Board Meeting 7-24-25

001All right, we're gonna get started right at 5 p.m. Thank you very much for your patience Good evening board members and I want to call this meeting to order at 5 o 1 p.m Can I get a motion to approve the board agenda as it is so move? Second, it's been moved by trustee Richardson Fowler and seconded by trustee Rodriguez all those in favor. Please say aye aye Any objections any opposition any abstentions? Okay The agenda for today's meeting for July 24th 2025 is approved by those board members present in two absences Any public comment this evening superintendent? All right. No public comment on Closed session agenda. We're gonna go ahead and move into closed session at 5 o 1. Thank you very much Thank you very much for your patience this evening. Thank you

002for coming. Thank you board members superintendent and staff Thank you very much for all your support in making this meeting happen this evening. I Would like for us to reconvene in open session at 6 o 2 p.m And let's go ahead and get started with the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you Thank you very much, and we're gonna go ahead and proceed to the land acknowledgement statement land acknowledgement statement. We should take a moment to acknowledge the land on which we are gathered. For thousands of years, this land has been the home of the Patwin people. Today, there are three federally recognized Patwin tribes, Kachidehi Band of Wintu Indian of the Colusa Indian Community, Ketzeldehi Wintu Nation, and Yochidehi Wintu Nation. The Patwin people have remained committed to the stewardship of this land over many centuries.

003It has been cherished and protected as elders have instructed the young through generations. We are honored and grateful to be here today on their traditional lands. Thank you very much, Trustee Richardson-Fowler. Next is our equity statement. Our equity statement reads as follows. All students deserve excellent schools, which are culturally responsive and set high expectations, a high-quality learning environment, and equitable resources to ensure that they are reaching their full potential. WJUSD will be purposeful about providing equitable access to all essential educational opportunities for all WJUSD students, especially diverse and disadvantaged students who have historically been underserved. by educational institutions. Thank you, Trustee Rodriguez. Board of Trustee agreements. Check in. Remember our larger purpose. Boundaries. Remember that individual decisions are not personal. Open. Aspire to find common ground. Having empathy. Being respectful. And assume best intentions. Thank

004you very much, Trustee Brubaker. And thank you to all the hosts who were able to participate in these. readings of these statements and agreements. I appreciate that. Next one is announcement of any action taken in closed session or items to be approved in open session that were reviewed in closed session. There are none, so we're gonna go ahead and now move to item six, board action. Approve the appointment, employment of the following positions. Principal Freeman Elementary School. I'll take a motion for the approval of the appointment of Stephen Brown for the position of principal of Freeman Elementary. Second. Motion by? No, you say so moved. So moved, sorry. Motion by Trustee Brubaker. Second. And seconded by Trustee Richardson-Fowler. I'll do a roll call vote. Trustee Rodriguez-Molica. Yes. Trustee Richardson-Fowler. Yes. Trustee Garcia. Yes. Trustee Brubaker.

005Yes. Trustee Rodriguez. Yes. Trustee Bautista-Zavala. Aye. It is approved to appoint Stephen Brown for the principal position at Freeman Elementary with six board members present, all in favor and one absent. Today, we welcome Mr. Brown to your new position. Please, we invite you to come up. Thank you very much. Thank you to Superintendent Ortega-Lampkin and Board President Bautista Zavala and Wheatland Joint Unified Board of Trustees. I'm honored to be here. Thank you very much for the opportunity. And to use our metaphor as we talked before, I know that these are big shoes to fill. And I hope to work to encourage, empower, and inspire not just the students, but the faculty and staff and the community of Freeman. Thank you very much for your time and thank you for this opportunity. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

006Any comments from the board before he proceeds to a photo? No. Thank you very much. Yes, I would like to say something. Trustee Garcia. Yes, as the only migrant mom on the board, I want to say gracias. Gracias for your words and for reflect our community. Thank you. Gracias. Mr. Brown go ahead superintendent. Yes. I just want to say we're very excited to have you on board I'm very excited for the Freeman staff and I'm glad to see you some of you here And you know, I've heard um comments about that. You have big shoes to fill and yes THE PRIOR PRINCIPAL LEFT A LEGACY THERE. BUT I WANT TO TELL YOU THAT YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SHOES AND YOUR OWN LEGACY THAT YOU WILL BE BUILDING AND MOVING THE SCHOOL FORWARD. HAVE COMPLETE CONFIDENCE

007IN YOU AND WELCOME. THANK YOU. THANK YOU VERY MUCH, SUPERINTENDENT. I DON'T THINK ANY OF US COULD HAVE SAID THAT PERFECTLY BETTER THAN YOU. I JUST WANT TO ADD THAT THIS PROCESS We as a board are committed to this process and we believe that the outcome of this process that was jointly through You know the community of staff and teachers that participated in this Made a decision and you are the new beginning at this school site So again, I congratulate you and I thank you for selecting our school district And now I invite you to take a photo with our superintendent to congratulate you in your new position. Thank you very much Thank you, thank you for the community for coming and celebrating Mr. Brown, all right, we're gonna continue to the next item on

008the agenda respectfully and this is public comment for sections G consent agenda and we do have one at G 3 a perfect All right. So at G 3 a we do have one This is for the approval of certificated and personnel report. All right, so We'll come back to that. You can go ahead and make the comment that you're gonna do the call consent Or unless you want to table that, I mean, and then do the agenda and then come back to that separately. Any questions or comments on the consent agenda this evening? I'm going to go ahead and ask that we pull item G1A to vote on separate. All right, no questions on the rest of the items. Should we take the public comment now? All right, let's go for it. We have Stacey

009Mounts. My name is Stacey Mounts and I've been the athletic director at Lee for nearly 30 years. I'm here tonight because something happened that left me and many others deeply disappointed, frustrated, and honestly, angry. I'm hoping it doesn't happen to any of the coaches on the agenda tonight. After more than two decades of consistent practice, our soccer coaches received half their usual stipend this year. This reduction came with no warning. not to the coaches athletic directors or principals it wasn't until the checks arrived that anyone received noticed that something had changed let me be clear these coaches had completed the hiring process and were approved they completed all required trainings submitted their applications and timesheets and received positive evaluations they completed their job coached their full season, supported dozens of students along the way. Two

010coaches took their teams to the league championship and one of them won it all. Then without a conversation or heads up, their checks arrived and it was cut in half. Worse still, no one who was a part of this decision-making process let anyone know this was going to happen. In fact, two district employees confirmed the coaches would be paid their usual stipends. After learning of the reduction, I researched what happened. I then called each coach personally to try to explain. And what a difficult conversation that was. I delivered a message I don't fully understand and don't agree with. I don't believe the policy was applied correctly and our athletes will be affected. Jess Graves and Anavo Corona promptly resigned. Emily Stewart, Rogelio Rodriguez, and Marcos Michelle Perez, all experienced, committed coaches, are now unsure if

011they will return. And I don't blame them. This wasn't just a policy decision. It was a decision that sent a message. Your time, your commitment, and your combined 31 years of experience and impact in Woodland Middle Schools doesn't matter. Our coaches don't coach for the money. They make less than minimum wage. They coach because they love kids and for the love of the game. But when you are cut their stipends in half without warning, it becomes about the money. The money should say we value you. Thanks for the great work you do with our kids. What do you think that money said this year? We're already struggling to fill coaching positions across the district. This will make it even harder. It erodes the trust of the community and damages the morale of your staff. And

012ultimately, our students are the ones who pay the price. Upwards of 100 athletes do not have confirmed coaches for the coming season. When a coach leads, kids lose more than a practice schedule. They lose a mentor, a role model, a trusted adult who believes in them, shows up for them, and helps shape who they will become. Who will tell the Douglas League champs why their coach isn't returning? I urge you to consider what kind of culture the district is creating when long-serving staff members feel devalued and disrespected. You say you want to support students, then you need to support the people who serve them. Our coaches do better, and so do our kids. Excellence for all. Thank you. I appreciate the public comment. I'm not going to ask for, I'm personally not going to ask

013for a clarification, but I do want Ms. Mount's. that you do know that I have been following this issue closely. I am very well aware. And if my colleagues have any questions, this item is not agendized, but you are welcome to ask Ms. Mounce any questions for clarification if you would like. But we can't have any deliberation amongst ourselves. Okay. I'm going to go ahead and proceed. That was the only public comment. Thank you for coming this evening. Can I get a motion to approve the consent agenda minus G1A. So moved. Second. It's been motioned by Trustee Richardson-Fowler and seconded by Trustee Rodriguez. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposition or abstentions? Seeing none, it's been passed. The consent agenda minus G1A has passed by all members present. And then a motion

014to approve consent agenda item G1A. Questions or comments on that? I make a motion to approve. Second. Motion to approve. Item G1A has been motioned by Trustee Rodriguez and seconded by Trustee Richardson-Fowler. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. It's been, I am a abstention. So five board members in favor. Motion passes and one abstention by Trustee Bautista-Zavala. Moving on quickly here. to item H, public comment for items on the agenda this evening, seeing none, moving on. Report, superintendent. Okay, good evening everyone and welcome back from your summer breaks. Hopefully you still have a few more. GET AWAYS THAT YOU CAN GET SQUEEZED IN BEFORE THE SCHOOL GETS ROLLING. WE HAVE WIND DOWN OF OUR SUMMER SCHOOL PROGRAMS. YOU WILL GET A REPORT AT THE NEXT BOARD MEETING, A WRITTEN REPORT ON SOME OF

015THE ATTENDANCE INFORMATION AND SOME OF THE PROGRAMS THAT WE OFFER. HERE ARE A FEW PICTURES OF OUR STUDENTS ENGAGED IN ROBOTICS AND ARTS AND ACTIVITIES DURING OUR SUMMER SCHOOL PROGRAM. Want to thank our staff who did all the planning ahead of time and we're we're here working during the summer To make sure our students have the summers experiences. We also had our admin team. We have been praying for the new school year We started on Wednesday And we still have another day tomorrow So they've been here all day yesterday all day today and all day tomorrow and I was very pleased to hear There's some of the highlights that our new principal spoke to because they're remembering about making sure that we lead with encouragement that would use by helping empower empower others and to

016inspire and We've been focusing on that what that means what that mean in as a leader What does that mean for our classroom teachers? What does that mean to all of us in the organization to do that for one another? The other thing we've been focusing on this couple days too is the focus for the year, which is continuing on the focus on professional development, literacy, and student engagement. And while the principals have been getting ready for the last few days, we've had some young people here in our building as well getting ready for their own leadership opportunities. These are students who are peer-to-peer trainers. They're being trained. They're going to be doing our anti-bias training for their peers. And so they've been receiving intense staff development and training on how to present. Along with

017that, I don't have a picture of... of them on this presentation, but we've also had other students also getting trained on leading and guiding the student leadership camp that's coming up in August. So adults are learning in the summer, students are learning in the summer, and everyone's preparing to lead. We are also... Fast and furious working on the game measure why projects finalized you for the start of school for this face this group of schools this summer As you can see we have some pictures here showing you some of the work out there It looks like a big mess out there But it's gonna look much better for the school right before the even the day before even early in the morning People will still be out there doing the final touches and there might

018be a few things that still need to be finalized, but I think we're going to be about 98% complete. Work's being done at Plainfield, SciTech, Prairie, Freeman, Maxwell, Douglas, Woodland Adult Education, and Woodland High School. So if you have a chance to take a drive, so that you can... actually see the before and after. It's amazing how these projects come together and I want to thank Jim and his team for working so closely and monitoring this and keeping me updated on what's happening with Measure Y. And I want to also take the opportunity to thank the public, to thank our staff for all the support in passing this bond measure that is making a big difference to our schools. Finally, state and federal funds, you have all heard. Regarding some of funding freezes that are

019occurring right now. So we currently have about $1.2 million that impacts us personally in the district regarding some of these freezes that involve some of our Title I funds and adult education funds. At this time, we are making adjustments and we're continuing to move forward with our programs. I ended up having the time to speak to all of you in July, made personal phone calls to all of you. I also sent an email to our principals and staff and I did also call our 2W, our WA principal, President and our CSA president just to reassure everyone that this these freezes are not going to stop us or hold us back for making sure that our students receive the services they're entitled to so we're going to continue to serve our immigrant students our English learners

020or adult education students and and hold back on making any drastic decisions about any cuts until we look at the whole picture later on the fall and make decisions then In the meantime, we're gonna continue as business as usual and continue to provide the services and double down on making sure that all of our students regardless of language or identity, immigration status are gonna receive what they need in our district. And that concludes my report. Thank you very much, Superintendent. Any questions for her this evening? Seeing none, we're gonna go ahead and continue. Report from CSEA. Report from WEA. Thank you very much, Ms. Bernard. I have a temporary computer. It's massive right now. I also apologize. I meant to go home and change. I'm sorry. It's summer. We are here. Good evening, Superintendent Artia

021Lampkin, President Batista Zavala, trustees, and members of our community. My name is Becca Bernard, and I'm a science teacher at Douglas Middle School and the proud president of the Woodland Education Association. Summer has flown by, and in just over a week, we are excited to provide lunch and welcome new educators at our new higher orientation on August 1st. Many members will also participate in the four additional paid professional development days from August 5th to the 9th, some even leading sessions themselves. Though our summers may feel shorter than they used to, many members appreciate the opportunity to ease back into the school year and be fairly compensated for their time and expertise. This summer, our union leaders have been attending CTA conferences, training and reflecting on last year's progress and preparing for the work ahead. Our

022bargaining team is ready to return to the table, but we were disappointed that negotiations ended in June without an agreement. Woodland is facing a teacher retention crisis. We remain the lowest paid district among the 15 largest in our region, and that makes it incredibly difficult to hire and keep qualified educators. It's time to be honest with the public. I doubt that many of our community or parents know that each year we bring on 70 to 80, sometimes more, new teachers. That's not just a number. It's dozens of veteran teachers being asked to mentor, train, and support those new colleagues, often without compensation, only to watch many of them leave by June. We are so short-staffed that our superintendent said we would hire a special ed teacher if they were breathing, which I agree. We're now

023recruiting from our own CSCA ranks to enter emergency intern programs, scrambling for solutions, when what we need is long-term investment and transparency. Our students deserve stability. They deserve schools where teachers stick around long enough to build lasting relationships and deep community roots, not classrooms with a revolving door. I want to share a story that's stuck with me since June. During the senior parade, which is when the seniors walk to their elementary and middle schools to see their old teachers, a former student visited my classroom. He was so excited to reminisce and reflect on his middle school experiences, which were only five years ago. But when he asked about his other former teachers, I had to tell him that eight out of the ten that he had remembered had left. Many for other districts, and some

024left teaching for good. I wish you could have seen his body language. His shoulders drooped, the light in his face dimmed, his disappointment was palpable. And then came the question that I didn't know how to answer. Why did they all leave? How do I tell him that the trusted teachers he had built relationships with, who had supported and cared for him, left because they couldn't afford to live in our community? That they left because the cost of health care was so crushing that they had no choice but to look elsewhere. That despite how much they loved their students and this community, they could no longer justify teaching in Woodland. That moment, his disappointment, his confusion, is the true cost of teacher turnover. Our students feel abandoned when their teachers leave our district year after year.

