001Sorry? Okay, good. I'd like to welcome everyone watching on ITV and via live stream and call the May 25th, 2021 regular meeting to order with all board members present via Zoom webinar. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Ready, begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Can we get in a motion to adopt today's agenda? So moved. Moved by Dr. McQuarrie and seconded by I think Trustee Bozzo. Yep, thank you. Okay, Trustee Patterson. Aye. Trustee McQuarrie. Aye. Trustee Beizer. We lose Trustee Beizer. Trustee Bozzo. Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Aye. And Barrera, aye. Okay. Okay. Today's meeting of the Board of Education is a business meeting that is conducted in public.
002In compliance with the California Department of Public Health and County of San Diego directives prohibiting large public gatherings during the coronavirus outbreak, the Board of Education is accepting public testimony via Zoom webinar for tonight's meeting. Board bylaw 1025 sets the time limit for public comment on agenda items at 10 minutes per side pro and con or 20 minutes total. Speakers will be able to provide testimony at the beginning of the appropriate agenda item or at the end of the meeting for non-agenda public comment. The list of public speakers is attached to agenda item B2. Speakers are listed and called in the order received. When your name is called, you will be allowed to speak. Please unmute yourself at that time. If you hear your name called and are unable to unmute yourself, we will call
003the next speaker. Once all speakers have been called for the item, your name will be called again. Please unmute yourself then. Zoom does not allow staff to access your personal device to unmute a speaker. If there are multiple anonymous or same name entries, please raise your hand so you can be identified. Okay, and we will start with item C1, our student presentation tonight. And this is from Hage Elementary School's Dynamic Physical Education Program. And we'll ask our trustee, Sabrina Basso, to introduce Pat Crowder. Yes, thank you, Trustee Barrera. I'm very excited to have all of you see this presentation of this fantastic program that's going on at Hage Elementary School that we can feature to everyone in the district. And I think, like you said, I'm actually going to hand it off over to Pat
004Crowder, our interim superintendent, first, and then go to Hage. Thank you. Thank you, Trustee Baza. Thank you. I'm Pat Crowder, retired administrator, and I'm honored to be the interim area two superintendent, helping the wonderful principals in our district. I would like to introduce now James Lee, principal at Hage Elementary, who will tell you about his outstanding physical education program with his wonderful teacher, Keith Konecka. Thank you, Interim Superintendent Crowder, as well as all the board trustees. Great to see everybody. And a big shout out to our Interim Superintendent, Dr. Lamont Jackson, for all his leadership. He's been amazing as a support for our schools, especially in Area 2. We know that Ubuntu is still alive within what we do, always, and we appreciate that. And so I wanted to lift that up first and foremost,
005but also share some appreciation for our community at H. We're in Mira Mesa and we love our community and we've seen so much support. And I want to share that gratitude and appreciation to our community for all that love and support through one of the most trying years we've ever had. It's been four years for me, the leadership and being at the top at Hage as a principal. And so just a very proud moment for us to be able to showcase the different amazing things that we do at Hage, but especially our dynamic physical education program. So we're going to showcase for you some innovative, different things that we do that supports our wellness, as well as overall student achievement and learning. So I want to pass it off to one of our amazing teacher
006leaders and partners, Keith Koneko. Thank you, Board of Trustees and everybody else that is attending the meeting this evening. I really appreciate this opportunity to showcase the physical education program that we have worked really hard. And I'm just really excited to be able to give you a snapshot of what physical education is and what it was and what it will continue to be moving forward. as we just meet the students' needs, especially in our community, and hoping to set a pace, an example for other schools and other districts, and just as we move forward. So thank you again for this time, this opportunity, everybody. And I believe I am going to share it. Is that what's going on, or they're going to share it? Okay. Sorry. I was under the impression, sorry, guys, that you
007guys are going to do that. So... I really apologize. No, not at all. I thought for some reason when I submitted that I'm all new to this. When I submitted this that I was going to already have it or you guys are going to have it. So I apologize. We're all new to this, Keith. Sorry about that. Not a problem. Good thing it's just right at my fingertips. So wait. Sorry. Okay. So without further ado. I'm going to go ahead and start it. Everyone attending, hello, good evening, board members, everyone attending this presentation. My name is Keith Caneco, and I am a physical education teacher who has taught and learned for over 23 years. This evening, I'd like to take you on a journey that showcases student learning opportunities. through a dynamic physical education program
