to think

284that we would lose the schools and community by a small amount statewide just because of something like this that is going to be a big issue and the more you dig up as far as spending and asking people for money the more they say i'm not going to vote for any of that stuff and the more they say that i don't trust the district and it's just gonna get the it's the camel getting his nose under the tent and the whole business you just rile up everybody let us pass the schools and community first and maybe do a partial tax another time i will certainly vote for it but i won't spend a lot of time on it i've got to spend it on the schools and community and so please consider the other things

285and consider what else cerrito did they tried to pass the parcel tax and failed and the thing that really got people angry with that one was that it was a an undeterminate time frame and people didn't like that part of it and so there's a lot to be looked into before you put this on the ballot right after proposition r and that was a miracle that that passed so good luck uh but think carefully before you do this thank you good night thank you and that concludes public comment thank you mr walton josie bundes do you have any questions thank you sir thank you president hernandez jarvis um i noticed the fiscal impact uh in the tracy shows 9.8 million and mr walton i thought you said 14 million did i get that wrong revenue

286no it would be 9.8 additional um dollars we want to be very clear and very transparent that this would be on top of the current parcel tax okay the combined total would be almost 20 million dollars however um it's only 9.8 million in additional revenue okay and as we're currently conceiving it does it sunset well that's a question for the board to to answer okay fine um i i'll just know like uh we have a parcel tax committee and i assume they haven't weighed in on this but i mean they have i also noticed they haven't uh submitted the annual report for the last parcel tax i don't know if dr wold can tell us when we're expecting to see um that annual report from the parcel tax committee and i'm just wondering if there's

287been any talk among the personal tax committee people about their feeling about this we have not talked with the parcel tax committee about their feelings on on this item okay um well i'll just say i get i i know the parcel tax polled at 56 57 last year um perhaps the voters have changed their minds um what what do we know about what it would cost to put us cost us to put this on the ballot i believe it's uh 150 to 200 000 however because we are uh we have five uh board members up board seats up for election um and it's a it's a presidential prime it's a presidential election uh that cost is much lower than if it were for instance a special election or something like that and i believe if

288i recall correctly and i'll have to make sure that i'm getting it right that that's the combined total for uh the five and the um the five board seats as well as the parcel tax dr walt do you have different information each one would be separate it gets billed total by each item you put on the ballot and then they divide by the number of ballot items we anticipate that we spent over 250 000 for measure r it's going to be less than that because there are more items so we anticipated a 350 000 budget for all ballot items should we do a parcel and the five trustee areas okay thank you for that well i'll just say like if we're going to pass this it's going to be this year in the presidential election

289and i'm kind of in favor of letting the voters say whether or not they're willing to uh pay this additional parcel tax so i'm okay with bringing this forward to have the board vote on going on the ballot that's the end of my comments thank you are you interested in us um trust steve i'm sorry go ahead mr banish um i i would be in favor of having it doesn't have to be a near in sunset you know 15 years 10 years but i i think there ought to be a sunset on this thank you josie um i i don't have any comments at this time um but i do need to let you know that since i've been on with you all since 5 p.m i gotta step away now so um forgive me

290for having to get some sleep tonight but um i trust the board will make good decisions take care everyone thank you trustee gloves trustee phillips thank you um i know that there is a need it's an obvious need but in the spring i supported measure r with reservations and the reservations that i had i spoke very openly about the community that i live in is probably the lowest income community in uh the school district and um but i supported i went ahead and supported measure rn and i did i'll just leave it at that um and now we're in a depression um or at least the recession and i think things are going to get worse we have record unemployment um and i i have a lot of difficulty uh supporting another local tax um

291miss burkhardt called in and talked about schools and community first um and i think that that for me is a better option and that is something that i do support because i think in a time like this it's very important that the burden is spread out uh evenly among the state and i think that the schools and community first ballot measure does that but actually creating a new tax on top of measure r in the middle of a depression um i just i don't think that's what you do to your neighbors so i know i'm one person um but i don't have any intention of supporting this thank you josie phillips trusty ladder yes i just want to say i definitely support putting this tax on the ballot on november thank you thank you so