025Students from Prairie have seen high turnover for the last four years. And when I get them in seventh grade, they have told me, why does it matter? These teachers are just going to leave next year. And we feel it as teachers too. Every time a trusted colleague walks away from this district, it chips away at our morale and our belief that things will get better. So I ask you again, when will it stop? When will you do what it takes to retain the educators who pour their hearts into this district? As the new year approaches, I remain hopeful because I believe in our students and in the teachers who have chosen to return despite the challenges. But I'm not naive. I worry about where we're going to be a year from now. How many interns

026won't make it through the year this year? How many veterans will finally say enough is enough and retire? As a teacher and a leader, I hold on to words that remind us of our power to create change. Barack Obama said it best. Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Our students can't keep waiting. Our students deserve stable, fully staffed schools with educators and district leaders who are invested in our community. Thank you, and this concludes my report. Thank you very much. Next up is reports from our board. Any board members have a report this evening? Trustee Richardson-Fowler, please go first. Hey, guys. Sorry, I have really bad allergies that are really kicking

027in right now. I had the pleasure of going to the conference, the Institute for the California Association for Black School Educators. I think that this conference surpassed last year's conference as a SPED teacher. If it works for SPED, it works for all students. If it works for black and brown students, it works for all students. And I took away a lot of important gems that I'll be using in my classroom as well as when it comes to policy for this district as well. And then I just wanted to clarify something real quick about the... PE teachers and the coaches I wanted to let you know that part of the reason I didn't bring up any questions is because our board president who I have full faith and trust said she's monitoring the situation and if

028there's some eyes on the situation and you're getting some answers I figure it's moving forward. If you guys don't get some results please bring it back to us and let us know what's going on. OK. And that concludes my reports. Anyone else. No, trustee Rubico. No, okay. Trustee Garcia. Sorry. Okay. I also attended the CAPC conference, which was amazing. I wanted to very succinctly, I hope, sort of sum up some of the sessions I went with because I am still really... It's all vibrating in my brain and I want to share it with my colleagues. So one of the sessions was about food insecurity and building strategic partnerships with organizations to help address the 20% of California students who are food insecure. And so there were some really interesting ideas presented that I think would

029be worth us considering, especially as we face more financial insecurity going forward to try to help our community any way we can. There was another session on developing trust in the IEP process, which was presented by a school psychologist who wrote her dissertation on the topic. So I am going to reach out to her and get her dissertation and dive into that because I think it was really interesting. And I know that having gone through the IEP process several times as a parent, it's definitely something we can always work to strive to improve on. And then I also attended a session from the Oakland School District, which in 2015 passed a $350 million bond that they passed by a hair's breadth. But because of that, they have just finished building a state-of-the-art high school. They

030had many, many really exciting things. But one of the things that I thought was really interesting is they had facilities for... doing on-site training for things like EMTs. So they had a room where they had an ambulance. So students could actually get into the ambulance, see what that's like, and then leave with graduation with that on their resume already, which gives them real world. training and opportunities. So I think that thinking about ways to broaden our students horizon and on that score would be interesting to consider. And then there was also a district in Pennsylvania that came and talked about a program where they had high school students come and visit first graders and work on reading skills with them to help ensure that a higher percentage of them finish first grade at grade level

031with reading. They the students use they arrange public transportation to get the students from point A to point B. They also had food Supplied for the elementary school students and they could even take like bags of snacks home with them Which I sort of circles back around to the first session I mentioned and then that again that gave the high school students something on their resume and Got the more interest in the teaching which we all know we need more teachers So those were sort of the ones that really stood out to me, but I had a fantastic time. So, thank you trust you to do No report. I don't have a board report this evening, but I am going to take my time for my board report to just touch base on the athletics

032issue. I can't touch on specifics, but I can tell you that I have at the minimum checked in on this issue once a week, if not more often. So I just want my colleagues to know that I am keeping. Close touch on this. I have had a number of athletic coaches reach out to me And I do empathize on the situation and I do trust that the process that needs to be taken is the steps are getting Taken so I want to just thank you very much for participating in public comment one more time. Thank you so much Okay To share with my colleagues, I also am going to add to my board report this evening that tomorrow I will be heading over to Orange County to participate in the executive committee meeting for the

033Latino School Board Association. It's not going to cost our district any money. I just want to make that very transparent and open to you guys. But I'm excited because we have an exciting unity conference happening in September. You guys may have already received the information. So I just wanted to use my board report time to extend the invitation. Superintendent, sometimes the majority of us go. Sometimes we can't because we have overlapping calendars and other challenges that we have to satisfy. Please as a vice president organization, please consider joining us. I'm excited to leave tomorrow and continue the planning for the conference So, please look at the invitation and if you guys are excited about the program, please come moving on in the agenda board committee updates for the Coalition for Woodland youth We did have

034a youth. We did have a meeting This July this month there will not be a meeting next month because it was going to happen the same week as the Yolo County Fair And there's just a lot of different activities going on so there's no meeting next month We did not have a formal meeting this July. It was a meeting, but we did not have a quorum. We did represent our school districts. The need for us represented was there, but the other agencies were not there, so we didn't have a quorum. With that in mind, what did happen was the City of Woodland did have their interns, a summer intern fellows program that they have. Those individuals are paid. And there was probably about, I want to say, 10 or 12 of them. And each of

035them is currently working or interning in a different department for the City of Woodland. It was really exciting to hear from them. and then learn how they eventually can have the opportunity to transition into full-time employment. I did ask the question of how could other groups that participate in the Coalition for Woodland Youth participate and engage in a collaboration in something like this in the near, in the future. They had over 200 applicants. and only about, I think they wanted, they said between 15 and 20 openings. So they had an abundance of applicants. And I expressed that perhaps the Woodland Joint Unified School District could participate. And then the Woodland Community College said they would be interested in participating. Obviously, these are paid positions. I don't know what the stipends would be. But I just

036thought that it would be exciting to see if we could have some summer intern fellows, because there are graduates from universities, whether it's Sac State or... UC Davis. They spend, I think it's, I don't know, between six and eight weeks participating hands-on full-time. Not sure how much it is, one more time. But I thought it would be exciting to see if we could have one of those fellows help in our summer school projects that we have. I think that would be really, really exciting. But that was just an idea. And that item about potential collaboration between the city and other agencies with the Woodland Youth Coalition is gonna appear on the agenda at the next meeting for further discussion. No action is gonna be taken. Obviously, we would have to form some type of formal

037agreement, but I think learning more is what's gonna happen at the next meeting. So I just wanna make sure that you guys are all aware that that's something exciting that the city of Woodland was able to share and showcase. But nothing was talked about on the agenda because we didn't have a quorum. Any other committees? All right, moving on. Teaching and learning. Study session focused on improving student outcomes. I'm gonna pass it on to the superintendent and Trustee Rodriguez-Molica. All right, this is the third meeting out of a... Three meetings our final meeting on Looking at how to support our student achievement in our schools This is the board request from trustee mojica. This is a third session as you recall the other sessions were all the elementary schools We went through all the elementary

038schools and tonight you'll hear from all our secondary schools Each of the principals will be coming up and giving a 10 to 15 minute presentation. They're gonna focus on particular items. They're gonna And then answer any questions that you may have I want to let you know that trustee Mahika also did additional research on secondary school so she'll be presenting in a bit. And this is an opportunity for us to learn, for the board to learn all the wonderful things that you're doing and to understand some of the challenges that you also have and just to kind of get a big picture of what's happening in our school to support our board in making future policy decisions and just having a bit of a pulse of the school. So this is the time to learn

039and so I want you to come up and feel confident because even despite this 10, 15 minute presentation, no one knows. school like you do. You know better than any of us and so you're going to just give us a little insight to support the board in having a better in tune of what's happening across the districts. So with that I'll pass it on to Trustee Mojica. Thank you superintendent Before I jump into the presentation that's on the screen right now. I just want to Give our board and the community a little bit of a recap of the other research that we had shared in the in the previous two meetings That research review focused on schools k-12. So it does apply to our secondary schools that we're going to be focusing on today The

040presentation I have prepared zeroes in on, it says high schools, but it really is secondary schools. A lot of what the research has to say does apply to high schools and middle schools as well. So just as a brief reminder, from the meta-analysis that we've reviewed before, it's actually a... over 185 studies that were reviewed, again, focusing on teaching and learning and improving academic outcomes for students in grades TK all the way to 12. And I'm just going to hit some of the highlights. So we've discussed before that extended learning time or additional hours of instruction has been demonstrated to result in improved learning outcomes. It's one of the reasons why we've asked our administrators to prepare information for us that focuses on their extended learning opportunities. We also have learned that greater duration of

041implementation of any intervention is associated with greater results. So that means that we shouldn't expect to see results right away after months or even a year of implementation, although sometimes you can see some improvements. Sometimes these interventions take a bit of time to be able to end up in results and improve student outcomes. We also learned that district level implementations appear to be more effective than simply school level implementations. So I think that's something important for us as a board and community to remember. We know that professional collaboration around data monitoring of data, decision making based on data is also positively impacts improved student outcomes. Another reason why we've asked for information about professional learning opportunities, professional learning communities at the school site. And we also have talked about teaching experience and we've talked about

042how the greater the years of teaching experience that our teachers have, they actually, the students make significantly, statistically significantly greater gains. So that means that it's really important to focus on retaining our teachers and those teachers that have a lot of experience typically mentor teachers that are just starting out, either interns or teachers at the year one, year two, year three. We know that teachers are also more effective as they have more experience in a particular grade level So the more years of experience in teaching grade 5 for instance the greater impact they're able to make on their students learning in the grade 5 We can see applications for this in the secondary schools as well. Not specifically in grade level, but if they're teaching the same courses. So maybe it's Bio 1 or whatever

043it might be, right? There's applicability in that sense, even if it's not grade level, it's more content area and experience teaching that course. We also know that principals wear a lot of hats. This applies to principals, elementary, middle, and high school. Principals' time spent and skills in five categories of leadership behaviors is positively related to increased student achievement, also positively related to teacher well-being, which helps them be able to stay at the school and stay in the teaching profession. and their instructional practices. And those five categories of leadership, as a reminder, are instructional management, internal relations, organizational management, administration, and external relations, like coming to board meetings and things like this and communicating with the community. The more time that principals are able to spend on these different skills, the greater the impact they can

044make. So it's important for them to spend time across these skills. And one of the suggestions based on this finding in this meta-analysis was trying to increase support for principals because they're already working so many hours beyond that they can't simply work more hours. They need more support. So that's a little bit of a recap on that. And now I'm going to move into the research presentation I have prepared for you all today. Okay, so like I said, this says high school up there, but there's a lot of applicability for our middle schools as well. In looking at the literature to be able to bring to you all today, I did a broad search. And when I was doing that, two big things came up. One of them is that there's a lot of research

045out there on CTE or career and technical education showing that there's a lot of promising. kind of information for it right and increase in student outcomes so i focused on a study by lindsay at all published last year in 2024 and a big finding for that was that participating in career and technical education in high school positively impacts academic achievement graduation college readiness and employability once they exit high school and i'll dig into that just a little bit more in the following slide another um piece that I focused on is titled 10 features of Successfully redesigned schools and that one is published by the Learning Policy Institute just last year lead author is darling Hammond and They identified 10 features of successfully redesigned schools, and they're the ones that you see on the slide right

046now, you'll see that there's two bullets that are highlighted because those are the ones that I'm going to zero in for a conversation today. I'm not going to go through everything slide by slide because you all have access to it and you also have the full report. These were the two that I felt were like the higher level and really useful in our conversations. But if any of you have any questions and want me to go over any of the other slides, I'd be happy to as well. So this is a CTE study and it's titled what we know about the impact of career and technical education a systematic review of the research and this is a meta-analysis of 28 studies that were done over the past 20 years and they focused on Looking at

047what the impact of CTE related programs has been in secondary schools And as just bullet points, if we think about what they found overall, they found that student participation in CTE courses, even just one course, it didn't have to be the whole series, but even in one course had statistically significant positive effect on high school academic achievement. Like I mentioned before, their graduation, employability, and career college readiness. Students that participated in CTE in high school were more likely to have a job post high school when they were compared to similar peers that did not participate in any CTE courses. And what I found really interesting about this one is that participation in even one CTE course can make an impact on students. And there's also no statistically significant negative effects of CTE participation, meaning that

048participating in CTE does not have any harm to students. It doesn't mean that they're not going to go to college. It doesn't mean that they may take longer to graduate or anything like that. So those were the three key bullet points on this study that focused on CTE. It's just one article, but it reviewed 28 studies, and there's a lot more studies out there on CTE now. The next one is redesigning high schools, 10 features for success. And this piece. Really looks at high schools overall and again this applies to middle schools as well And they argue that our current model of high schools. Oh, here we go current model of high schools of having seven to eight periods that are about 45 minutes to 50 minutes long They say it's kind of like a

049factory model because you just turn them out They're 45 minutes in one period or 50 minutes in one period bell rings passing period and they go over to the next one. So they're calling this a factory model and they argue that this model was really designed about 100 years ago and it was never intended to support all students of all different backgrounds like what we have here in Woodland to perform at high levels and they also expected high dropout rates when they first designed this model again about 100 years ago. So The authors argue that if our goal is for all students, all groups of students from all kinds of backgrounds to be able to succeed academically. If we want them all to graduate high school and pursue productive work and go to college, then

050we really need to start thinking about redesigning high schools. And again, there's applicability here for our middle schools as well. So they identified 10 key features or elements that they found that effective redesigned schools had in common, and they created a list. And this is a graphic from the article. And again, you all have access to this PDF. And there's 10 different features ranging from positive developmental relationships. to shared decision-making and leadership. The article, if you look at it, it's organized really well and they have case studies and examples of every single one of these. So it's not just recommendations of this is what you should do, but they have examples of how different schools have implemented these models. And a lot of these different features also happen together. So there's a lot of overlap

051in these features. Again, I'm not going to go through every single one. I am going to focus on number one, positive developmental relationships, and number seven, well-prepared and well-supported teachers. So for positive developmental relationships, They had a lot of different things that they recommend. They recommend smaller learning communities. These could be 300 to 500 students or 300 to 400 students. And this recognizes that a lot of our high schools are really large. So they recommend that having houses or academies, kind of like the Harry Potter houses that they have, right, that are focused on different things, could be helpful because you have little groups of students, little learning communities within a larger school. Schools that have done this have demonstrated results in stronger academic achievement, improved attendance and graduation rates, fewer behavioral incidents, and the

052list goes on and on. For the smaller learning communities, they would have a teacher lead or an assistant principal that would lead those communities. And they would again be houses or academies. And the students would take classes together, but they would also take classes outside of their houses as well, specifically like electives or athletics and things like that. They also recommend investing in teachers. They talk about our secondary teachers just having a huge load of students. That's very, very different from our elementary school teachers where they might have about 30 or over 30 students. Our secondary teachers can see about 150 students, right, because they're teaching so many different periods. So they recommend that we invest in teachers so that they're able to have groups of students that are about 80 to 100 students. That

053doesn't mean in one period, but overall, right? Their roster overall across their periods are 80 to 100 instead of 150. to do this they recommend that we hire more teachers so they can have a smaller student load and to do that reduce non touch non teaching staff and administrators this is a little tricky because of what the research I have reviewed earlier right that says that our admin are already stretched so so thin and they need more support Here they're saying that one way to be able to hire more teachers is to reduce non-teaching staff and administrators as well. They recommend offering fewer electives and partnering with community colleges for dual credit options as well as a way to be able to do this. They recommend block scheduling so teaching fewer groups of students for

054longer periods of time So instead of teaching for 50 minutes, they would be teaching our teachers would be teaching for 90 minutes This would cut the student load in about half and teachers would have time to teach more hands-on lessons Do more project-based learning because they have more time with the students during those period do presentations And students would also be able to focus on fewer subjects at once and engage in more rigorous work in each of their classes. The bullet points just demonstrate some ways that the schools that have been successfully redesigned have done this, either a four by four block, which is the students take four courses in the fall and then four in the spring instead of all together, or what they call an AB block, which is courses on alternating days

055of the week for the full academic year. The next one is still on positive developmental relationships, interdisciplinary courses, having humanities teachers, so a teacher that can teach English and social studies course together, and having longer blocks for this as well. They also recommend looping so that the students can have an increased sense of community with the teacher and with the students. And this would be something like a ninth grade teacher, let's say biology. would stay with the same groups of students and teach 10th grade science to those students too and then when they move on to 11th grade the teacher would loop back to 9th grade and start with a new group of students but they would stay with that same group of students for two years Another thing that they said that these successfully

056redesigned schools did is offer longer grade spans. Sometimes the transitions between elementary school to middle school to high school can be really challenging for students and especially in building a sense of community. And it can be challenging for families as well. So these schools offered K-8. and then a 9-12 school, or they offered TK-8 to 8, or they offered TK to 5, and then a 6-12 school, so that they could provide that continuity that facilitates students' and families' understandings of the learning environment. It has been found to increase student confidence because they don't have as many transitions and their sense of well-being as well. Then there was also some discussion of advisory groups that I just put at the bottom and you all can explore those a little bit more later. So I'm going to

057breeze through until I get to number seven on well-prepared and well-supported teachers. Here, there's really three big things. One was ongoing learning for teachers. Another was time for teacher collaboration. They recommend that teachers have at least five hours a week of collaboration time. And then also reciprocal peer observations. And they say that doing these things amongst others, and I guess, again, they have case studies that demonstrated how these schools and teachers have done this, help improve student outcomes. So I'm going to stop here and not go through all of the slides and I just want to pause to see if any board members have any comments or any questions on any of this or anything else that I did not cover or if our superintendent does When it comes to the scheduling and I know

058you've mentioned the four by four and the block scheduling which we do a bit of as well were there any other models that came to your attention that were plausible for Having an impact on student learning and student outcomes You mean outside of those the four by four of the a B. Mm-hmm. I don't know of any other ones. Um, I will say Secondary schools are not my area specialization. I focus more on elementary schools, but I don't know if our superintendent has any ideas or if anyone else does. I can dig in and see if I can find anything else and share for sure. I know in the past we have talked about a scheduling system so that kids actually get to take more electives, which is something that the student surveys had mentioned.