008at Hage Elementary School. But before I do this, I'd like everyone to think back when you were a kid in physical education. What were your experiences? How did you feel? How did it affect your life? Did you have physical education? Was it equitable, standard-based, and strategic? I'd like you to keep these thoughts in mind as you hear more about our program. One of the programs we are highlighting is Club Move. Club Move was created from an organic collaboration with myself and the Adaptive Physical Education teacher to create an inclusive opportunity for all learners. Let's hear a little more about this program from our APE teacher. Hello everybody, my name is Brandon Cahoon. I'm the adaptive PD teacher here at H-Ege Elementary School. I've been with the district now for about eight years and today I
009want to talk to you about our inclusion program called Club Move. The way that Club Move got started was about five years ago. Keith went to a PD on the Young Athletes and Special Olympics. When he returned from that, he approached me and asked me if I wanted to start our own inclusion program. I thought it was a great idea. And we wanted to really focus on the building of relationships through the groups and the teams that we have in Club Move. But not only that, I wanted to also build a program, and Keith wanted to build a program that students of all abilities can participate in physical education. Now, this year, we have the opportunity to be a unified champion school, which is also a great addition to our program. Now, if you have
010any questions or want to visit anytime, observe our program, that would be great. Contact myself, Brandon Cahoon, or you can contact Keith Connecto. Now let's hear the impact this program had on our students. It inspired me to help others. I just love when I come and they give me a big hug. I feel like really good about myself because it teaches me that everybody has different abilities and everybody's different. And I think that people should be treated how they should be. and I don't care how people are and I feel like everybody should be free to jump and Club Move has taught me to be a better person. Gotta love the internet. Another program we have that is unique and dynamic is our swim program. This program was created on the notion that everyone living
011in San Diego should know how to swim. This life-saving, inclusive program has been going on for the last 18 years and has taught over 5,000 students to swim. This program was created alongside with Lynn Barnes-Wallace. This program provides five weeks of free 35-minute swim lessons for grades 3, 4, and 5. In collaboration with the Prevent Drowning Foundation of San Diego, our fifth graders get to participate in the Bridge to the Beach program. where every child gets an opportunity to participate in aquatic activities such as boogie boarding and surfing in the ocean, to kayaking and stand-up paddling in the bay. Now here are two videos. The first video is a student with myself who has special needs learning how to blow bubbles under the water. The second video is another student explaining the impact the program
012had on her. You do it. Put your face in the water. Good, Bonnie. I'm Suhey and I'm a fifth grader at Hage Elementary. When I think of physical education, I think of the swim program. One impact that the swim program has had on me is that I can now save my own life and other people's lives at beaches, pools, and other places with water in them. This skill might help me in the future, like if I decide to become a lifeguard. What they do is basically just save people's lives, so I'd basically have a head start on that. Well, thank you so much for listening to this. Hope that you have a great day. Bye. Gymnastics is another encompassing opportunity that our program offers. It gives our students the opportunity to persevere and succeed at
013skills they may not have thought possible. Learning how to conquer the high balance beam to springboards and vaults can transfer into confidence. in the classroom when tackling a challenging assignment. Here is one of our students explaining her experience and the impact gymnastics has had. Hi, my name is Amrita and I'm in fifth grade. When I think of physical education, I think of gymnastics. An impact gymnastics had on me is that if I'm stuck in an emergency, then I have learned many walks that could help me. For example, bear walk or crab walk. Both of them can help me get through my... get through to my safety. Another impact gymnastics had on me is conquering my fears. I climbed the high balance beam when I was learning gymnastics and it was pretty scary, but conquering that
014fear, I now do flips on the red high bar. Thanks for listening. I hope you learn gymnastics too. Dance fitness is more than a tradition at our school. This school-wide opportunity creates and builds a community for all children to participate in an environment that is safe, a lot of fun, and active. Here is a video of a student sharing her experience with dance fitness. Before playing this video, I'd like you to notice two pictures in the corners where you see hundreds of kids dancing on the blacktop. This is what it looked like before the pandemic hit. Hello, my name is Zoe Park and I am in fifth grade. When I think of physical education, I think of dance fitness. Dance fitness has helped me a lot with confidence. Since I do ballroom dancing, I was