292i i hear what um the other board members said and i i share that i think that the time to do it is now i know that we are in a pandemic but i also understand that we're in a presidential election and if that amount had already been budgeted um because it was a possibility i think that it makes complete sense to go forward with it so um mr duffy and mr walton um it i noticed that you know you need direction from the board on this item so it sounds like the majority of the war would be um in favor of moving forward with this item so we should get it agendas for the next meeting to continue thank you very much we will thank you thank you mr watson thank you mr duffy

293and board members our next discussion is item e4 disgusting discussion of new proposed budget resolution thank you um i'm going to introduce it and then i'm going to let dr walt speak to some of the budget details so if we could bring this uh prices up that would be helpful thank you so in the prices we tried to outline a little bit of the history of this budget resolution and sort of how this came to be this resolution there was an original resolution that was submitted um by mr panus um and so here we've talked a little bit about kind of the context and why we don't think the resolution as submitted by trustee panis is appropriate and we don't staff does not recommend moving the budget resolution forward we have created an alternative resolution

294if the board is absolutely dedicated with passing some type of budget resolution and in terms of the details that we very specifically disagree with i'll let dr wold get into that but we really do uh while we do believe deeply in accountability we do not want to create a situation that is not sustainable for staff or board in terms of um creating more and more and more uh steps for um for items to be moved through so i'll turn it over to dr wold but again uh in in reviewing this um i certainly did not agree with the original resolution we did our best to craft something uh separate and then um you know again if board wants that we can bring the alternate one forward at least that's staff's recommendation sorry to be clear

295so you have two attachments and i'll let dr wold get into some of the details of these resolutions thank you so we want to start off and say that we absolutely agree with the principles of the original resolution and even the principles of another resolution we have an obligation to provide information to our community we have an obligation to be transparent with how our dollars are spent and we have we have an obligation to make sure that everything we do is clearly delineated throughout there are a lot of needs in this district and there are a lot of challenges over the last year we started a pathway in september towards reducing the 39 million in the current year getting true cuts built in for this coming year the pandemic came and we still kept ourselves

296poised to move forward even with worsening economic conditions we are on pathway to do everything that the board has asked us to it board by lock 9932 on the contracts we froze contracts until we can bring only contracts that have solid amounts to the board moving forward we moved the purchase limit down to the 25 000 again so that we're truly keeping to like the ideals of checking how we're spending every dollar this resolution creates several more committee meetings that take staff time to feed those committee meetings and continue to do that and what we're finding is we need time to do the actual work to train our staff to operationalize the biggest learning that i had when i walked in this district was that there was so many meetings and so many presentations that

297staff was running from one meeting to the next and trying to as soon as one boarding use board meeting was over we're trying to create the presentation materials for the next we need to be able to create the actual systems that maintain this permanently so that we never have a financial issue before later tonight we'll be talking about cash that's now going to be presented at the second board meeting every single month so that we're continuing to go forward i am 100 committed to meeting the accountability that this board has asked for 100 committed to making sure that we present to our community groups and we have many of them that we do present through our recommendation is that we truly have the processes in place we don't need another resolution but if we do

298please do take the time to read the draft that we submitted because it does illustrate that we're going to hold ourselves accountable and even if the board doesn't pass that resolution that's the plan that we put in writing two weeks ago in the friday letter that's still the plan that we have in place so again we're committed we thank trustee panas for his diligence to ensure that we're doing the right thing we just don't think we need to continue to do it in a micromanaging way we can do it collectively and collaboratively together thank you thank you dr walk um mr watson do we have any public comment before board discussion there's one public comment uh leslie reckler thank you mr reckler hello good evening i'll keep it really short um once again uh fiscal