059They wanted more art, more opportunities. And there was one scheduling that I know we had talked about, and I can't remember what it was, but it was... decreasing the amount of time. So instead of semesters, it would be something like trimesters and then a possible intersession. And that would be feasible within maybe a four by four or a block scheduling. So instead of taking the eight classes, I think that ended up what they were having, 12 classes, which gave them exposure to more things, which is listening to what the students want. They want more opportunities to take more. I do like the literature that talks about offering less electives and offering more dual enrollment classes. I love this information. So thank you for putting this together. I'll just leave it there for sake of time.

060So you jogged my memory of my own high school experience, which I hadn't thought about in a hot minute. But I actually had an AB block schedule. And I remember when I first started at the school thinking it was very weird. But I quickly learned. how valuable that extra time in topics. Like, I can't imagine having dug into Tale of Two Cities in half of the amount of class time, you know? And so I think it's a very interesting thing to consider. I have not had a chance to fully read this entire paper, but I am absolutely fascinated by all of it and I intend to finish it. And if any of my colleagues have not read it, I really encourage you to because it's got a lot of meat. And so thank you for

061bringing this to us to enrich us and help us hopefully do better at our roles here. Thank you for for putting all this together and all your hard work I have a question about CTE and it being recognized as a factor that You know can help academic success success all around Was there a particular kind of CTE that they mentioned in terms of since it part they say participation but what kind of participation was it a couple of semesters more than three semesters and was it Was it true of all CTE programs or particular types of CTE programs? That's one of my questions. That's a really good question. One of the things that to me was a little surprising was that even participating in just one CTE course resulted in positive outcomes. So it doesn't

062even have to be like you get a certificate because you completed the two or three course sequence or anything. Even participating in one course can be helpful. The review, the article that I reviewed for this didn't dig in into the different types of CTE programs, but there's definitely literature out there on that, and I'm happy to dig up some articles and share them with you on that as well. So, yeah, so I'm afraid I don't have anything more about, like, the specifics of those CTE programs. Yeah, it'd just be really good to know the more detailed nuances of, you know, what type of CTE courses really... supported those outcomes. And then I think just my second observation is that I think that the concept of perhaps I'm trying to find out more about what it

063would be like, especially in the middle schools, to expand more time, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, because those two years are, you know, staff, teachers, they have so little time to kind of bond, and it's such a time of transition as you enter and as you exit, that I wonder if... it wouldn't be valuable to continue to explore what that would mean, what it would take. Not just in terms of curriculum, how would you organize it, but I don't know if there was also talk about what the facilities would need to look like in something like a 6th, 7th, or 8th, or larger. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. Not about the facilities. I mean, it would definitely mean more, right? You would need more space to be able to house

064them. But I do think that was interesting as well. And just that focus on how difficult those transitions can be for students and families. And then, like you said, teachers and principals, they're not able to get to know the students as well because they only have them for a short period of time. So I think thinking about those structures is really helpful. Yeah, I'm really intrigued about conceptually. What what that could mean and trying to do some more research about how that how that might benefit us here in this district Just to add to the conversation Right off the bat our biggest challenge is going to be facilities. We don't have the space to add Six three class of six graders into the current middle schools. So I'll walk the bat Now that that's a

065serious consideration for this board The other thing I just wanted to clarify regarding CTE CTE are regional based on the industries available in the area so A film class, I'll just use something, something in LA Unified, right? LA and LA area, you're going to have a lot that feeds into the industry of the movie industry because there's a market there for jobs. RCT programs are designed regarding the industry in Northern California and that's how, and that's tied to funding. We get funded for those types of things. So just something just to keep in mind that it's a little more complicated and the article and information may not necessarily be specific to our area and our needs. are some of the challenges that we have in our district. So it doesn't mean that we can't explore,

066but what works in one district may not be able to work in ours. So not every CTE opportunity would be the same. For example, a Hollywood opportunity versus... Factory opportunity. Yeah, we could provide a class enrichment class on let's say filmmaking as an enrichment or a elective, but it wouldn't call a CT CT course because it's not Aligned to the industry here and would not be funded through CTE grants So it would not be considered a CT course. It could be considered in enrichment and an intellect of So my question for the superintendent is about the CTE classes. Can all the students take it, or is there some requirements to take it? Not the entry-level courses, but there's pathways. So in order for them to take, let's say, auto class number two or the second

067level, they'll have to take the first class. And we prefer to have strong pathways so they can't just take to the advanced. They have to take the first class, the second class, the third class. It's like taking Spanish, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3. You have to show that you've taken those preliminary courses. What happened with the students who are not reclassified yet? They can take those classes. Okay. So if I can just piggyback off of what you had said superintendent and I want to make sure my understanding is correct. So our CTE programs basically with them being regional or regional there's a survey done of the industries that are in our region and they basically discuss hey what. do we need in our job force? Do we need farmers? Do we need people who

068operate and manage farms? Do we need people who are working in sheet metal shops? And based on that survey, we basically see where the areas of needs are to make sure that when our kids graduate, they are job, career ready, which is why we have the various pathways of these CTEs so that when our kids get out of school, they say you have successfully completed this pathway. That means you are employable in this industry with these different organizations. Since we don't have an arts area, we can't be like Orange County High School of the Arts, which... has a CTE component to both their culinary as well as their dramatic arts, their fine arts, and all of that stuff. because there's not a huge employable industry for that. But we can still get people ready to

069work behind the scenes at KQED or KCRA or whatnot with enrichment classes. It's just not one of those CTE-funded pathways. I hear with the literature saying that even one class gets our kids even more college and career ready because these classes are designed to make sure our students have the knowledge. and the skill set that makes them employable to these industries. Am I picking up what everybody's putting down? Great. Yeah, and the only thing I would add is that the meta-analysis done on CTE took into account that that's the way that CTE works, right? And there's so much research now on it because there was a lot of federal monies that were allocated to this. So folks wanted to see if we were getting our bang for our buck, right? If this was actually working.

070So it goes back to what our superintendent said. That is... That is how CTE functions, and that is what gets results, right? So for us, it would look a little bit different, the courses that would be CTE, but those would fall in line with what the research is saying as getting positive outcomes, especially in employability, because it's what the jobs are that are here, so they'd be more prepared for that. Last thing I'll say before we can let you move on to stuff is... The research you're presenting is everything most of us have learned in our teaching credential program of stuff that makes things successful. Watching how other teachers teach so that you can continue to put more tools in your toolbox. You have the research here about UDL, Universal Design for Learning. If we

071could actually have the time to scaffold our class and figure out what the hooks are for every single one of our students, that would be phenomenal. Three times a week, 30-minute tutoring. Oh, my God. mind blown what a game changer that would be in a way that doesn't pull our students out of their classes and sacrifice the knowledge for other aspects high quality high intensity tutoring project based learning learning cohorts which they've been doing internationally for years these are all fabulous I don't know how we get to employing all of these things because they will be huge game changers, especially those small cohorts of anywhere between three and 500, which yes, to all of it. I hope that we have conversations after listening to the secondary level as trustees, as policymakers on how we can

072bridge that because that. That would be a game changer for our district if we could figure out a way that our kids can get three times a week tutoring based on our scheduling based on how we organize and design stuff I mean legit this is the stuff I was hoping came out of the pandemic But we were fighting another fight then so we couldn't get to this if I Just pray that we don't just talk the talk that we start figuring out. These are the things that work How do we make it work for our kids? How do we make this part of our woodland way? I'll just leave it there Yeah, I just want to add to that when I was reviewing all of this research I try to get the most up-to-date research

073that is out there I try to get Kind of cast as wide of a net as I possibly could and I did bring in that separate CTE piece because it was everywhere in the literature That being said this is not all of what the research says right it's not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination and especially this list of 10 features of successfully redesigning schools is not easy and i'm not standing or sitting up here saying we should do every single one of them and that's the way we should move forward i think we should take this into account and be thoughtful and think about whether we want to approach any one of these and do it one by one. Otherwise, it's completely overwhelming. So my goal with this and the presentations

074that we're going to be hearing today and the ones that we've heard before or earlier, rather, in the elementary schools is to get more information and be in a better position to start having more meaningful conversation so that we can start taking action at some point, but then also get administrator input, right? All of these articles have been posted on the agenda, so anyone from the community can read them in their entirety, our administrators as well. But I want to make clear that I'm not sitting up here arguing for us to do every single one of these, right? This is just what the research tells us. And I included them all in the presentation, even though I did not go through every single slide as a little bit of a cheat sheet for folks if

075they want to use that and dive in a little bit more. So with that if you want to add anything superintendent I just caution the board the presentations today are not necessarily aligned to what was shared with the data for the research there's actually a lot of things that our schools are already doing and so we just caution the board to You know make sure we're careful on not going into the pigeon, you know going up to Getting off self off track. Some of the things are already happening. There's a lot of things happening already again, not necessarily aligned to the research presentation today, because that's not what the board, that's not what the principals were asked to do today. And there are some things that have already been tried out in our district in

076the past. And that worked and or did not work for a reason or the other. And so we're here to get information. when I think we need to look at our data to see what still needs to be improved and then let that the data drive what we need to research into. Tell us what you want to see and we'll have staff work on the how. Because they know all the ins and outs and some of the things I've already tried out and we also have some of the many other items that are in the research that's not considered implications to the bargaining units as well, implications to do that as well. So I just wanted just to caution us and not get too excited. quite yet. You know, definitely we have areas to improve

077on, but I just wanted to remind you that the principles are not prepared to respond specific to the research that was presented tonight. Let's go ahead and begin the presentations. Is everybody okay with that? We do, we did... We do have a desired end time and I think everyone as well, the board here, we kind of know where we kind of want to run, what time we want to conclude. So that's just a friendly reminder. If we want to stick to that time, we can, if we don't have to. We're going to start with Douglas Middle School. Hey, good evening. Good evening, board president, trustee. Bautista Zavala, board members and Superintendent Ortega-Lambkin. I'm the very proud principal of Douglas Middle School and I just concluded my 10th year at Douglas, so six years as the

078vice principal and then the four years as principal. And it was a little challenging for me to... narrow it down to three things that I thought were were our strengths and so what I landed on was our PLC development and the strength of our guiding coalition and the strength of our wellness team PLC development was not an easy task and it wasn't an easy ask because essentially We asked our teachers to really change their way of thinking about being a teacher. And so, like, when I was a high school teacher, you were in a silo, and you had your four walls, and that was your universe. And to now ask teachers to embrace working with... their grade level team and being very vulnerable about who is doing what well and who needs some support and

079like what did you do for that lesson because your kids rocked it but mine struggled and it took a lot of very strategic activities at our staff meetings the year leading up and so At one point, a few teachers were like, Tina, why are we playing so many games at our staff meetings when we have so much to do? I'm like, oh, no, no, these are not games. These are activities because games are for fun. Activities have a purpose. And I'm telling you, next year and the year after and the year after that, you are going to have some very deep. hard conversations and you can have those conversations when you have laughed with people and you've grown that relationship and so I am super proud of the work that we have done to develop

080our PLC processes and my goal is that when I leave that work is going to continue because They know what to do and they're gonna they will carry it on with with new teachers I'm not going anywhere, but at one point I will retire so and so with our PLC development part of that was like the very first big ask was aligning their practices and their policies and protocols with each other. And so if a student was moving from one class to the other, one teacher to the other, that things were the same. Those were some tough conversations. And then it was... really looking at the standards and narrowing down which standards were the most important. And so we call those our boulders. Like these are the ones, these kids have to get this for

081this year and to be successful for next year. And then you can add some rocks. If they've mastered the boulders, then you can add some rocks. And these are the extras. They're still very important, but they're not those, big standards. And then we have butterflies and the butterflies are, they're the fun things but we at this point we do not have time for butterflies. And then came the unit planning and the common formative assessments and looking at the data and really becoming a data focused school. That's very different than the work we did three years ago. I added SMART goals based on data analysis and not like it's not because that was just like one big aha thing. Oh, SMART goals changed everything for us. It wasn't that. It was me as the principal watching

082this very organic discussion and the outcome from my teachers at a staff meeting where, and I wish I remember who had brought the question up during a staff meeting, but it was. how do we know if we're doing our SMART goals right? We haven't seen anybody else's. Can we look at everybody else's SMART goals? And yeah, we'll do that our next staff meeting. So the following month, I printed out a lot of their unit plans and let everybody know, like I'm using your unit plan from March and yours from December. And so there weren't any surprises. And then we laid them out and everyone had time to go around and look and see. how there was some differences in SMART goals. And then we came back together and came up with some common language and

083preferred outcomes. And so it just, it was kind of an aha moment that is very aligned with PLC processes and like what kind of great work we can do when we're collaborating together instead of being in our own silo and being in our own classroom. And part of that is ensuring that teachers have enough time to work together. And so we had three paid full days by the district, and then I matched three days with our site funds. And teachers are very appreciative of that. And they are working so hard. And that comes from their dedication. The next part of developing our PLC processes would be the guiding coalition. And so our guiding coalition is made up of a representative from every department. So we've got English, math, science, history, PE, electives. And then we

084also have our English language specialist, our AVID coordinator, and one counselor. myself and our vice principal and I separated not the school year but the last school year I separated the work and so guiding coalition their focus our focus is Teaching and student learning and that is it and and that was tough. That was a tough Bend in the in the work like no no no no we can't talk about promotion. That's not our work we were talking about teaching and learning and so put money aside for a policies team and that group is the one that talks about the tardies and the dress code and the behaviors and the things that kind of bubble up with the middle school and that has really kept our guiding coalition moving in the right direction and giving

085those members the I think the onus to kind of take charge and well, this is what Tina this is what we need to focus on next and so everybody works together to to month by month Keeping our progress moving forward Another area where I really see staff. Coming together to support students is our wellness team and we have our weekly meetings And so it's the vice principal and myself our RTI specialist both of our counselors our nurse our attendance liaison used to attend and this coming year will be our attendance clerk our EL specialist our Northern Valley Indian health therapist and our school psychologist and between everyone on that team somebody knows something about the student that was referred. And so we really look at, first of all, the referral. The referral is going to

086come from other staff members. And we look at why. So everybody reads through the referral. We set a timer, no talking. You're going to do a deep dive in ARIES and get as much information about that student as you can. And then we share out, you know, what do we notice? Like what questions do we have? Who knows about this student? Who knows about the family or the situation that they're dealing with? And then we look at solutions. And so whether it's attendance, behavior, academics, who is the best person to guide the support for that student? One of our last... wellness meetings of this year, we had this kiddo that kept coming up on our radar, kept coming up on our radar, and we could not make progress with this kid. He was cutting classes.