015a bit nervous, but since I did dance fitness, it really did help. And since I do competitions and performances, it really did help because I got nervous all the time, but in the end, it really did help in general and just doing the stuff I want to do. Thank you. Innovation is part of the education process as a teacher. And we were faced with a huge test on how to keep our programs going. Here are some platforms we used in order to keep some of our programs going. One example is how we kept our dance fitness program going via Zoom with over 500 students. Now remember, the two pictures that... I had in my last slide where you saw hundreds of kids dancing on the blacktop prior to the pandemic starting. And here's what we
016came up with. And here's what we have been doing over the last year and a half. I already saw some age panthers dancing. If you can spotlight it, we want to see your dancing. Come on, let's whip and nae nae. It's Friday. Let's go. You already know it. Watch me nae nae. Watch me nae nae. and awareness on physical education. We took you through a journey that encompassed a variety of dynamic and inclusive programs that serve all students. Being physically active allows students to leverage their learning to the classroom and beyond through perseverance, confidence, and lifelong wellness. Thank you very much for listening this evening, and I hope now you have a different idea of what physical education is. Goodbye and good night. Hello. Good evening. Well, that was fantastic. Thank you so much, Keith
017and Principal Lee and Pat Crowder and Sabrina and especially the students at Hage. That was really and it was just so great to see you continuing with the creative physical education through the pandemic. I know how important that that would have been to your students. So thanks again, Hage. Great presentation. Thank you. All right. We will now move on to item C2, and this is our recognition of employees for years of service. And we'll turn it over to Interim Superintendent Jackson. Thank you so much, President Barrera. This is a great opportunity for us. As you know, we have had the... Classified Employees of the Year, the Teacher of the Year. And this is, again, us extending our ability to celebrate, folks. And hats off to Acacia Thede in HR and Issa, who's done a phenomenal
018job of recognizing. So I want to turn it over to Acacia now, who will take us through these presentations. Thank you, Dr. Jackson. Again, tonight, we're super excited to honor our classified employees, actually all of our employees. I was stuck in last week's classified employee of the year. But we're back to our monthly employee recognitions. So tonight, what we're going to share with the board is the way that we honor our employees each month since we've done over the past school year. We are in the progress of getting out the certificates and pins to everybody. So those will be coming through school mail. So we're excited to send those your way. We're going to share two videos tonight. The first is our monthly celebration of those employees celebrating 5, 10, 15, all the way up
019to 40 years of service. And then the second one, we have a special honor tonight, and we're going to highlight 17 employees who have been distinguished leaders honored by AASD. So I have two videos to share with you this evening. And I'll begin with the first, which is our monthly employee recognition. And I'm excited that we're going to honor our very own Martha Corrales, who is in the back there behind Board Services Director Marty Stoltz. So I'm going to share this with you. My name is Martha Corrales and I'm currently working at the Board of Education office and I'm celebrating 20 years of service. My journey with San Diego Unified began at Troy Pines Elementary. From there I went to the Parent Involvement Department, then the Parent and Community Engagement Department, then the Parent Support
020and Board Services Office. followed by Lincoln High School, Claremont High School, and finally here back to the Board Office. What I am most proud of is having the opportunity to create the conditions for students to thrive. I have been privileged to have the opportunity to work with both caring and innovating people. In 2008, Kathy Ryan and I worked together to put together a health and wellness center and a youth health council at Lincoln High School, thus providing students with the opportunity. to be able to receive mental, dental, and health services and also to be able to advocate for their community. We also took first-generation students on college tours and we did parent-student college tours because we wanted both parents and students to be able to have a college campus experience together. A big thank you
021to Ms. Apple, Ms. Berlin, Mr. P, Mr. Allen, and Nella for always volunteering to chaperone our activities. Without them, we would not have been able to go to all of these places and provide students with all these experiences because as a classified employee, I'm not allowed to take students on field trips without a certificated person. In 2012, David Benavides and I created an after-school program in a summer bridge program for students that were at risk. These were students that had low GPAs. or attendance and discipline issues. We were able to provide students with the opportunity to have experiences that had been denied because of the discipline issues and the low attendance and the low GPA. Students were able to participate in field trips, they were able to have academic experiences, and they were able to