299uh accountability and transparency is absolutely important i appreciate mr panus when i read his resolution and i was deeply concerned about the level of i mean what i'd like you guys to do is to read that resolution and then think of yourselves having to do that job you're all professional people you've had professional careers your professionality needs to be respected you need to be empowered to do your job i would quit that job in a heartbeat because i was just completely micromanaged and not allowed to do the job with grace and dignity and so when you read that think about your own jobs and think about whether you would like to work in an environment that's like that the board's responsibility is to set up systems and structures that empower their people and let them

300rise to their best and not to micromanage them so please think about that thank you and that concludes public comment thank you um so we are going to start with our discussion and it's 11 15 trustee upon us thank you president on this jarvis so um i know that uh there's many opinions on this um i will just note that you know our board bylaws do say that we have a budget committee but among the other committees we should have a budget committee you know staff and that's i'm not talking about the budget committee even though it's like we created last year board bylaws says we actually have a budget committee so if people don't want to do that they don't want to do it we have a district budget engagement committee i guess i

301have a few questions about for staff about this [Music] regarding the budget uh i'm looking at bullet four and the resolution that i provided and it says the budget is created as a new document based on students but development starts from scratch and that's back to programming staffing materials have been proven to directly increase student achievement um i noticed that you didn't want to transfer that text to the resolution you put there um briefly can you say why that was impractical can i say something on that i mean when i read that language that we're going to start from scratch to me and that reads basically lay off everybody start the whole thing over every year and that's just not i mean that's not feasible um and so to me it's unclear what's being asked

302for in language like that um and so that was one fear i had of like how extreme are we talking when we say start the entire budget over every year um i'll i'll let dr walt maybe share his concerns but for me it was certainly that sort of macro level of like what exactly are we talking about here and and that's the first part 85 percent of our budget is staff so to start from scratch you would have to do a formal resolution to do layoffs every year and create that anxiety of all your staff secondly only 15 percent of our budget is non-salary of which as we went through last year we went through that exercise to make very significant cuts there there's very little left to cut in there other than discretionary funds

303that are for academic programs so you're really looking at staff cuts to redo we've already built in with 99 32 our contracts cannot be renewed without proper amos so we've already put a safeguard in there that does require us to in a sense go back to scratch for those things that are not fixed expenses so as written we're doing that through the exercise that we've done now through the dl cap to finding the priorities through each of our groups so we felt that that wasn't something that made sense in a budget that is predominantly people okay so thank you like we all know we have bargaining agreements we can't just go break the bargain ingredients but if you choose to interpret it that way that's okay i wanna go down a little bit further here

304so we were okay on the cash flow um position control report um you didn't include that in your your budget resolution i mean in theory you know in theory position control got us into this we heard mr clark taught last year how we're gonna have position control like taken care of going on to their system i i just don't see that having a position control report um is a large burden like unless we don't really have position control under control yet we have implemented position control it's in progress of finalizing it we just hired a person to be in charge of that for this year they started two weeks ago part of what we i spent the entire year last year is starting to develop the infrastructure and the systems we made a massive reorganization

305of our operations division to get everyone in the right places they started two weeks ago we're now building those systems to create that that report would take a person pretty much every day they would be uploading things onto the website this also now while we do through transparent california put our employees names and salaries out there this is not something that our employee groups want to have that front and center as we go forward we keep position control to ensure that no position is hired that hasn't been approved in the budget but to create that undue burden again it's about creating reports versus doing the work of maintaining the system and so we thank you that's enough thank you so um i completely get it about the employees and i don't have it it doesn't

306have to be i didn't mean to suggest that's been the employee's name if we just said you know fifth grade teacher at madera school if we just said all the teachers at madera school but i like it's i'm really unhappy to hear you saying that we do we don't really have this information available to us i don't know why you think it has to be uploaded to the web every day because we said once a month but i to me like being able to like you can't tell me once or what month who you know what kind of positions do we have at every site and how they're paid for because i also heard that part of all our problem and negotiating with our bargaining units was we didn't know where the money came from