087He was hiding in the old bathrooms or the old showers in the gym. He wasn't supposed to be on that side of campus, and we just could not make some traction with this kiddo. And so our RTI was like, let's just bring him in. And so Half the team left because we didn't want to overwhelm him because I wouldn't be able to do that at that age. And so we got down to, okay, what is going on? like, be real with us. What's happening? It ended up that he had gone on independent study and didn't do the work. And so when he came back, he was totally lost and it was easier to hide in the old shower than it was to face going to a class that he did not know what was happening.

088And so we came up with a plan and he checked in, check out with our librarian. communicated with the parent and we got to see some some progress and some happiness on him as we were ending the school year so I'm really excited to see what he's going to do with us next year and um how am I doing on time okay um Some key challenges that we have experienced over the last three years The big one for me is the continued achievement gap So while we are definitely making some progress And I attribute a lot of that to what the work that we do in our professional learning communities in the collaboration We are nowhere near where any of us want our students to be We do get a large percentage of students who

089come to us behind in grade level and so there is a little bit of a win like when they leave and we still have students that are like in the high 40s that are not proficient well when they came to us they were as high as 78 percent and so we are making progress but again it's we've got a long ways to go especially in math. Although this year we made some significant gains in math with the preliminary data. And I think the achievement gap, the teacher turnover, the chronic absenteeism, and the student behavior are all very well linked, unfortunately. Since coming back from the pandemic, we've had a high rate of turnover with teachers. This year, we're only going to have three new teachers, and it's the lowest number. We have 38 teachers on

090staff. It is the lowest number that we've had in five years. And when you are bringing on brand new teachers, there are some challenges that come with that. In the last two years, 33% of the teaching staff are new. And out of that 33%, only one came with experience from another district. Everyone else, they're brand new. And when you think about all the things that... When I think back to all the things that I had to learn as a new teacher, it can be very, very overwhelming. They're not only learning the curriculum, but they have to learn how to teach the curriculum, how to teach it well, how to manage a classroom. how to redirect student behavior, how to get along with other adults, how to handle some challenges that pop up that you've never

091experienced before. And so it takes new teachers quite a few years, probably. I think I read an article over the summer, and it said five to seven years before new teachers feel very proficient in their craft. And so... We're having difficulty hiring experienced teachers. We are getting interns, and we're grateful. I am grateful to have somebody that wants to step into those shoes with zero teaching experience. Chronic absenteeism, you can see like prior to the pandemic, at the 18-19 school year, our chronic absenteeism rate was 13.9%, 21, 22, 27%. 22, 23, 21%. And then 23, 24, 23 and a half percent. So we went down and then we came back up. And I'm anticipating for the 24, 25 school year that we have reduced the chronic absenteeism by 1.8%. So we will move from red

092to orange. And then we have student groups who have the highest chronic absenteeism. Student behavior, the classroom disruptions are pervasive. The low level, the low level classroom disruptions are pervasive. And I think a lot of that comes with when you have 30% of your staff is brand new. They haven't quite figured out how to manage those behaviors in a way that keeps the learning moving forward. They will. It's just, it takes time. And the suspendable behaviors. Social media is not doing us any favors. Like our, the girl fights that we have are 100% based on social media. And then I think one thing that could really. Well, not think. One thing that I know, because the research says so, is that the middle school schedule does not have a built-in time to provide targeted intervention,

093and we have to capture the kids while we have them at school. A lot of them don't stay. We do offer after-school help, but a lot of them do not stay. They have... You know, they're middle school kids. They don't want to be with us any longer so Those are the things that I see as the most challenging aspects at Douglas middle school for right now Thank you. Any questions or comments from the board? Trustee Richardson Fowler. We'll start with you for the teacher retention. Can you attribute the Lack of turnover this last year to anything in particular Not really. One teacher was temporary and so had to reapply. And somebody with 20 years of experience applied, which, oh my gosh. And another was moving out of the area. One of our new hires is

094a new position because she's filling the art position. So it really was just two teachers that left us. But the years before, it was moving out of the area, just leaving education altogether. Babies, we've lost a lot of teachers from COVID babies. They're staying home to take care of the babies. Sure. Anyone else this evening? Trustee Rodriguez? Hi. Which? Which Rodriguez? Okay. Hi. Thank you. Thank you for being here during the summer. I really appreciate the time that you're taking to go through all this information. I think it's not the first time that we've heard that a good percentage of our teachers are brand new, recycling. And it takes quite a while to bring them up to speed, for them to feel confident, to sharpen their skills. Is there something that you do systematically to

095help? bridge that gap, bring more experienced teachers in for some quality time. Is that something that's possible within a campus structure, or does that really need to maybe happen more district-wide, where maybe we would have the ability to have a pool of maybe retired teachers that would be willing to come in? certain amount of hours and and act as a reference but more systematically at just Let me kind of say what happens to sir Dwight and you can add anything. Okay, so any new teachers from automatically qualify for the our bits of program so they're Automatically assigned a mentor teacher if they don't qualify for the bits of program We have to do their status. We provide a mentor anyway. So that's what the district does. They meet, they do classroom observations, they have a

096schedule. Those mentor teachers get a little stipend. They get training. And so that's something that we automatically do to support at the school sites for all our new teachers. On top of that, the site, sometimes they do a little extra too. So can you talk about that at your site? Should have clarified our new teachers are receiving a lot of support. I was an intern as you know, my first three years of teaching and Did not get the level of support though that as a district we are offering to our new teachers and so at Douglas we also have a buddy program and so veteran teachers are paired with our our new hires whether they're Experienced or this is their first their first site and It is kind of an all-encompassing, another person that they

097can go to for, I don't know how to make copies. I don't know how to fill out a timesheet. Just a buddy. They also have a department chair that is really looking out for them. But our buddy teachers, and again, this is the collaboration from my teaching staff. They have figured out how to make the buddy teacher program, I think, more robust. It's got some more teeth. Where they are... swapping coverage so that they can go into their buddy's classroom and, hey, I noticed that you never told the kids what they had to learn today. Let's work on that. And so the support is definitely there. It's just, again, it's time and experience. Well, I know you said you've been here for, this is your 10th year, right? So congratulations for 10 years. So that

098means you have a kind of a longitudinal kind of history. Right. In terms of, you've always been at the middle school? No, I was a high school teacher for 15 years prior. Okay. How long have you been at the middle school? 10. Yeah, this starts in my 11th year. Yes, yes. And so in terms of the strengths, when you look at PLC work, do you feel that, as you look back upon your 10 years, that we're on a pathway that is positive? that, especially if you compare it to what's been prior in your experience, you know, PLC was a particular specific push, right, to be able to double down on it. And do you feel that there are signs that that's going in the right direction? A hundred percent, yes. I think... The thing that

099I hear most often from my teachers is while they might have been resistant of really changing the way they do business, they saw the value in it. And now that they are working together and they're sharing that workload and collaborating and more brains put together have better outcomes. They're they Appreciate that they don't have to do this work alone Because my fear was if we didn't get on this this PLC journey people were going to burn out at a very rapid rate And so now they have a team behind them. I have one more question, but I'll save it Get back in line if anybody else has questions. I don't have any questions I can defer my time to trustee Rodriguez if everyone's okay, so we can move along. Go ahead, sir So just this

100is kind of a broader picture question earlier when we were looking at some of these best practices, right? You heard me mention, what if we had a sixth, seventh, and eighth, and not just a seventh and eighth? Just from your experience, what... How do you connect to that? Is that a terrible idea? Would there be benefits from it? Someone said, it's possible for us to figure out a way how we would do a 6th, 7th, and 8th. Would that be beneficial in your experience? I don't have enough information to make an assessment on whether it would be beneficial or not. 7th grade is the lowest grade of student I've ever worked with, and so I really don't know at this point. So it's like if you had another year. To work with these. So let

101me go the other way. Two years is too short with these students. Is that accurate or is that not how you see it? Yes and no. We build relationships with them because they are eager to, students are very eager to build relationships at this age. But it does go very fast. And I just say it because as an institution, right, you have two years, and we've had these conversations over the years about, you know, in seventh grade, there are a sizable amount of students that are not prepared. You're having to do a lot of work to prepare them. So if you had another year under your control. Right to be able to kind of maybe address those issues earlier. That's kind of where my thoughts go, you know, would it be beneficial in that way?

102So I think like I said earlier our principals aren't prepared to get into deep discussions because that's not what they prepare for tonight But I can tell you I worked at a sixth seventh and eighth grade middle school in the clusterville, California North Monterey County and There is pluses and minuses It's very difficult for those sixth graders coming the first day of school and they want to climb on the trees and looking for the swing sets. There's a maturity issue going in with seventh and eighth grade. So it is, some parents did not like it. They wanted the kids to remain more we had the opposite problem the opposite discussion that we're having here We were having the North Monterey County Asking should students stay at the elementary level where they still need maturity for

103to go with all the hormones and the middle school brings brings so again, it's not a we have we would have to have a further discussion and it's not something that you Decide really quickly over an article or anything like that It would have to go through a whole serious discussion to determine the pros and cons and what's right for our district Yeah, no, absolutely just just that I take take the shot and you know, try and try and get that person. It's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would require Maybe a interesting measure in a couple of years. But yeah for sure. Thank you. All right Is it safe to say that we couldn't? Say thank you and move on to the next one. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you Next one up

104is Lee middle school, please so this time I'm gonna remember to start my Maya My timer, I forgot that. Oh, okay. I will rock it for you. I'm going to put 10 minutes, and then when it rings, that means start wrapping it up, okay? Okay. Good evening. I'm Shelly Fryer. I'm the very proud principal of Lee Middle School. I'll be starting my seventh year at Lee this coming school year. A lot of, you'll hear a lot of similar things between Tina and I because we do collaborate a lot on ideas. And so because she did dive so thoughtfully into kind of the background of PLC implementation, I just wanted to kind of talk and brag about the amazing work that my staff has done over the past few years in their PLC implementation. Our staff

105has worked incredibly hard to develop those common essential standards, their unit plans, their assessments, their SMART goals to analyze the data. And as a result of working through the PLC process, we have seen results. It's not just even though we've only been implementing for a couple of years, we've started to see that the fruits of their effort is paying off. This year we saw, over the last three years, we've seen a reduction in DNF grades. But this year what we saw was a dramatic narrowing of the gap, especially for our English learner students and our special education students in terms of grades. And that's solely, I believe, due to the fact that our teachers are really looking at those students, student by student, and having those discussions. How did our English learners do? How did

106our special education students do? What can we do? strategies can we implement to help improve outcomes for those groups? And we've seen that those gaps have been narrowed. We've also seen growth in our ELA scores. We had double-digit growth last year in math. Before I went on vacation, you know, we're looking at the scores coming in every day. They're not official yet, but it looks like we'll have double-digit growth in math this year. So we're really excited about that. And our math team has worked incredibly hard over the last few years to implement a lot of the professional development that they have undergone in the last few years. Our English Learner Progress Indicator score, as you know, went from red to green this past year. And again, a lot of it is due to that

107work they're doing in their PLCs. And so I cannot say enough about the tremendous work that our staff is doing within their PLCs in having those conversations and looking at data and trying to figure out what's going to work for our students. Another area that we've spent a lot of time and effort developing over the last few years is our MTSS system. And I wanted to first talk about our tier two and three support. Like at most schools, we have our wellness team meetings. We went to doing it biweekly most weeks because... weekly is just, it's a lot. And we found that bi-weekly we have more focused conversations and are able to then see what happens in between and come back and say, okay, we tried something, is it working? Through that system, we've set

108up systemic and comprehensive social, emotional, and behavioral supports for our students. And what that looks like at Lee is a variety of groups, individual. brief solution focused counseling at the tier two level and intensive tier three mental health therapy at the tier three level. We have a variety of attendance interventions. We have an intervention specialist that works with a variety of students with behavioral and social emotional and academic interventions as she can. And so You know, it's everything from who needs to be hooked up with Friday Night Live mentors, you know, all kinds of things that we've developed over the last few years. And as a result, we served over 250 students this year at the Tier 2 and 3 levels. Now, we all know that Tier 2 and 3 doesn't work without a strong

109foundation at Tier 1. And Tier 1 is nothing new at Lee. They've had robust PBS implementation for years at the Wildcat Way. And what we've done over the last few years is really refine it and make it actionable to the data that we're seeing. And so several times a year, our team meets, our PBS Tier 1 team meets monthly and really dives into that data and figures out, okay, we're seeing this happen. Let's survey the teachers. Let's get... information on the ground from everybody in the trenches and figure out how we're going to respond. Whether it's a reteach or a challenge or a social media campaign or something to raise awareness, our PBIS implementation has grown tremendously. And has led to, again, outcomes that we see, lower suspension rates, more students staying in class, all

110of those pieces. We also have really been very thoughtful about how we welcome students to our school. And over the last four years, we've held our first day orientation for all of our students so that... Every student can take part in that orientation. And we have welcome activities. And the whole goal of that is to have students feel connected from the first day and feel welcome and like they are a part of our school. We also have a calendar that has all of these things on it that includes our weekly Character Strong lessons. And we're getting... better and better about addressing the needs of the kids that we have and figuring out how to implement in a strategic way. We're not 100% there yet with the effectiveness of those lessons, but they are happening and

111we continue to figure out how to make them better and stronger each year. And then a variety of counselor presentations happen as part of our tier one support as well. So those two pieces work together to support students' social emotional needs. We also have worked very hard on our school climate and culture and empowering our students to take part in being part of the solution. One of those things that we have done is implement the Safe School Ambassadors program over the last few years, using students to be our eyes and ears on the ground in... really dealing with some of those lower level things that happen between students and standing up for each other and those pieces. We have our web lessons and our web activities throughout the year to not only support students the

112first day of school, but throughout the year with their eighth grade mentors and that opportunity for our eighth graders to get leadership opportunities and really show their leadership to those seventh graders and help them through that really difficult transition year. We also have a lot of field trips that happen. Our goal is to get every student on a college or career opportunity throughout their time in middle school so they start to open their eyes to what the possibilities are out there. And then a couple of other things we've worked on to strengthen our school climate and culture are... the implementation of more restorative practices and we hope to see, well we know we will see a big decline in our suspension rate this year because that was called out as a huge need for us.