022participate in different student forums. A special thank you to Rafael Hernandez, Van Meehan, Akiva Jones, and Edo Beda for their endless support during my years at Lincoln High School and Claremont High School. Without their continuous support, our students wouldn't have been able to participate in field trips, academic programs, talk for a day, and many other experiences doing research in a lab at the university, and just being able to be exposed to the college life. You know what? I just do it because, you know, the kids, they need it. And I think, you know, if you work in education, it doesn't matter what position you have. If you're in a position to help, you want to make a difference, you can make a difference. In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, death valley is not dead,
023it is dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility, waiting for the right conditions to come about. And with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. Thank you. Thank you, Martha. All right. So now we're going to celebrate our next video. This are 17 leaders who have been honored by AASD as Distinguished Administrators. Hi, my name is Angelica Hueso Garcia and I am the vice principal at Knox Middle School. My favorite part about my job and being part of the district and AASD is that I get to connect with families, support teachers, and improve student learning. Most importantly, I get to cry and laugh with my students. I get to be a part of their journey and I have the privilege of watching them become better human beings. My name
024is Bernadette Kasich-Jancic and I'm a regional field manager with Food and Nutrition Services. I'm extremely honored to be in this group of leaders. Our district is made of leaders. Our district is made of great individuals. This past pandemic year has been very challenging and everyone has stepped up to the plate. We work with a great team. We're here for our community, our families, and our students. Thank you. This is Kathy Murphy from Patrick Henry. I just want to thank everybody from AASD. And the favorite part of my job is always working with my crew. I have the best team on the planet, and that means my principal too, who supports us 100%. Thank you so much. Hi, my name is Dr. Celia Ramirez, representing AASD Retiree Network Committee. As a retiree, I am proud to
025continue to support staff, students, parents, and communities of San Diego Unified. I am honored to receive the AASD Distinguished Leader Award. Thank you. Good morning, everybody. My name is Fernando Hernandez, principal at Perkins K-8 School in Barrio Logan, and I am so proud of the way the entire staff at Perkins responded during these last two years and were able to overcome these tremendous challenges. Thank you so much, everybody. Hi, I'm Jeff Alvaro principal University City High School. I appreciate being honored in this way by the principal colleagues as they know I am retiring. I want to thank the Board of Education and allowing me to serve the last 35 years the students, staffs, and parents and community members for San Diego Unified has been a true blessing. Thank you very much. Hi, my name is
026Jessica Keen and I'm a Regional Field Manager with Food and Nutrition Services and what I like most about my job is being able to do such meaningful work for our community. Since the beginning of the pandemic, we've served over 28 million meals and at a time when food security is at an all-time high, I feel privileged to do such meaningful work. Thanks. Hi, my name is Liz Sloan and I'm the principal of E.B. Scripps Elementary School. One of my favorite parts of my job is collaborating with other principals, so I especially enjoy being the chair of the elementary principals and providing a platform for principals to share and collaborate. Thank you for this honor. I'm Matt Fallon, principal at Wagon High Middle School. My favorite part of my job and being supported by AASD is
027working with my great staff and community and creating some really phenomenal learning experiences for our students so that they can grow and become just amazing young people to lead our future. Thank you. Hi, I'm Dr. Rashaun Villery, proud principal of Oak Park Elementary. I'm passionate about creating opportunities for students, teachers, and fellow principals to achieve at high levels and reach their highest potential. I enjoy teaching, leading, and mentoring them. Thank you AASD for this special recognition, Distinguished Leader Award. I'm honored. Hi, I'm Russ Sperling from the Visual and Performing Arts Department, otherwise known as VAPA. I love my job and being a part of San Diego Unified and AASD because I get to work with amazing people. District teachers and VAPA staff who are artists and artists in our community, all on behalf of bringing
028arts education to all of our students in the district to enable their artistic expression and growth as individuals. Hi, my name is Steve Whittle and I'm the principal for Innovation Middle School in Area 5. And I am most proud of the collaborative work and progress of my fellow principals and educators during these trying times. It's awe-inspiring to work with such great people that are constantly striving to improve what we do for kids. So thank you on behalf of all the principals and educators that showcase their hard work and dedication. Hi, my name is Tim Swanico, principal of Audubon 14th grade to 8th school. This recognition is very important to me because it is truly a recognition that validates not only my work, but the hard work of all my wonderful colleagues during these unprecedented times.