307it's like it sounds to me like we're saying like we still don't know what's paying for each position nor do we know nor do we want to nor do we have a system where we can still like say here's all the positions we have at a site and how are they paid for so is that correct we don't have that yet no we we do have position control in place we have the ability to identify exactly what is assigned to each site that's been the pieces we've done it's the burden of putting it in the formats and the requirements that you're requesting to maintain it it changes every day who and what changes every single day just like at the reports we bring to the board that's true doctor our cash flow our cash flow

308changes every day but we don't ask you to tell us it every day we ask you to tell it once a month what then follows up is having to do a long explanation of every change between every month because that's the second you start providing those information where there are interim changes what you're asking staff to do then is spend their time defining every single micro change that happens in the budget again as your cbo the board can direct us whichever way you want this however is not going to allow us to focus on what we need to be doing which is building systems that are ongoing all right like i'm just really disappointed to hear that you we can't hear once a month we can't see a list once a month of who's where

309and how they're paid for like what positions are filled no it's paid for and i'll remind you that the transparency tool does have the employee position and information on there and that has been updated again so that is available like it's working now after it is we've worked with the company and it is back up online and it has been updated to have employee information at the site level okay thank you that's the end of my comments thank you trustee found us in dr trustee phillips thank you uh very much um dr wold uh [Music] is the person that uh i am depending on uh frankly to direct us out of this mess that we are in uh when we got into this mess um it happened over a period of years but other than

310dr wohl everybody was around who's on this call all the panelists were around at some point during us getting into this mess and so i know how we got here i know who's new uh it's dr wald and frankly uh i'm going with his advice because i i want to get out of this mess and he is frankly the person that i have the most confidence in in helping us get out so those are my comments thank you trustee phillips trusty letter yes i think this uh resolution is totally unnecessary we really don't need it it's micromanaging and in fact it would be detrimental um to the district we it's just not necessary i'm against it thank you thank you trustee um mr duffy a quick question in the precede i noticed that it says

311that the board clerk and the superintendent um let me look at that line i just want to clarify that it's a staff and board clerk strongly disagree with this budget resolution um but nowhere does it say and please correct me if i'm wrong that the the board president that i wanted to bring this forward and that i agreed with most of the resolution can i ask why um i think that was uh i'm sorry that we didn't include that um i think we understood that as implicit uh when we were saying there's board support for it so we wanted to make sure it was explicit in some way that staff didn't agree with it um and that a trustee didn't agree with it who's part of the agenda setting team um so i apologize we

312could have made that more explicit that you are um in support of that i also know we did discuss that together in agenda setting which led us to craft this the next resolution um so again you know please feel free to to share your thoughts here and i'm sorry if we didn't represent that clearly in the crazies thank you for that explanation i just thought it was very odd when i read that that it showed you know essentially that there were sights to it and why why wasn't the other side also represented in the praise team and it's a minuscule detail but i think that it it just gives me a message about how things are being agendized and we did have a discussion about that and and to me i quite frankly don't understand

313what is problematic about transparency and in it being a burden because we're an actual public institution so how is public transparency as an institution um how is it a burden to try to build those systems and i'm not saying that they're going to build be built overnight and i'm not saying it's going to land squarely on our cbo and dr walt i'm saying that this is something that we have to really consider because we need to ensure that we don't allow for the district to be in the mess that it was before and i know that last year we passed a resolution um um i don't know if it was in in july or august i can't remember i'll go back and look but it was essentially saying that we needed to have a more

314focused and and hands-on approach because we wanted to make sure that the money that we do have you know um that is not spent on on salaries and on people that is actually spent on the education of kids is closely monitored and i i'm not saying that we need a cl cash flow update every single day i'm not saying that we need to know which staff is specifically in which position i'm not saying that at all but i think that for me it was important to bring this type of resolution forward so the board could have a conversation because i think that by stating in the precede that staff and the board clerk were against it that was already taken aside without allowing the actual governing body to have a clear discussion about it in