113And so by implementing restorative practices we've been able to do that. And then of course our student advisory council just to get that constant feedback from students really helps us to improve our school culture and climate in the way that we serve students. I don't know, I'm holding this upside down. Sorry you guys. Some key challenges over the last three years. We've seen a lot of growth in the numbers of students with disabilities on IEPs or 504 plans. We went from about 17% three years ago to over 22, almost 22.5% this past year. We had 63 additional students on 504 plans. And so that just presents a number of challenges for teachers within the classroom to make sure that they are providing those accommodations modifications to. their students and are keeping track of progress. I

114will say though this last year we were fully staffed with special education. People not not consistent people, I don't know how to say that, but we had enough paras basically to fill the needs for push and support, which hasn't happened in a while. And so I think that that also really helped to contribute to some of the increase, but it is still a challenge to serve so many students. And then we've seen a growth in the numbers of students with significant trauma. I can think of... at least 10 students this year that lost parents, right? And just other kinds of trauma that, you know, our wellness team looks at these kids and we're like, how do they even get up and come to school every day, right? And so we have to be very thoughtful

115about how we serve our students who are experiencing trauma. And almost every single time, you know, we have a student that has significant behavior concerns that we're talking about in a wellness team meeting. We get to the root of, oh, this is why. And we find out this is what happened and the behavior is the communication that something's wrong. Like Tina had mentioned, we see large numbers of students entering middle school significantly below grade level. When I looked year before last, we had about 75% of our students entering from I-Ready scores below grade level. We're able to shrink that gap a little bit before they go to high school, but that really begs the need to have that systemic intervention in middle school. And so I know it's something Tina and I have worked a

116lot on and have talked a lot about the last couple of years. And we're very hopeful that in the future we'll figure out how to do that. In the meantime, our teachers and their PLCs are looking for ways to embed intervention within their classes. But then, you know, that helps, but it's not that systemic embedded intervention that our middle school kiddos really need. We've had some staffing challenges, in particular with special education. I think you all are aware of that. And then... Our chronic absenteeism, we've been able to shrink it pretty substantially over the last few years, but it continues to be a problem for us. If kids aren't in school, they're not learning. And so we continue to try to implement strategies to improve on our chronic absenteeism numbers. Like Tina mentioned, middle school

117is... challenging time for students in terms of behavior and discipline and again looking for creative ways to manage that and we found some success with the implementation of restorative practices and also getting our teachers on the same page one of the things that came out of our PBIS tier one meeting was that we needed to have a common way for teachers to deal with classroom disruptions and so by putting that in place this year we were able to come up with a system that really helped teachers be able to help each other through the use of buddy classrooms and different strategies to keep students in the learning environment and not class suspended up to the office which should help our academic scores as well And then the last thing that really has been challenging is

118reengaging families post-COVID. And so we're looking for strategies to implement. We've tried some things with a little bit of success. We're looking to implement new ideas, and we're hopeful that through our community schools grant, we'll get that situation handled. So that, in a nutshell, is the strengths and challenges. Did I do okay with time? You did great. Timer was on silent. 10 seconds. But you did good. You hit it. And I thought, OK, she's wrapping up. So I'm saying I have to do it. Thank you. I tried. Board members, who would like to go first for questions and comments? Trustee Rodriguez-Molica. Thank you so much for preparing the slides and sharing with us tonight. In your extended learning opportunity slides, you mentioned interventions, some department-based intervention embedded into classes. And I wanted to see if

119you could share a little bit of what that might look like, the interventions within the class. Sure. I'll tell you. What some departments have tried, I'll give you an example from the history department. They did a writing assessment and they in their PLC determined who was proficient, who was not, who was well below, and they separated into three different groups. One teacher took the kids who had already met the standard and did some enrichment with them. One took all the kids who who were kind of just almost there and gave them what they needed to kind of get over the hump and then another the other two teachers took the Lower groups and split them into smaller groups and really went back and retaught the the writing structure and gave them another opportunity to try

120so it's kind of a lot of that and it's a lot of juggling on their part it's a lot of trying to figure out okay you're on prep this period and then you know we pay that teacher on prep to kind of take this group and you know figure those things out but it's not it's not ideal it's um it's it's difficult but it's something and it sounds like um Like it helped because they were able to provide intervention, but it sounds to me like it's logistical issues, right? Like the scheduling that you had mentioned earlier, that's what poses a challenge? Okay. Yeah. It would be much easier if there was a dedicated time during the day for that intervention to happen, and then it's just about getting kids to the place they need to

121be, whether it's for extension, because they've already met the standard, or whether it's for a reteach or, you know, whatever they need. Okay. Another quick question, and I know we've talked about this before, but I can't remember. Do we have a tutoring center at our middle schools, or is that just at the high schools? That's just at the high schools. We do offer after-school, before-school tutoring, but we don't honestly have a lot of kids who show up for that. But we don't have, like, a tutoring space where they can just drop in? No, that's specifically at high schools. Thank you. All right, who's next? Trustee Richardson Fowler. I just wanted you to know I had the dashboard up with the presentation going over this stuff I love seeing your numbers, especially the what is it

122the English learners number or I do like seeing more in our greens and our blue But I just wanted to say that English learner progress really did stand out that 11 percent increase Chef's kiss wanted just to give you have to give a big shout out to our you know specialist back there Marlene is sitting there she Her and Angela have done a tremendous job not only supporting our newer yells, but also supporting our teachers As well, all right anyone else same I want to say echo about the English learner in green. Thank you. Congratulations to your Specialist think I would like to Reply this on all our secondary schools. I would love to thank you trustee Brubaker do you have Ideas and I did not ask you at the side of time. So if

123you don't have on the spot, that's fine of ways to Change the schedule so that there can be embedded intervention time? Yes. I would love to hear them. Either now or email. That's fine. I mean, I wrote a whole 10-page paper a couple of years ago. Please send it my way. I can send it your way. Tina helped with it too. But in a nutshell, the only way to do that is to reduce the other instructional time. Right. So again, there's pros and there's cons. Right. Yeah. Great. And anything we do something like that, we would have to, it changes the work schedule. It has to be negotiated. Yeah. So there's... I am not saying this would be an easy thing. I'm just saying, yeah. As a new board member, I am curious what that

124would look like. So I would love to see whatever you have to share. Sure. Thank you. Trustee Rodriguez. Hi. Hi. Thanks for being here this evening. Thank you for all your work. I deeply appreciate it. I know the board deeply appreciates you being here today. In terms of student behavior, discipline, chronic absenteeism. To me, when I hear some of those things, besides what we do on campus, family engagement, I think, is very important. And I want to hear, you know, what have you been able to do in terms of reengaging families? It's the last bullet point there in terms of connecting and how to support their students to be successful. So we started with bringing people back in person after COVID and trying to do in-person workshops and different pieces like that to varying degrees

125of success. We would, you know, we had ideas about what we thought we could do, but it wasn't until this year's ELAC at one of our meetings, you know, we kind of asked our ELAC members. what are we missing here? And they're like, well, just ask us, like, like survey us, like find out what, what do we want to hear about? Right. Like, and, and we're like, okay, like that seems like such a simple thing. And so. We're in the process of doing that for this next year, finding out from families, what do you need information? And also, how do you want it delivered? Because we've done online, we've done recorded and sent out, we've done in person. One thing we haven't tried that we're hoping to try this year with the community schools is

126actually going out in the community to where families are and seeing if we can get more engagement that way. But it's been a struggle. And to be honest, we haven't found anything that's been super effective. effective. And so, um, yeah, we're, we're, we're studying it very closely and trying to trying a lot of different things to figure it out. But I think it does start with asking our families, what is it that you need from us? What kind of information do you want and how do you want it delivered? Yeah, I think that that's, um, I think that that's a, a good pathway to try and figure it out. Right. It's just, you try bringing for them to come to your come campus and it has a certain amount of success but we need to

127really see what happens when we go out to them especially when nothing else is working and I think you know one of the interesting things I remember listening to when we go to the the trustee conferences and we hear you know all the different intervention work was that before you try and connect with parents about school issues, you have to try and find a connection with parents about their life issues. Because if their life issues are so overwhelming, they're never going to get to the school issues. It's really hard for them to grasp on to the school issues. So one of the things that I remember hearing in... from this school district that had some success was that first you need to really figure out what just their needs are in general in order for

128them to be able to grasp information and then do something about that information and that could be a whole could be several things that don't have to do with school right and so I think one of the things is to try to be open to that you know because I think in remembering some of those dialogues you know school staff We're not open to that because it was kind of like, what am I going to do about that? That's not within my structure. If they lost the job or they have alcohol and substance abuse or something like that. So when you go out and... and do some of these things, to be open to that fact that you may hear things that don't fit real easily into the structure that we're used to going down

129in, but rather to really document so that we can hear back what our families are actually dealing with, right? Because I think that's a really important... concept in terms of trying to reach families that we're not doing that are harder to reach. So I just want to share that with you. Absolutely. And I know like a number of our staff members went to a workshop at UC Davis a while back that was about Gen Alpha. And there were some real stark differences with parents of Gen Alpha who are kids in school right now that we never even. thought of in terms of seeing school as more transactional. And so we're really looking at that information and going, okay, then given that, how are we reaching out to those parents as well? So we are engaged

130in a lot of study of different pieces to that. One of the things that has not changed. is that teenagers don't like to have the parents around school. It's a big deal for them. I remember my first time taking my older son to middle school and he started walking in front of me. really fast and I was trying to catch up and he just didn't want to be near me. And when I realized that's what he was trying to do, it just broke my heart. What he needed was to feel he was starting to become independent. It's that age as well, right? So how do we do it to make it cool for your parents to be at school and that age or to be there and not to fight, you know. That's another layer

131of challenge at this age. That's why I love middle school. It's challenging all around, and there's always ways. But going to the families, going to doing those home visits for those families that are more complex situations, having the community, our cafe specialists and those types of resources are very, very needed at the middle school. Very much. Thank you. I this isn't a topic that I wanted to touch on I agree with everything that you stated board member and superintendent I have a student of my own, my daughter. She does really well academically. And when it comes down to open houses, she's like, Mom, we really don't need to go. I'm good. And I'm like, yeah, you might feel like you're good, but I still want to meet your teachers. I want to see the spaces

132that you're learning in. I want to interact, and I want to spend some time with you in your classroom. I think it also comes down to parent availability and comfort. We're living in a very, very historical moment right now where parents and families may not feel comfortable coming to school sites. You know, they may have neighbors and friends and family dropping off their children or picking them up or engaging in parent-teacher conferences on their behalf. I think that we need to prepare for a very different academic school year, one that is welcoming of, you know, perhaps even holding parent-teacher conferences via Zoom, you know, if that is an option, because some parents may not want to be at a school site because of their status. And it's a very harsh reality. Seeing it in so

133many different ways You know, there's a lot of different legislation right now at the Capitol on how to protect School districts on you know, not losing their ad a because potentially we could see you know a lot of absenteeism So if we see those kind of measures being taken imagine, you know, the parent participation levels just plummeting But I like the fact that you brought up the challenges of reengaging our families post-COVID. But I would say our challenge now is dealing with the current times. COVID was five years ago, and we're still dealing with this. It's turning into another reason on top of COVID. I also have to say, having a 10-year-old and a 16-year-old, you experience burnout. You know, you get to a certain place as a parent where you feel like, well, I've

134already participated in PTA. I volunteered at festivals. I volunteered at fundraisers. And I kind of just want to go to the fundraiser and support and go home. And it's a real thing, you know. So I think it's like, how do you... not necessarily look at it from a lens of re-engagement, but also look at it from a lens of continued engagement, continued participation from those that may not fear, you know, for their own personal, you know, safety when visiting a school site. But I'm excited to see, you know, our middle schools start their new academic year, and I don't have any more comments. I just wanted to bring it back to that space. Anyone else? Can we move on? Go ahead. I just wanted to add in the research I reviewed and the report they

135talk about family engagement and one of the things they mentioned was offering opportunities for video conferencing exactly like what you said for. parent-teacher conferences, but then also in like orientation sessions or anything like that, hosting any of those events also at community centers or places of worship as well. And I think it applies to the reasons that you just mentioned as well. So I think us starting off the year being creative and flexible, even though we're no longer, you know, in the pandemic with the school shutdowns, but that might be a really smart move so we can get the information out to families and make sure that we don't end up losing those connections and ties. Definitely something important to keep in mind. Starcy Garcia. Yes. So, yes, I hear what all the trustees say

136about this. And my own experience, I would like to share that for me, as a migrant mom, middle school is the more hard transitions and even more than high school. And if you, all this for the other parents who live here, who grow up, who go to school here, is even... harder for a migrant is the language plus them and start another level another system and for me, I believe the Entrance the people who are on the on the door. So the the office is They need to be you need to feel welcoming. So I've been on those two middle schools and I know I would say Lupita is always going to smile, is always available to help, and that means a lot for the parents. And also, I would like to see, that's, I

137mean, you can feel welcome. You can go and ask questions. And also, the cafe, especially with the trustee, about this challenge, those days, I would like to, yeah, here to the cafe, contact more to the parents if they need something. But again, thank you for everything. And so, I would like to share that for my experience. Just real quick, Trustee Fowler, you know, when we think about contacting our families, some of our families may not even feel comfortable participating in Zoom. They might want to go back to phone calls, you know, so just putting it out there. Trustee Richardson-Fowler, you're next. Thank you for everything that you just did but since trustee via grana is not here and something is just sticking in my head if we don't make a Directive it doesn't get done

138and we haven't told anybody to do anything. So I would like to make a directive or an appeal whatever is the most appropriate way to do it and Make sure that we are directing our sites to be mindful this current time and when we are preparing for our back-to-school nights to be cognizant of having some sort of an online component I and and back-to-school nights not back-to-school nights what is it parent-teacher conference I'd like it to be normalized so that we're not just reaching out to Spanish surnames but You know, I got a text from a parent when I was on a hiking trip, and they said, I got this in the mail, blah, blah, blah. Are they singling my kid out? And it's like, oh, no, no, no. This is for all of the

139kids. Don't worry about it. So I just want to make sure folks don't feel singled out, that it's for everybody. Yeah, so I'm just making it official. Okay, officially you only direct me not staff And now you'll be pleased to hear that we've already started those discussions already Especially with everything was happening with the immigration and some of the activity is happening with ice in our community That we have to rethink about how we're going to capture These families in different different ways so the conversations already Began and we'll continue to do that. Thank you. Glad we're ahead of the curve. Thank you. Thank you. All right anyone else? Thank you very much, Lee Middle School. All right. If anyone needs a bathroom break, I'm going to ask that you go excuse yourself individually so

140we could continue. If anybody has an issue with that, please let me know. Everybody okay with that? Okay. Cache Creek High School. Thank you very much. Okay, so there's a unique situation here because we're in transition of the leadership for Cash High School, so be mindful of that but our director Ms. Carrillo has very knowledgeable of the school and I'm expecting a very smooth transition. So she's going to begin I'm gonna time you I'm gonna put the volume of this time Okay Think she's saying I talked too much Good evening Good evening board president about these does a ballad superintendent or tail amkin and trustees I'm here tonight to represent cash Creek in the absence of a Principal I reviewed all of the available data and information for the school so that I could share

141some things with you this evening I forgot I have the power of the clicker All right. So the strengths of Cache Creek over the last three years, the first thing that I was able to identify is the stability and the depth of experience of their certificated staff and their classified staff, actually. The average or the mean number of years of experience on that campus is 18.1. It's very, very high. It's among the highest in the district. The depth of experience of those teachers, particularly in forms of a lot of the strategies that they use to engage with and build relationships with students on the campus. The mode is 17 years, so it's not the outlier that has almost two decades of experience. It is the majority. The Cache Creek staff, because it is very small,

142finds it very easy to collaborate and communicate amongst the teachers and amongst the teacher, between the teacher's administration and the classified staff. They have a lot of... shared practices that are implemented by both their teachers and their office staff, their campus safety. Even the custodian, Maria, who is amazing, gets involved in interacting with kids and helping implement their staff priorities. One of the things that has been consistent with Tana or with Cache Creek over the last few years is their collaboration with Tana, which leads to students creating their own unique artwork, much of which is on the wall outside in the hallway right now, and using that artwork to find and exercise their voice and advocate for issues and policies and groups that they feel very strongly about. It's been pretty cool. The culture on

143campus really focuses on the safety, support, and connectedness of students to school. In the last couple of years, there's been a transition on campus. You can walk across campus during lunch and On any given day, kids are just chilling. They're sitting, they're talking. And it's not the Cash Creek of the stereotype or the historical reputation. It's calm. You've got kids over in one corner playing the guitar. Somebody's bouncing a basketball. Kids are sitting on the picnic tables just kind of enjoying each other's company. The implementation of the art and culture class. The art and culture class is going into its third year, I believe, on campus. And it's really given students a means of understanding how art and culture are intricately connected and using art to express their culture, their sense of self, and help

144them refine their sense of identity and connect with something greater than themselves. Last year was the first year of the rollout of senior seminar, which is the class to help students develop their post high school plan. What do they want to do for a career? Do they want to continue their education? Do they want to go into the military? Are they ready to be full-blown adults? Help them develop those independent living skills that they're going to need to adult on the other side of high school. A good portion of senior seminar focuses on helping students understand just how expensive it is to be an adult and live independently. It gives them an opportunity to practice creating a budget, understand what it means to rent an apartment or to rent a home, buy a car versus

145lease a car, what are taxes. Why, who is this FICA person that's taking money out of my paycheck? Why it's important to start a savings account, even though you don't feel like you have any money, all of those things, right? Get a resume together, get a cover letter together, how to ask for letters of recommendation and build relationships so that people will vouch for you when you're applying for those jobs that you really want. And so this year. We'll talk about it a little bit more on the next slide as well But it was really the first opportunity to see it in action and it was pretty cool the addition of dual enrollment and a pathway to employment through the early childhood education courses Last year was the first year that we were able to

146offer dual enrollment classes at Cache Creek And we paired it with our after-school program so that students who successfully completed the early childhood education courses would have an opportunity to work in our after-school program as student tutors. We had a couple of students take advantage of that. They were super excited about it. We plan to continue offering dual enrollment courses next year. We're going to offer the same early childhood aid courses again next year, but we are also adding the dual enrollment career exploration and planning course, and we're going to pair that with senior seminar. So for students who want to take the dual enrollment course, career planning course, it would be a portion of their senior seminar course as well. So they get to double dip and get some college credits on the way.