029Hello, my name is Veronica Ortega, Classified Manager with Leadership and Learning. Over the 27 years that I've worked with SEMU Unified, I am most proud of my contributions of supporting classified staff, specifically the staff that work directly with our graduating seniors year to year. Thank you. All right. Well, thanks so much, Acacia. That was fantastic. Some of our absolute favorite people, including, of course, Martha. We're just so blessed. to have the people who work for our kids every day in this district and have done so for such a long time. So it's really, really inspiring. And congrats, Martha. Okay, so we have no report outs from closed session and no administrative assignments. So let's move on to item D3. And this is our associated student body president's report. At this time, we'd like our ASB
030students to introduce themselves, tell us about yourself and what's going on at your school, both academically and socially. We'll start with Samantha Bombau from San Diego SCPA. And then, of course, we have Austin Kingston from La Jolla High School and the president of the Council of ASB presidents. So, Samantha, why don't we lead off with you? Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative
031and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau, ASB President of the San Diego School of Creative and Performing Arts. Samantha Bambau 100% transparent. This year has been honestly really, really hard for me. Like many other students, this is not the ideal environment that I am able to learn in, not one that I flourish in. But I understand that this is a very tough year for everyone, you know, like students, teachers, faculty, and we're all just trying our best to get through something that
032no one else has ever had to do before. When speaking to my fellow students about it, at least more near the beginning of the school year, the talk kind of made them a little nervous, a little worried that we weren't ready to go back yet. More than anything, you know, we want to be safe about it, keep everyone safe, number one. But because I speak for all of the students, I... know that I needed to voice that out. However, the current transition into the hybrid schedule has been going pretty smoothly for the kids that are returning to school. A little about the situation with communicating with teachers during this year was also kind of difficult. I've had some wonderful teachers who have remained very patient with students during online learning, but at the same time,
033I've also had to handle teachers who assign a little bit more workload on students than regular school years. So I just do my best to communicate with my teachers about what I have going on outside of school just so that we can reach a certain understanding, which I found has been going really great for me. So moving on, in order to help students communicate more with each other, my ASB has been doing our best to achieve as much student outreach work as we can this year. So in the beginning of the school year, one of my ASB committees executed a student linking program, and that kind of just helps students meet different kind of people to just stay connected through this year. It's very easy to feel lonely going to school, like through your laptop.
034That was one of our main focuses. Our class cabinets have also been hosting online class meetings, just like in a regular school year. In addition to that, there are also online bonding days planned as well, whether it's as simple as putting on a movie for the students on Zoom for everyone to watch or playing online games together. So we've also been able to do like things like online spirit weeks, student takeovers on social media. And we even had very successful middle school bonding days hosted by our very own middle school ASB because my high school is also a middle school. So we try our best to make sure they feel included. Also, because we are very limited in our resources this year in regards to publicizing information and kind of keeping that. connection from ASB
035to the student body strong. We knew we couldn't just keep all of the information on social media, you know, because all students obviously don't have, you know, Instagrams and stuff like that. So our ASB decided to revamp our previously unused ASB website. It is now fully functional, informational. It has links, contact information, resources, and stuff like that. Lastly, our ASB committees were also able to launch a brand new student podcast named The Surface, which is available to everybody through YouTube. And I'm always so impressed by the production and the effort put into this podcast. And I believe it's a great way to kind of keep students in the know of what's still happening at school. Yeah. And so despite everything I just talked about, what I am especially proud of for my ASB is the
036way that we have been able to stay motivated. to do the kind of work that we do, even in the circumstances that we've been given. And how we still do our best to try to be there for the students. Because like I said, it's really easy to feel lonely, like going to school and you see a bunch of gray boxes. So we just try our best to make sure students know that it's not just them. And yeah, so after a long year of just changes and struggles, I'm proud of what my team and I were able to accomplish during this global pandemic. Thank you. Really fantastic, Samantha. Great report. And just, you know, we know what a tight-knit community SCPA always is. And it sounds like you just did just such great work to keep
037that community strong and together. as students struggled with that. So thank you. And Samantha, we always put our ASB presidents on the spot at this time of year. So can you tell us what your plans are for next year? Well, I'm actually a senior, so I am graduating. in like two months. But what we're doing right now is actually completing our ASB election process. So we're actually getting the new team of ASB together. I already have someone I know will be a great ASB president. She's focusing on keeping the community as close as it has been these past few years, but also working towards reaching the disabled student population because we noticed that there's not much inclusivity during like around that population so I believe that's something she really wants to target and I support