315the past we've had resolutions brought to us by other board members without clear action steps about how they're going to be implemented or the cost to the district yet we've had those and and they've been talked about as as a board and nowhere in the pricey does it say the precedent is for this the clerk is for this or against this so to me it is just not okay to have this type of behavior in the way that we're that we're um agenda seeing items so i would request that in the future that we don't um show that we're taking sites like that you can make a formal and official and professional recommendation in the same way that it's done in the past so that would be my formal request um to staff and it

316doesn't mean that i don't trust stuff i do i do trust staff but i also am entrusted with making sure that i provide oversight that is clear and transparent and regardless of how we vote on any of these resolutions i think that it is it is of utmost importance that we have a clear discussion on the resolutions without trying to sway people into a political conversation because i do not want it to go this way we need to have a conversation that is really focused on how are we ensuring that we're building systems that are going to live here long before us before you know after us so i i just i want to make sure that you know in the future um when there's not clarity about any resolutions brought forward by board member

317by any board member that we check in with them and then we clarify is this what you mean by this or this may be problematic because of this but offering an actual explanation um and so yeah i i'm i am disappointed at that because i don't think we're trying to have a shot at micromanaging and i'm not you know i just i just don't don't get why we couldn't have a clear discussion that didn't have to be like no you're micromanaging this one person has to be the savior and get all of this done like i trust dr walt but i also want to make sure that i'm building systems that support his work and do not make it more burdenous for him but at the same time how can i look and say like

318this percentage you know of funds is actually being spent on educational services for kids or supporting supplies and this is how we're paying for this position and having that position control was part of the conversation that we had last summer so that's going to be that on that but i really want us to have a clear conversation and agenda setting so that we agendize things in a way that is clear for uh trusty ladder for myself as the agenda setting team and for you to and to check in with any board member in advance on things that need clarity and resolutions that have brought forth you know for the board to have a discussion i understand i would just i would simply offer that um everything pretty much everything we bring forward is under the

319assumption when we bring something for action or discussion um it was necessary in some ways that that's unusual and we usually don't actively um go against something that is on the board agenda but that we felt strongly enough that it we needed to articulate that so i understand that we'll try to do a better job of framing the discussion um and show either where everybody stands or where nobody stands so that that's uh you know reflects uh what you're asking for um thank you thank you so i'm not sure if we're gonna have to bring back um a resolution that has more clarity based on the conversation that we just had um and so that trustee cuevas can also be present during that i i don't know i don't think we're gonna have enough um

320a majority from the board at this point um i don't know if anybody would like to make a motion or make any um suggestions to bring it back um for discussion or i just you know want to hear very quickly from everybody justin thank you president i guess i would say like the big thing in i mean like i wish the staff had reached out to me and said like what what about this what about this what about this and no it's just like okay we're gonna jump on it when we get to the meeting um so i'd be happy with the stats revolution if we just added like staff will work to provide regular position control reports because like to me like if i if i had to give i could give up most

321of the things in here but like the position control report it's why we're in the trouble we are right now and to say that we cannot produce a monthly position control report it's great so i'd be happy to take the staff so i was loosely with the physician control report some reasonable language they're added to it but we can't vote this time because it's not on for action yes thank you just upon us um trustee phillip um i mean if we want to bring back the same item so uh trustee cuevas could hear it and give her opinion i guess that's fine um but i don't really see any reason to change anything um at this point because she's not here right and so i the idea would be to get her opinion on what's

322before us right now uh but that said you know you want to bring it back you guys are agenda setting you make the decision i don't you know um but i don't think we should do this um i don't think that it is necessary um i don't think the resolution that was proposed is necessary i don't think the staff compromise resolution is necessary i don't think any of it is necessary um and i do know that it's extremely important uh for us to you know watch the money and that we are in a precarious situation um but i don't really think that this is about watching the money i think to be frank that this is about um being able to say we did something um and and i don't really see it having any