147The student advisory at Cache Creek is pretty strong or has been pretty strong. And it continued last year even with the interim principals who were there over the course of the year. Students at Cache Creek feel very empowered to share their opinions, to voice their needs, to make requests. And they do so respectfully and consistently. So it was pretty good. It was pretty good. It was pretty awesome to get to watch it last year play out even with the interim principals. Um, and, uh, I might be biased because one of them was one of my Douglas babies who I sort of adopted when, when we were both at Douglas, but the student board representatives, the way those kids come to these meetings and get up here and vocalize their pride in their school and the

148work that's happening there and just watching their growth over the course of their time from when they start being student board members and they're nervous because they don't know how to say people's names and they. like tied to their note sheets to the end of the school year where they just get up here and briefly glance at their notes but they're having full-blown conversations and public speaking is a definite point of pride and i think that the ability for the general public to watch that growth highlights the best of the students at cache creek and the work that happens there so challenges being a continuation school cache creek has, has challenges. Right. Um, but I think primarily last year in particular, after Principal Jarrell retired, after having been there for a number of years, a

149very long time, having two interim principals, though they were amazing and very consistent, but not having that permanence of leadership on campus was definitely a challenge. The rollout of senior seminar was a little bumpy, right? It was the first time that they were rolling out the curriculum. They did not the school itself did not have an infrastructure for that class. They didn't prepare for the rollout or the addition of the graduation requirement And it was embedded into another class. It was embedded into advisory rather than having its own Course structure on campus and so there was a lot of struggle in trying to figure out how to map out the curriculum who was responsible for what. But I'll go back to one of the strengths is that the entire staff collaborated to create the units,

150to plan, to organize so that the students didn't know that it was a bumpy rollout. It was an adult problem that the adults handled. But it was a little bit of a struggle. As with every other secondary school and maybe every other school in the district attendance, part of the issue at Cache Creek is its location, and the majority of the students ride the bus. If you miss the bus, you can't get to school, right? Or most of them can't get to school. But there are also other things that lend themselves to issues with attendance at Cache Creek. Some behaviors. There were some pretty significant discipline issues or incidents last year that increased the number of suspensions, which tanked the attendance, but also other priorities for students who are attending the school that get in

151the way. Some kids just really want to go to work. Some kids are parenting. Some kids are... afraid to leave the home because of their status, because of what's going on in the world. And so it's a mixed bag. I will say, though, that the attendance liaison who worked out there did a fantastic job of reaching out, getting those home visits done. And so we're hoping to continue some of that work next year. One of the biggest issues that Cache Creek is dealing with is vaping and cell phone addictions. Kids can't put their phones down and kids can't get over the nicotine. And so trying to figure out how to address that at the same time as trying to address all of the other social emotional issues and life issues that kids at a continuation

152school come with has been a challenge for the staff. And that's been pretty consistent over the last, I would say, five years. Like a lot of schools, when leadership becomes unstable, the application of agreements and adherence to discipline procedures gets a little bit wonky across campus. I'm almost done. And so there's been a little bit of inconsistency in the cell phone policies, bathroom passes, things like that, that staff have reported as being a little bit problematic because it sets one teacher up against another, right? Well, why can't I do this in here? Mr. So-and-so down the hall lets me do it when I'm in his class. Why are you being mean? You're doing too much, bro. And so just trying to get back to that consistency. coherence And one of the the biggest thing and

153it's not unique to Cache Creek We've seen a huge increase in the number of layered students on our campuses students identified for services with IEPs 504s language learning students and our ability to provide the Increased infrastructure has lagged behind the increase in the number of the students who require those services that all contributes to the struggles with academic achievement and particularly at Cache Creek contributed to the decline in the graduation rate. Academic achievement, if you look at the data later in the slides, is particularly or no actually it's not even it's not that it's um hold on a second. I got ahead of myself. Academic achievement in general and the students' sense of themselves as a learner and whether or not they are able to learn. Because students who need supports but don't get it

154internalize that, right? They don't always recognize that it's a lack of services or that they need some support. Kids generally assume everything is their fault, right? Especially teenagers. kids who have been through some things will own things that aren't necessarily theirs to own and so their sense of themselves as a learner their confidence and their ability to learn ability to perform academically tanks and with that so does it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy at cache creek if you look at the um uh the past data the social emotional survey data, this is particularly true for 11th grade female students of color. So that is one area that Cache Creek really needs to focus on to improve not just the general academic performance of campus, but to serve all students better by focusing on the group that's

155struggling the most in that area. And with that, I am all done. Thank you very much. Opening up to members. Trustee Richardson Fowler starting with you and going to the right is the numbers on the dashboard the for college and career readiness because we don't have CTE programs at Cache Creek There is a cash or there is a CTE program at Cache Creek. It's culinary Oh, yeah But the CCI indicator, is that what you're referring to? Just having a CTE program is not enough. You have to meet multiple indicators within that to increase your score. So the fact that we had dual enrollment will increase that score. The fact that we're embedding a dual enrollment course into senior seminar, which could ostensibly give... At least half of the seniors who graduate the opportunity to take

156a dual enrollment course in addition to the CTE in addition to any students who are able to meet a through G requirements or kids who end up participating in other Programs that meet those requirements is gonna skyrocket that indicator. Awesome. I love hearing that we're already addressing that. Thank you. Yeah anyone else? Press you told you guys What what are the dual enrollment courses that we're working on? In terms of what? At Cash Creek. Is it culinary? Cash Creek has early childhood education, dual enrollment courses. So if students complete those, they're halfway done with their certificate to become preschool teachers or classroom aides. We're adding the dual enrollment career planning course. Culinary is not dual enrollment. It's CTE. It's CTE. Okay. Yeah, career technical education. I know that Woodland Community College is going to have

157the culinary. It has culinary, right? We have culinary. Yes. But it... We're working on it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Woodland Community College had to rewrite their courses. Previously, it was an eight-unit course, so you had to enroll in the course for two years, and that's just not a reasonable expectation for our students to commit to an eight-unit, two-year college course when they have so many other requirements to do. They didn't rewrite their curriculum for us. They weren't getting a lot of participation on their end either. up and running now. And so we had already started conversations with them about potentially dual enrolling all three of our culinary programs. Right now, two of our three culinary programs are articulated. So if students do well in the course, they can take the final exam. They pass the final

158exam with a certain percentage. Then their teacher reports to the community college that they've passed and then reports to the registrar to add the college credits to their transcript. In terms of family engagement, what types of family engagement do we do with the students at Cache Creek? What has been tried, or do we need to? Do more. I would say that's definitely an area of growth. Family engagement at Cache Creek consists of the usual yearly events, back-to-school night, open house. I will say that last year, their back-to-school night was very well attended, but it was very well attended because they did a hybrid model. They had teachers in their classrooms. They had the culinary program did their spaghetti dinner, but every single teacher and the interim principal, Robin. Miller had a zoom open. And so

159as, as parents were able to during that one and a half hour window, they would pop in, check in with their kid's teacher, check in with the principal. They did their title one meeting. And it really, it almost tripled the number of families that were able to participate just by doing that. So that's something we're looking to continue. Other than that, they've tried to establish an ELAC, English Learner Advisory Committee. It hasn't been very successful. They've done phone calls, emails, letters home, the cafe specialist. Everybody has tried it, just it hasn't. It just hasn't worked. School site council. But other than that, there aren't a lot of events at Cache Creek that parents can participate in at this point. So it's definitely an area of growth. And I have another question unless somebody else has

160a question. And to what extent would you say that the facility lends itself to being able to have the kind of growth and success that we need for those students at Cache Creek? And to what extent does that facility really hinder the ability to be successful for our students? In regards to structure or location? Both. Because both have problems. Yeah, both. Right? The location is out of town. That's a challenge. So it's not easily accessible to our parents. or to students and that's why it would be almost, if it's gonna be hard to have students stay at Lee Middle School, our school's even worse for Cache Creek. Regarding the facility, well, all our facilities could use updating for more of the arts updated. I attended the workshop with Jesse Brubaker and we're not anywhere close

161to having 21st century, let alone, you know, industry types of environments to expose our students to that. So I don't think Cash Creek is any different than any other. Why are there old facilities such as Douglas Lee, adult education? They're very old buildings. I would say the single most impactful issue I see with the facilities is that there is no place for students to gather as an entire school. There's no gym. There's no cafeteria. There's no, so even if we wanted to, um, they couldn't hold a dance. They couldn't hold a rally. They can't, you know, those, those whole school meetings, assemblies, the only place that they all fit is really on the quad, which. Isn't super comfortable on either end of the year, you know, it's either too hot or it's too cold or

162it's wet And so I think that's the the most impactful Part of the the facilities issue is pretty there's no I would say there's no gathering place for them like you have on other other campuses but like superintendent said it's Every school has its issues. I can say that It was intentional to make sure that measure why that that school was included in the first group of measure why schools to get that attention because it's out there as students feel like it's Is it abandoned and we were very intentional we were also intentional to select that specific school to be one of our ribbon-cutting events Where we showed up? to make sure that we got a, they were featured in our news press. That was very intentional to make sure the kids knew that we

163cared about their school and that they were gonna be first in line. Yeah, and then no doubt, I know we're doing our best to try and address those issues. It still looks great. But I think, you know, fundamentally to my colleagues is in terms of long-term thinking, I think there's some work to be done there. in terms of a facility that has the capabilities to deal with the challenges of that population, both geographically and as a facility. And I think we need to keep that in mind as we move forward. No, I appreciate that, your comments. I agree. these students need this curriculum, this structure, and the facility doesn't meet the needs. And it's also not equitable compared to the other high school facilities that we have. So when making decisions, start looking and keeping

164the specific school site in mind. Anyone else? Can I add one thing? Go for it. I will say that there are... portions of the facility that aren't being well used at the moment. For instance, the science lab, the, um, we're, we're just pulling kids over into the art lab so that they have more ability to like get elbow deep into the arts and, and actually creating. Um, so what is there is functional. Um, the classrooms themselves are well taken care of. Um, they're comfortable for the most part. Um, and you know, It's a functional school, you know physically so we're not We're not gonna struggle. I just you know would like to see them be able to have some of the typical high school experiences Like a rally No, absolutely. Absolutely I also noticed in

165the demographics that enrollment increased pretty dramatically in 24-25, right? It seems like it went from 83 in 2023-24 to 145 in just this last year. Do you have a sense of what it might look like for the upcoming year? Are we still going up? So the enrollment numbers on the demographics page are... snapshot the enrollment at Cache Creek varies each quarter based on the number of students that Need it essentially and that are able to transfer over from the comprehensive high schools who are interested and willing I believe that 83 is from the census day, right Christina The demographic information, the enrollment information is from Census Day. Okay. So that's the first Tuesday in October. So, or first Wednesday in October. So that would be, you know, partway through the first quarter. And there may

166have already been a handful of kids who. graduated at that point. So, um, cash Creek has the capacity for 160 students. Um, we increased its capacity, I think three, four years ago, um, by adding an extra teacher. Um, and so that for the majority of the year, they hover right around 154, 155 kids. We always hold a couple of seats back just in case. Um, there are emergent circumstances like, you know, a kid transfers in whatever. Um, So it is, it's pretty consistent throughout the year until you get to like fourth quarter and then seniors start graduating early as they complete their credits. And, you know, by the end of the year, you're down to juniors. Yeah. So even though it is a snapshot, it does seem like the numbers are increasing though, right? I

167would say over the last two years, particularly we had the COVID bubble, the kids who started high school on Zoom and Essentially thought we were just kidding about them needing to actually earn credits to graduate And so two years ago. We had a huge number of juniors who? had fewer than a hundred credits going into their senior year and so there was Definitely an increased need for access to cash Creek access to credit recovery at the comprehensive schools As we get through the kids who were that COVID middle school, early high school, who were those COVID middle school and high school classes, I think it'll level out. But there's always going to be a need. But hopefully, with all of the intentional work that we're doing to improve our Tier 1 practices and encourage... See

168I was trying to be smart and now I can't remember the second word empower empower encourage and inspire our teachers to do differently and to adjust will decrease that need even further I was curious curious about the extended learning opportunities the list that you have do we offer avid at Cache Creek? Not currently is that is that a possibility or is there a reason? I'd have to research that But I don't believe Abbott is for continuation schools or something. We have to look into We could offer it as an elective, but we couldn't run it as a program. I will tell you that the issue with adding something like AVID at this point right now would be staffing because every teacher is assigned to teach essentially a content area with an extra one in English

169because so many kids end up at Cache Creek needing English. And so to add that specific elective would take away from a subject area and it would make it harder for kids to get through the way they do. But it's something to explore. To me, it seems similar to what you described as a senior seminar, right? Senior seminar seems... very much like AVID. AVID just seems like a fully blown program that has more structures and systems and support. So I was just curious as to why maybe that decision was made and if AVID could be something that could be moved in to support. To me, it's also an equity issue, right? If we offer AVID at our high schools, at Pioneer and at Woodland, then to me, it would make sense for us to be

170able to offer it at Cache Creek. It's a little different because AVID students start as a freshman. And they go through the whole four years through AVID. And they go through this whole preparation of getting A through G. The whole purpose of them is to get them into college. For a continuation student that ends up at Cache Creek, the regular comprehensive school did not work for them, right? And they're going there because they're credit deficient. and they're trying to have a second chance to make sure they get their high school diploma and that they have a next step. So it's a little different. They're not there. This only qualifies for 11th and 10th. Yeah, students have to be 16 years old. At least at the lowest grade level that they can be in is the

171second semester of their sophomore year, but we rarely have room for students in 10th grade, so the majority of them are 11th and 12th graders. The other thing is that senior seminar really focuses on life skills and independent living. There is a unit in there about college exploration, but really it focuses on work. and sustaining themselves, supporting themselves on the other side of high school. There's like future planning and, you know, researching resources, but it doesn't have the intense focus on the college going that AVID does, although it is part of it, but it's just not the main focus. I bring it up as maybe something that folks can look into if there are other schools like Cache Creek that do offer AVID. I imagine it would look very different than it would at Woodland