038her 100% on it because I have also recognized that you know there hasn't been much student outreach in that part of our campus so I'm very proud I'm very excited to see what they're going to come up with next year. Well, and that speaks so highly of you to be so excited about the folks who are coming up after you. But Samantha, we were also asking you personally, what are your plans for next year? In terms of college and all of that, I'm actually planning on attending the Southwestern Community College for about two years, just while COVID dies down, and then planning on transferring to a university, hopefully UCI, my dream school. Yeah. Well, that's so great. Well, congratulations, Samantha. Great, great report. Thank you. Thank you for the opportunity in giving students voice representation
039in boards of education meetings. We've got some powerful student voice that's been happening over this year. So thank you, Samantha. And Austin, give us your report from the La Jolla High and our Council of ASB president. Hey, everyone. Looks like you can hear me. Yeah. So like President Barrera said. My name is Austin Kingston. I'm from La Jolla High School. I'm the ASP president there, and then I'm also the district-wide council president's president. I have a short report at this meeting, and this time I actually mean it. So at La Jolla, we're just now wrapping up our election process. Last Friday was our elections. We had some great turnout. Everyone's been elected. And right now, the officers for next year's class are going through the process of interviewing a lot of applicants who maybe didn't
040want to run for office, but still want to partake in student government. So they're going through that process right now. It's really great to be sort of a guiding hand in that process since I've done it a great number of times. Our future president, her name is Charlotte Gaynor. I will be looking to bring her along to next meeting just to sort of introduce her to this sort of medium and presenting to the board. As for the rest of the school, we're really looking forward to graduating. I counted it down on the calendar pretty recently. I'm counting down to less than 10 days here. I'm getting excited. Thank you to the district for securing Petco Park. Again, that's going to be so much fun. I'm really looking forward to it. And yeah, we're sort of
041just making our strides to transition to next school year. Hopefully, it's all in person for everyone. Because I know, like Samantha said, this year has been kind of a kind of a wild roller coaster with online and hybrid and in person. So hopefully next year we can we can finally settle down and put the coronavirus behind us. As for the district, as for the Council of Presidents, last Wednesday was actually our last meeting. So we are we're officially done as a bit of a shorter meeting. Most of us are seniors. So we kind of just wanted to get this last one out real quick. We had some discussions about some senior activities. Some schools are doing grad night. But yeah, other than that, we're basically done. So I am looking forward to coming to my
042last meeting on June 8th, which is I think like three days before I graduate. So that's going to be an even more fun report. But thank you guys all so much. It really has been fun over the past year to be able to give these reports. And like Samantha said. It is really great that there's an opportunity for student voice, especially through the ASB presidents. And then, of course, the student board member, Zachary Patterson himself. It's great to be here. And I will see you guys next meeting. Thanks so much, Austin. And again, it's just so great to hear the excitement in both of your voices about the leaders that are coming up after you. It just shows what kind of leaders you actually are. So great, great to hear your report. And of course,
043we know we're excited about Austin going out to D.C. and taking up the next phase of your life at CW. Great. Thanks. Thanks, Austin. OK, we will now move on to our superintendent's information report. Dr. Jackson. Thanks, President Barrera, and thank you, Samantha. I appreciate your voice, and thank you, Austin. Always a joy to hear our students. I want to begin by saying thank you to you, President Barrera, and all the trustees for selecting me as the interim superintendent. What an honor. Just as a product of the school system, our school district, so many folks that I know supported me on this journey. So thank you for what you do for our students and our staff and our communities. Know that I am going to remain committed to working with you, our district staff. our
044parents, our community members, our students, all on behalf of our students. This work must remain about our students. And we will... certainly remain focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think Samantha mentioned how important it is to make sure that all students, particularly our students who are most marginalized, receive the supports so that they can achieve high-level academics through agency. And Samantha, it is... When I was listening to you, I thought, oh, my gosh, she must know what I'm going to speak about, because the foundation to this work must be that we provide a space and opportunity for students to find their voice, for adults to find their voices, so that they can then create opportunities for others to find their voice. And Samantha, you just hit the nail with your work, as well as