323impact other than us being able to say we did something look at us um i don't see how this is helpful i don't see how this changes anything um i don't really see the substance um so i i i don't support it thank you trustee phillips trusty lotto yeah uh no i'm not interested in uh having this come back uh in any form it's just not necessary thank you thank you thank you justin so i will be in conversation with uh superintendent duffy and trustee lada at agenda setting to have a mutual understanding about what we're going to do with this resolution okay that sounds good thank you thank you moving on to our action items we have four of them before we address the the five consent calendar items that were pulled um it

324is 11 35 so we're officially passed at 90 minutes that the meeting was extended for is there a board member that would like to make a motion to extend it to so moved second why me can we please take a vote i am assigned hello lara no and then this drive is yes so the motion does not pass to yes to no with trusty cuevas absent um we do have certificated provisional in internship permits uh and other items that may be on a tight schedule mr duffy can you please um explain if there's any items that need to be approved tonight i'm gonna need am i am i muted can you hear me uh we can hear you all right i'm looking at the agenda i'm gonna need to hear from my team i believe

325uh number one and two we'd want a quick authorization on to be able to get staff on board the consent items i need to hear from my team and the team can text me and i can speak to the board from there um [Music] and i would of course like to get f3 done for dr wold uh but it can wait um and that's all our items thank you um so and actually f4 was pulled and i didn't mention that right now so we only have three action items so i'm to make a motion that we extend to 12 15 not to 12 50 in my mic oh no 11 50 not 12 50 11 50. that's 30 more minutes a second then second of my trusty pandas can we please take a vote yeah

326let's just let's know lara no and on this drive is yes motion does not pass to extend the meeting to 11 50. um two yes uh yes again trustee finesse and myself who knows jesse phillips and trusty letta and trusty club is absent so we need e1 e2 d2 c2 and c11 can you repeat those again please e1 e2 c2 c11 so you mean f1 right f1 f2 yes i'm sorry f1 f2 f1 c2 c11 c2 and c11 so hold on sorry it's okay c5 can i just make a point of order really quick yes jesse phillips the original motion was to end the meeting at 11 30. we have now had two motions to try to extend the meeting that had been voted down and what i feel like is happening to be frank

327is that the motion the original motion is being ignored that it was 11 30 and then the two motions um that have just been voted down they're being ignored um and i just feel like this is actually what we're doing is out of order the the motions fail the meeting is over and people are just keeping it going because they don't like the way the vote ended up that's what i think is happening thank you trustee phillips for making that point of order i i hear your point and i also want to acknowledge that i needed to check with uh superintendent duffy on anything that needed a vote asap and i understand you voted no twice as well as just a lot and i get that so if that's the will of the board and

328we're not going to have a majority to vote on those things that have time constraints then i will work with trustee lauda and mr duffy to have a special meeting specifically for these items that need to be approved asap superintendent duffy um can we please communicate tomorrow morning with trusty letta about scheduling a time for these items that we did not get to today yes and just one more point of order because now i feel like well if you don't do it now we're gonna have to have a special meeting we already have a special meeting called for the 29th so there's not any reason that this can't be tacked on to the special meeting you already call now i feel like we're being punished because we didn't vote yes with that said i i'm

329done because i don't want to be a stick in the mud but that's how i feel thank you trustee phillips and i respect your viewpoint i know that this meeting has gone long and i also understand that there are time constraints on things that we have to approve so i will work with trustee letta and to brent and duffy to figure out if they can be moved to the july 29th meeting but it sounds like there may be some things that will need to be scheduled um sooner so with that this is a public service and i understand there's public still with us right now and we're going to adjourn our meeting at 11 40 and i will let the community know when we're going to take care of these four items that we did

330not get to today thank you everybody please stay safe wear your masks see you soon thank you thank you have a good night bye