172and Pioneer. But maybe there is something that could be offered there that could be useful to our students at Cache Creek. All right. Anyone else. All right. Can we move on to the next one. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for your time Ms. Carrillo. All right. We have two more schools Woodland High and Pioneer High. It's 835 p.m. I would like to wrap up by 9 if we can Respectfully take it away sir. Good evening. So again, I'm Gerald Salcedo. I'm the principal of Woodland High School and Let me use this All righty. I'll try and go quick All right, so as far as our strengths, so over the last few years, we did have lower test scores. I think we've started to address that and help. So the previous year, we

173had increased CASP scores in English and math. Our reclassification rate for our English learners. has improved i think even just last year we had about 29 of our students reclassified to level four um for and it did a tremendous amount of of work uh with our students we brought in some training with our teachers uh for like best practices strategies working with our english learners across the different content levels and then so they can take that back to their departments and help support our students we did ramp up our rti and our mtss model with that being said, kind of just the tier one supports doing more PBIS, hitting home the positive, productive, professional, kind of our school-wide learning objectives for Woodland High School. Just with that being said, that decreased the number of our

174suspensions, increased the number of students that when we gave the pass, the pass is one of the things that's in the presentation. as the people's attitudes about school and self. And that has increased just tremendously over the last couple of years, even just last year. But just the number of students that are now coming. to trusted adults on campus or knowing that they can come to a trusted adult on campus. That's led to a lot of the preventative stuff that we've seen on campus, working with our assistant principals, working with our teachers, just like I said, decrease the number of suspensions that we've had overall. Increasing the number, increasing the implementation of our professional learning communities. Our staff has bought in. Our staff is doing a tremendous amount of work on this devoted allocated time,

175making sure we make time for what's important. And so we just allocate weekly time for our teachers to be able to collaborate, work with each other, build upon that, make sure there's no pockets of success, making sure that teachers are learning from each other as well. That did help with the decrease in the number of our D's and F's for our English learners as well. And then just continue to use all of that to build the culture and improve. And part of it has been also improving the facilities. um our kids have just um i think using their student voice um they've let's let's do a lot of student projects on campus um i think we've kind of empowered them to come and say hey we want to do this there's a dead spot over

176there let's fix that up let's do this uh which leads to the the cte programs that are on our campus so i know ag took the lead on improving one of the areas um our senior class uh donated a wolf uh last year and then that led into some other things that you know i think I want to thank Jim and the M&O department because they come and, you know, help support our student ideas. But just any of that stuff, just building upon those projects. Our construction department, we wanted to remove all of the old lockers that were just sitting there, broken, not being used. And when we removed them, there was a nice little base. which then led to the construction team just building a bunch of benches, give our kids more spaces to

177sit. All the areas were covered. So now they had areas to eat during lunchtime. When it was raining, they had covered areas, so they weren't just trying to find rooms to sit in. But it's led to kids just socializing more in those spaces. But, again, just building that culture. And also, I think with, you know, one of the strengths. I'll show you in a second one of the things that we do have we have a lot of new teachers but one of the things that we are doing is a lot of people that we've hired not just certificated in class but also classified have been alumni of Woodland schools so we have a lot of Woodland High and Pioneer High graduates that are now working at Woodland which then just leads to just that Woodland

178pride that Woodland like I want you know I went to these schools I went through here I want to give back I want to make sure that you're leaving here in a better place. And I think that's what's helped build that culture. So just a lot of those hires that we're being intentional with who we're hiring and bringing back into the community. Some of our key challenges, similar to what our other schools have been facing, just the staffing, primarily in special education. This coming year, we are fully staffed with special education. So that's helped. But in the previous years, it's been rough. And then just training staff on Even though we're fully into the PLC implementation just with the constant new teachers kind of coming in and Kind of we have to retrain them or

179get them trained and what we have based off our demographics we have about like I think the mean is about 13 years for our teachers. So we have a lot of veteran teachers on campus. But then again, when we get new teachers coming in, we have about 30% new over the last couple of years. Then it's just getting them trained, getting them supported, making sure that they're on the same page with everybody, which then, you know, sets things back a little bit. But again, they get caught up and that's part of the, you know, kind of the struggle. Our parent engagement. And when I say parent engagement, it's more just on campus events, not so much like that they're not engaged in their students. It's just we see a lot of parents on campus, but

180it's a lot of the same parents. And so we have a lot of people that help support. We have a lot of people that come and volunteer. We have a lot of people that come to the events. We have a lot of people, but it's a lot of the same parents. And so in trying to get more and more parents involved. which we get when we do a lot of promoting on like social media. We have the Facebook for, you know, the older folks like myself, you know, they have the Instagram for some of the younger folks and our social media numbers and like kind of just impressions have gone up. And so we have a lot more people that are following to try to get, you know, as many people or as much information

181out there as possible. So it is helped with in like one thing with like for example like Woody's Closet. It was one of the things that was a social media kind of just thing that led to the community coming out and supporting. We had to stop people from coming in because we ran out of space for clothes for the donations. So we had but then that led to other things with student involvement where kids wanted to get involved and help organize and do those things. So even over the summer we had some kids coming in over do some volunteer work and help organize. I think the parent engagement, if we can get more and just different families involved. We do a lot of the phone calls. We do the emails. We do the, like I

182said, social media, Parent Square. We do a lot of the different things, but it's still parents, you know, they have different reasons for not being there and we get it, but it's just, you know, trying to figure out different ways to get them there. And like I said, I already kind of talked about the increase in the new staff. We have about 30% of our, over the last couple of years, that's kind of a turnover. But we have been, like I said, intentional with who we're trying to hire. So questions? Who would like to go first? I don't have any questions or comments this evening. Trustee Garcia, go ahead. Yes. I want to congratulate Principal Salcido for all the new programs implemented under your leadership and also the environment and, as you mentioned, the importance

183of the family engagement. Thank you. I would like to use this. I had to leave at 9. And before I leave, I would like to say something. So I would like to say thank you, Trustee Rodriguez-Mohica, to bring this topic. I learned a lot for every single school. Thank you so much. All right, going back around. Trustee Richardson-Fowler. You mentioned the social media engagement and I know you guys are doing a lot of great stuff and I'll try and keep it brief I know some of the clubs have their own social media that the students run for Woodland High School are the staff running that or do you guys have an ASB or student group that's running that? So for our main pages admin does that and so what we do is we communicate with

184staff Clubs everybody if you have something that needs to go out share it with us or tag us in it so that we can share it or reshare it it's similar to like I know like the WJ USD page like we'll try to tag them in something so then they reshare it and try to you know get more exposure but admins does it just because we want to make sure that we we know what's going out and what's you know um and i even think like some of our um like the other the clubs and sports and anything that has those other things majority of them are um you know have the adult that's in charge of it as as one of the persons in charge they might give the kids some you know you

185know some of the kids like trusted to help manage it but everybody's better at social media than others so like even i mean on a personal level I don't use social media too much. I can't stand it. Honestly. That being said I would highly encourage if all of the different sites could normalize including us as well trustees to anything that they're having. Invitations, invite us to stuff especially if it's a fundraiser we'll show up and promote as well. Thank you. Thank you. Anyone else this evening? Trustee Rodriguez. In terms of your special education, so you said you have full staffing? For this year coming up, yes. Is there something that you did to be able to have that happen? I know it had been a struggle previously. Can you talk to them about that? I

186won't take ownership of that. Our director of special ed and the special ed department were the ones that did a lot of the hiring for special education. I think it's just, I don't know, maybe we're in an upshift of... more people graduating and getting into the programs, but they did a tremendous job of, and HR just getting. So nothing that happened different from previous years or any? I don't, I can't, I couldn't speak to that, so I wasn't part of the hiring process for them, so yeah. Seeing no one else, thank you very much, sir. Thank you. You have a good rest of your summer. Thank you. I'll just make a comment about special ed staffing. Continues to be a struggle It's not as bad as we were a number that we were looking back

187in May It's looking better. We still have some openings and we will be providing an update to the board later on how I don't have members in my head right now, but I can tell you that We are filling the positions but they're not necessarily credentialed fully credentialed Okay, so that still continues to even though we are having bodies in the rooms They're not necessarily fully credentialed teachers Which means that if they're not done with their courses and they don't pass their tests That they're going to be vacant and in the year because we can't rehire them the following year, which then looks like attrition Right. Why are people leaving? Well, there's different layers of reasons why sometimes I get married sometimes they move sometimes they find better pay No, this is different different reasons.

188It's not one single reason. Sometimes they're on an emergency credential and and they're done and they can't Move for we can't move forward with them because of the rules that we have with with the Commission teaching commission But things are looking better than it were last year at this time for special ed I attribute that to you know, the work that staff has been done been doing during the spring and and Working with a director and then with our new associate superintendent. Just everybody just keeping Doing their best to keep things rolling All through the summer while our principals have been on their much-needed breaks our directors have been busy at work during the summer We have our new principal Mrs. King here who is going to be presenting on Cache Creek and she's still

189in the process of quick learning the school But we also have the assistant principal here also to support her so they're gonna do a co-presentation. Oh Sorry, Cache Creek I just reassigned you. No, Pioneer High School. I do want to thank my assistant principal, Stephanie, for being here this evening and working in partnership with me so we can present. As you know, with being a new principal, it would be very hard for me to speak to the strengths and areas of opportunity. I will answer questions as I can, but I'm going to leave it to the expert at Pioneer High School right now to lead us through the presentation. Hi, good evening. My name is Stephanie Carlstrom. This is my fifth year at Pioneer, and I'm happy to be here tonight. I see that you

190saved the best school for last. I'm just going to have to say that. I know everyone's tired, so I'll go as... quickly as I can. So we have a lot of strengths, of course, at Pioneer. It's hard to choose which ones to share, but the ones that we did end up sharing are PLC work. We're really proud of the work that we've done in PLCs. It's a huge strength at Pioneer. We've been building PLCs there for the past nine years. And it's important to us, as other principals had mentioned as well, is if a student has to transfer between like one history class to another history class, that they have a similar experience so that they're not, you know, relearning the same material and things like that. We share with parents, if you have twins

191and, you know, they should, both of your children should be having, should have similar experiences, not identical, but similar. Our next strength is our wellness team. We're really proud of the work that we've done with our wellness team. It's very a serious meeting there at Pioneer. All the team members know, like, we honor it. We don't, you know, unless the school's burning down, we all show up. We're on time. We have an agenda. We look at data together. And it's really highly organized. Dr. Letary did a great job with that, as well as our RTI specialist, Jennifer Nichols. and the counselors attend. We have a huge attendance group with a lot of our team. It's probably about 20 of us that go to that meeting, and it's a really important meeting to us. We make

192sure that we identify any of the children that are in trouble that need additional help so we can discuss that and share all the information that we have. We make sure that it's an easy process for teachers and staff members to share a name, a student name with us that needs... extra help so that we can go over their information in our wellness meeting. And I'm really proud of the work that we've done with the RTI and the wellness team. The next strength I wanted to touch on is our dual enrollment. It's really grown quite a bit. We have a lot of, sorry, am I too close to this? Okay. Our dual enrollment, I know that Principal Reese spoke to you before she retired about a month ago about our dual enrollment. We're very proud

193of that work. We want to give a huge shout out to Lori Carrillo and Christina Lambie for their dedication. They really helped us remove a lot of the roadblocks that we had, you know, things that we didn't know would come up, things like transcripts or schedules and just a lot of the, you know, things that were new for a dual enrollment program at a high school. And it was really fun when we had the other schools come to Pioneer. I know our superintendent was there and we were able to share with other superintendents from other districts and other teachers and counselors of what we are doing at Pioneer. And they really, you know, had a lot of great questions for us and they're going to be able to bring it back to their school districts.

194So that was wonderful. The next strength I would say is that we've moved past the pandemic and we're able to now focus more on academics. You know, during the pandemic or after the pandemic, it was a lot of social and emotional focus, right? And now we're able to look, you know, to really focus more on the academic side, which is a wonderful strength. And our past results, we have shown really positive growth in that. And I know that there's a link. And I know one of the slides had that information. And then lastly, our WASC report. So we had our WASC visit this. a couple months ago and we did receive the best rating you can receive. It's a six year for our wasps. So we'll continue to work on those action items that the

195team, the visiting team shared with us and it was really a good experience and it was nice to be able to highlight the wonderful things that we're doing at Pioneer. Okay, so moving to the challenges. So it's, you know, overall, Pioneer does run very well, but we do have some foundational skill gaps for our students. The goalposts continue to change and move because of the year. dependent on the year that the students missed during the pandemic, the gaps that they have. So for example, our math one and math two teachers have to continually change the goalposts and change their content and their focus areas just based on whatever material that the students missed during that year. The next thing we would say a challenge is that we don't have an intervention period. It would be

196really wonderful if we could have something built into the school day to help our students. Teachers do a wonderful job. We're really happy and pleased with their work that they do before school, after school, and, you know, even during lunch, which is their, you know. free lunch time, but they choose to give that back to students. We have a wonderful after school learning center and other supports that are available, but it would be wonderful, you know, that's a challenge if we could have something during the, built into the school day. The next challenge would be artificial intelligence, AI. It's caused a lot of chaos, I would say, and just a lot of problems. You know that we we wouldn't anticipate and this is not just a pioneer issue. This is a global issue throughout the

197US It's really it's challenging because students can create videos that are not true This year we had a student create a video that it looked like the teacher was you know kissing or something a student and it was all AI. It was nothing was, you know, factual and it was upsetting, of course, to the teacher and to us. And, you know, that's the first time we had something like that occur. So it's just shocking kind of what they can do with AI. The next thing would be that we want to continue to make sure our students have more exposure to their four-year college plans for A through G. We have repeatedly educated them on their A through G, but then when you bring it up with high school, students are like, what is this? So

198it's something that we'll continue to refine and try to revamp to work with the students and with the families as well. And then the last thing is it's interesting that we have it as a challenge and a strength, but I would say our PLCs are also a challenge just because, you know, even though we have common assessments, common syllabi, essential standards, we need to continue to work and to take that information to make informed decisions of how to move forward with the data analysis and our next steps with PLCs. So I hope I stayed under my 10 minutes. I really enjoyed presenting with you and just sharing how awesome Pioneer is. I'm really pleased to be there, and I'm so happy to welcome Heather King as our new principal. So thank you. No, I just

199want to say thank you, and we're so happy for all the ground, especially for dual enrollment, and I'm so excited to your award. You will continue all this awesome. Thank you. Anyone else this evening? Going around. Hi, thank you for being here tonight. Deeply appreciate it. In terms of the effect of family communication and collaboration strategies, could you talk more about not only what we're doing now, but maybe as a new principal coming in, what are you going to bring to the table in regards to making more headway with family engagement? I think this year, with the unique challenges that we know that we're going to face, it is really going to... Beyond my leadership to take the school to the families and not expect the families to come to the school So I would

200foresee me doing daily Visits home visits and I would love to explore Maybe bringing tutoring into the community apartment complexes churches different things where there are safer spaces where families would not feel afraid to interact with school, so It'll take some creative thinking, for sure. But I think the model's going to have to change. And then to do the things that we would already do, right? So I'll be at every single football game. I'll be at the basketball games. I'll be at everything I can be in just because that's what I really like to do. And I love seeing kids when they're at their best. And for a lot of those kids, that is their best. It's what they are. you know excited about so increasing all of our presence in classrooms I think is

201going to build trust with the students and when the students trust us that should hopefully bleed over into the family so lots of different ideas but I my focus right now will be how do we bring ourselves to them versus expecting them to come to us I don't think that's realistic right now thank you very much anyone else this evening All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you to all of the school site leaders for being here this evening. We appreciate this. Thank you to Trustee Rodriguez-Molica for bringing this forward. This has definitely been a learning experience for all of us. Thank you very much for your leadership on this issue. So if I can just some final words about about these three sessions So we went through all the hope that you

202all have a better sense not only of the schools but of the students the people that lead our schools And you know they have some the most important job in the district is leading those schools and supporting teachers and students at the school site. And so I know they all take their jobs very seriously. They're all very passionate. But that is our leadership team. You might some of them, we have other leaders in the district that don't necessarily run a school, but run critical departments that provide services to our students. So I hope that you have a better sense. There is a lot more though. This is just barely the surface. But, you know, your role is to get the way big picture, way big picture, and focus on the policy and direction of the

203district. And it's these folks here and our teachers that we trust, the professionalism, to get into the how and to accomplish things. So we heard a lot of suggestions during these last three sessions. They heard the suggestions. They may or may not implement the suggestions, depending on what's on their plate, the priorities at their school site, the challenges that they have at their school site. So I just wanted to make sure that if we heard different individual suggestions I don't want that any other trustee to leave being thinking that that particular suggestion may be fully implemented right because that'll be my job once I get big picture big policy and Direction to the board then I'll work with staff on the specifics and the details of the implementation and based on what our priorities are

204Because we can do anything we want. We just can't do everything we want. There's limitations of manpower RESOURCES. AND THERE'S SO, THE NEEDS ARE SO MANY. AND SO IF WE'RE GOING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THIS DISTRICT, THE ONLY WAY WE'RE GOING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE AND GET BETTER IS TO FOCUS ON GETTING GOOD AT A FEW THINGS. VERSUS DOING A LOT OF THINGS AND NOT GETTING GOOD AT ANYTHING. SO GOT TO GET, PICK WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST NUGGETS. THE BOARD HAS ALREADY GIVEN DIRECTION THAT LITERACY IS THE PRIORITY. Anything added to that will distract that priority for example So I just wanted to say that because I want to make sure that our principles continue with the priorities that we currently have And continue moving forth with our 4l cap goals and continue with

205that and and then more to come later if that shifts and that changes then we can work together or if you work with that together with me if those direct those Priorities change then I can work with my staff to adjust those priorities. Thank you Thank you very much superintendent I'm just gonna add, you know being a board member is a balancing act there are times when you know, we we are you know kind of watching from the helicopter view and Coming watching from there from that angle But there are times that we do have to sit down and you know, listen Speaking for myself my priorities to make sure that I I'm an active listener that I'm a servant leader So knowing how to balance that is very challenging I like to make sure

206that I keep my ear to the ground and you know that I help build decisions here at the table But that I also keep in mind the different perspectives and the different feedback, you know not Just limited to the public comment but to the emails and the phone calls that we receive. It's a balancing act Yes, we do give directives. Yes. We do have a mission. Yes. We do have an LCAP. Yes. We do have goals But sometimes there are some different perspectives that we need to keep in mind and you know, it's it's a juggle sometimes So thank you superintendent for bringing us full circle I'm sorry board member Rodriguez mojica I just want to thank our, my fellow trustees for supporting me and bringing this forward. I know it was a lot, especially

207with the addition of, of additional study sessions. So thank you to the superintendent and our administrators and everyone else, the cabinet that has joined us. It's been a really, really busy time since spring. We've had a lot on our plate. And I acknowledge that this was a lot of work. It was a lot of time for us and also reviewing the materials, but then also for everyone else that supported these presentations, all of the time that went into it. So I just want to express my gratitude for doing everything that you all did to share this information and try to bring us up to speed, even if it's just a tiny little bit of what you all do. For me personally, as a new trustee is extremely, extremely helpful as I move forward in making

208decisions, right, collectively with the board. So I just wanted to take a minute to express just my deep and sincere gratitude to my colleagues here at the DICE and everybody else that has supported this effort. I also want to encourage us to... really take some time and take all of this in. It's a lot of information from the presentations we heard and also from the research. And keep an open mind about maybe trying different things, right? It doesn't mean that we're going in a completely different direction, but I also would hate for us to just continue doing the same thing because it's what we've always done. I think we all recognize that we have room for growth. We're doing amazing, amazing things, but there's also things that we can do better. And I do see

209our role as being able to identify the structures that maybe are getting in the way and what can we do to try to support positive change and positive growth. So while I do acknowledge that we need to focus and... What our role is I also think it's important for us to keep an open mind and really think strategically as a team Learning from the past history learning about what the limitations are of our district But then also taking into consideration everything else that we've learned to see what steps can we take in a positive direction? So I just wanted to add that note. But again, thank you so much to everyone that That was a part of us Thank you. All right. Can we move on to the next topic? All right, we do have

210a governance support item. It's k1 and this is a discussion This was a question that was brought by oh, yeah, the agenda planning committee. Oh wait, it's one of my oh, there's you Information report on Williams will these quality reports information only there have been no findings any questions? Okay Now it's the governance support Okay now to the government support this was a discussion that occurred during our agenda planning committee Meeting agenda planning committee that came up regarding a discussion of The board to consider if they review would like to do any advocacy CSBA has been sending information out we attached the Alert that was sent by CSBA on the one that was referred to during our agenda planning tool. I've attached that and this is basically a discussion for you and this was brought

211up by Trustee Rodriguez so I'll let you add anything else but just wanted to allow the board time to discuss if they wanted to take any action this is a board request. So colleagues essentially you know we've been sent you know this alert through CSBA they're asking for us to contact our U.S. senators and representatives and demand that that the administration, that pressed the administration to release $811 million in already appropriated funds for California schools and to urge the administration to unfreeze $6.8 billion in total funding being withheld from schools nationwide. You know, if you read the release, each year on July 1st, bylaws states receive the bulk of the federal education. money Congress allocated for the upcoming K-12 school year. On June 30th, states received an email saying the US Department of Education was

212still reviewing the 2025 funding for programs. And so I think the ask tonight was to have a conversation to see if we as a board felt strongly enough that we would follow CSBA's lead and and urge our US senators and representatives to have this money unfrozen. We could do that several ways, but I think one of the ways I would put forward was to try and do it in a resolution that we could create for a next meeting. There's no action today. It's just having a conversation to see if we have enough board sentiment to move forward in whatever importance everybody feels. this topic would be. So I'd love to hear from my fellow board members about this issue. I am definitely supportive. This is a discussion. I think advocacy on, you know, the federal

213funding freezes is something that's going to be ongoing. You know, some of the money may be pieced out and released slowly. It's very uncertain, you know, what... what we are facing. I think we need continuous advocacy and this is the first step to bring forward a resolution. My only request is that that resolution also includes statewide advocacy urging our legislators to be up front and center in the advocacy and urging our federal representatives to urge our president to release these funds. But thank you very much for bringing this forward. I am one hand yes. Any others? Richardson-Fowler. I like it. I think the saying is action is the anecdote to despair. And I think a lot of people are in despair right now and having an action item or something that people can do is

214very helpful. I recently heard some lady who said she feels like she was blocked from one of her legislators office because she calls twice a day. and she has yet to get anybody on the phone. So giving somebody something where they feel like they can make a difference, I think is just wonderful. So you got a thumbs up from me too. And I'll just add, I think... I would love to work on this with you, Board Member Rodriguez. I think also sharing a draft to our state senator and assembly member in advance. I don't want them to be surprised or feel that they were taken by surprise in any way, shape, or form. I want to work with them. But I am a yes to bringing this back actionable. In a draft and just to

215be clear. This is going to be an action item for our National legislators, so this will go to our Congress folks and our state senators, correct? Yeah, I think we're US senators. Well, I think the focus would be the the United States senators right Congress But we would also contact let let our state legislators know that we're doing this and we contact our federal legislators They don't have to respond right, you know, and I think you know just in general. It's We obviously are going through extraordinary times. And I think being able to think as a board that we may have to take some extraordinary measures. The regular kind of measures is not the regular kind of way that we deal with our other fellow electeds necessarily. But I can tell you that if you're

216reading the tea leaves, I have no desire or will to be a trustee that simply oversees the dismantling of public education. And so that may mean that we're gonna have to maybe do some things that the boards haven't done before. But one of the things is making sure that our other electeds understand that this is unacceptable to us and we expect them to do everything that they can. And if we can take it a step further, not just the families, but also activate and engage our students since this will impact them much longer than will impact us. Anyone else Tracy Baker so I I'm wholeheartedly in support of this We discussed in the agenda plan of meeting which is how this ended up here. So thank you trustee Rodriguez for bringing this forward initially I

217do want to say just because I don't know how much the public is aware of quite how all of this happened I think it was like a week or two after we passed our budget for the upcoming school year funds that we had full expectations of getting as of July 1st and I counted for in that budget were Announced I think the day before that we would not be getting them and so this is not even a well We could have planned better because there's literally nothing we could have done Which is why this is such an unprecedented thing, which is why we are discussing this I don't know that it's unprecedented, but it's definitely unusual process. So I applaud your leadership in bringing this forward initially and thank you President Batista-Valla for offering to

218help. I would love to help. I'm going to be incommunicado for between now and then most of the time or I would love to put my two cents in as well. So thank you both of you for stepping up to do this. So yeah, it sounds like we'll bring back a draft or bring back a resolution that will be open to amendments when we bring it back. And I just want to also mention, to finalize and wrap this up and move on, you know, feel proud of yourselves to really champion issues and being the first district in a lot of issues in our county to really be the ones to move forward a lot of change. So I think that this is something that is timely, but also consider it something that will be spearheading

219and then hopefully other districts will follow suit. Okay. All right, Superintendent. We'll bring that back with the draft. I'll work for the well for the resolution for the August 5th meeting or the 21st. The August 5th meeting we will need the resolution next week. Okay. Thank you. All right. Moving on to public comment for items not on the agenda this evening. We do have one. Christine Venucci. I went back and forth whether or not I was going to say something about parent engagement, but an encounter I had with the principal at Woodland High kind of pushed me over the edge. You ask why parents don't engage with the schools. I received an email from Woodland High School saying on Monday, August 4th, my daughter needs to be there as a freshman between 8 and noon.

220I'm a teacher. Her other mom's a teacher. Anybody want to give her a ride? But she's supposed to be there between 8 and noon, and then somebody's going to have to pick her ass up. Then she gets to come back again on the 7th so that she can get her books and pay her fees and do everything else. And it says, parents, please attend. You want to know what time that is? Between 10 and noon. I work. My wife works at your schools. How on earth are parents supposed to engage when your principals set the stuff between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.? You want parents to engage? Do it at a time that parents can make it. Not 5 p.m. because parents have to get off of work. Not at 3 p.m. because then... She

221has to get a sub so that she can do something, or I have to take a half a day off so that I can come and do something so that I can engage so you can check the box off that says parents are engaging. Figure out how to do it outside of the school day, outside of the work day. His response to me was, well, the teachers work. No kidding. The parents work. You want the parents to engage with the teachers, but we're like, this is the work day. You got to make it between eight and three. I work 8 to 5, and I have a 45-minute drive. Sure, I'll engage. Thank you very much. Any other public comment this evening? All right, you guys, we're moving on. Information requests for future agenda items. Superintendent,

222do you have something on here? Yes, I have two things I want to say about the future agendas. One is the board meeting on August the 5th. Right now we have it scheduled tentatively to start at 4 o'clock. The reason for that is because we have potential appeal of a suspension The only other option we have is to schedule a special board meeting just for that appeal We're trying to resolve it before before So it may not we may not need to have it started four o'clock But if we do we have two options we can schedule a board meeting just for that appeal Or we can just start that meeting earlier What time are you suggesting superintendent four o'clock? Okay And that's that's a Tuesday meeting. Yes. Do we have an estimate of how

223long that meeting is going to run and do we have. Yes we're going to give a limitation of a estimate about an hour not allow it to go more an hour so that we can take care of other business the other hour and plus session around. I'm just concerned about when. Oh. When do we anticipated ending. So like today we had a light one. Do we. It really is all up to you. The board. Okay, the questions and you know It helps to ask questions to ahead of time. Mm-hmm. It's asked especially when the principal's stuff that you know, that's they were not prepared to answer this Will make it smoother for everyone more comfortable for a staff as well I only ask because the six is my first day of this school year. So

224just trying to yeah Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. So can we go ahead and take us? survey the board Where if they're available to start at work is this is not an it's not an actionable item So we can't necessarily say yeah, let's all start up for Or do you want us to give you hands? I just think hands because right now we have it scheduled for that, but I just wanted to alert the board. All I need is four board members at that hearing. I may be able to make it, but I'm not entirely sure. Okay, then we are going to be in a pickle because we have to have, if this appeal goes forward, it has to happen before the 8th of August, which means I'll have to schedule a special

225board meeting on a different time. Rogelio usually doesn't like coming before 5, and then have you checked with Biddy? She won't be here on the fifth. So the pressures on Rodriguez mojica and Villagran I can I can make it work. Was I the fourth? Yeah. Thank you trustee. Okay anything else? Okay You can actually attending closed session virtually yes We'll talk more details The other thing I wanted to alert the board is that we do have an upcoming governance meeting on Saturday August 23rd and I have already been alerted by trustee Garcia that she will not be able to attend. I mean after all So I just wanted to alert you that that's the all-day governance meeting on the 23rd of August So if there's any anyone else that potentially has a conflict the sooner

226we know the better because the board may want to Consider looking at other options. So one of the things with this is that Elodia and I have already been working with our Moderator facilitator and putting together an agenda. We already have a draft agenda and Availability for the moderator facilitator is very limited The state was planned and vetted across all of our calendars in advance months ago. I personally for myself, I will consider rescheduling it, but I have to tell you my availability between now and the end of year is very slim. And I don't know that my dates that I would be available coincide with the availability of the facilitator. So I'm just being very honest. I know that it was very important for us, for all of us to be there. I just

227don't know that we can make that happen. If any of you really are, you know, married to the idea of all of us being there, please express that to the superintendent so that both of us can reconnect later and see if that's something that we need to do. I'm just letting you know, my availability is very slim and I don't know that it's gonna coincide with that of the facilitator. Anybody else? Yeah, I think that things happen, right? We all have to... Things happen. It's very difficult once we commit to a date and we've had a long-term Understanding of that, you know, we have to do our best to try and keep it I know I'm trying my best to keep it and then when you take into account the availability of the facilitator and

228how difficult it is then I think that You know unless it's a larger group that can't make it then I think we we move forward but I also think that we can you know try and do things to um say in this case trustee garcia may not be able to make it but there may be a way in which she could participate so you know she knows the agenda ahead of time she'd like to make sure we talk cover some topics or she'd like to express herself in written form or what have you um we can we can certainly uh you know be open to to accepting her participation in that way as well uh it doesn't have to be like a you know all or nothing. And so I say we keep the date.

229Anyone else? I agree with keeping it. I mean, the reality is we have had this on our calendar for months. And so if we reschedule it, same thing could happen with someone else. I mean, I think that if we moved it, it's just as likely that something else could come up for someone else. So I think we risk losing more people in the long run. It's unfortunate that we can't all be there and that would certainly be the best case scenario But I just don't know how realistic it is All right If you guys have any other feedback or comments that you would like to submit to the superintendent You're more than welcome to on this topic anything else superintendent Both of my two things. All right. Thank you very much in moving to the

230next item closing comments anyone All right, thank you very much for this meeting. The date and time of the next scheduled board meeting, regular board meeting is set for Tuesday, August 5th. Remember, that is a Tuesday and we will be starting at 4 p.m., it sounds like. Closed session at 4, open session at 6 p.m. And with that said, we stand adjourned at 9.23 p.m. Thank you very much.