045the work of the next president. at SCPA. In the past few weeks, we've had an opportunity to celebrate our educators. And in the video, we heard it from Martha. Thank you, Martha. Congratulations. It doesn't matter what your role is. If you're doing the work for children, you are an educator. And what a great opportunity for us to honor our incredible folks. And so I've just had a great opportunity to do that. And as a graduate from Claremont High School, A shout out to Ron Dare, Sharon Apple, both graduates from Claremont High School. So Claremont High School, you are, I guess, a beacon like so many of our schools. Thank you for the support of all three of us and the educators there. And Martha spoke about her days at Claremont. So what a great connection
046there. Thank you there. Thank you to all the dedicated teachers, you know, for their selfless work. You know, for them to go through an incredible year, I think Samantha and Austin both spoke about the difficulties of this year. Hats off to all of our employees, all of our students for just the grit and determination to make this happen. You all represent the best in public education. You should be so proud of yourselves. I know I'm proud. And I want everyone. in the district to recognize that you are vital. You're vital to me. You're vital to this board of education. You are vital to the work that we are going to do together on behalf of our students. As James mentioned, the African proverb Ubuntu, I am because we are. that you have to understand all
047of us working together can do this work more than any one individual can. But each of us has to show up and be a part of the collective. So we exist because each individual exists and has a voice. And thanks again to Samantha for lifting that up. You know, I'm going to repeat it again. The last year has been the most difficult in public education, certainly in the 21st century. And yet, kudos to the board, to the staff and to the families who remain steadfast on returning when it was safe. And we are reaping the benefits from doing that. that worked the right way. We went slow to go fast and we are going to make sure that next year is a dynamic year for all of our students. And so thank you because we
048did it when the conditions were right. I want to share a few photos. This is probably the highlight. I know I'm sharing a few appreciations, but I have a few photos that represent some of the work that I've been personally engaged in over the last couple of months. And this work included ensuring that the schools were prepared for a safe return for students and staff. that we were supporting our site leaders and I was able to go out and support our site leaders and provide training around mitigation and monitoring and engaging our students upon the return. And I have to say, you know, going into classrooms, supporting students really brought tears to my eyes because that's what I'm about. I'm an educator. And we have to be closest to our students to make an impact.
049And also, you're going to see in the video, we like to have fun, too. I was out at Perry Elementary School for we celebrated Unicorn Day. No judgment on on the head attire, please. You know, I'm bald, but. You know, I can get down with our students too. So Samantha, you know, you mentioned this. This has been a crazy year. And I'm sure that many students like yourself felt very alone because of this pandemic. But I want to speak to our students. And I want you to know you are not alone. This whole nation has got your back. Hang in there. Communicate with us, tell us what you need, and we are prepared to wrap our arms around you to make sure that you can be as successful as you possibly can. We're going to
050focus on your success, and we're going to do this together. So thank you for letting me speak, President Barrera, and I believe there's a video that we're going to roll. I'm hoping. My colleague Marty, or Brett. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Jackson. It's just, you know, hearing your enthusiasm and seeing. Your excitement about being back with our students in those photos through your eyes just gives us all confidence about what's coming next. I couldn't help but notice that as the song was saying, stand up for something, you were on the ground next to a student, and that's you standing up for what you most believe in. So thanks again, Dr. Jackson. Great inaugural. Superintendent Information Report. Okay, we'll start with, we'll go to item D5 and this is our Board Information
051Reports and why don't we start with Trustee Bozzo. Okay, I'm just going to share a quick slide from, see if I can get this pulled up. Okay, can you guys see that? Okay, see my slide? Yeah, so we're good. Yep. Okay. Good. First of all, I want to say Lamont, I think I need to get that picture of you with your unicorn. For future reference. That was. I don't know. That was pretty classic. So this was my first construction outing as a new board member. Just exciting to actually go out and be face-to-face and meeting people. And this is the Stanley Park project, which has been in the works for, as a lot of these projects have been for years. And so it was pretty exciting just to see it actually coming to fruition. And,
052you know, I'm just coming in on the tail end, but the people that have really been involved in the ground level are, you know, the University City Community Association, the district. That's Lee Dolgar off there. And then John Lee Evans, former board member in District A. Perks and Rec and Community Planning Group in University City. And this is going to involve, it's kind of interesting because it's involving both the city and Stanley Middle School and Spreckles Elementary School. So it's a joint use project, I think it's called. And they're building a brand new pool. They're putting in walking trails. you know, new field areas. And so we got to kind of just walk the area and the Belfour instruction guys were great. They gave us a wonderful tour. And so I just wanted to share
053that because it was, I know it's very exciting for the community, like I said, to see this actually happening after all the years of discussion. And then my next, my second slide, if I can get it to work. is just, I went, oh, there we go. We met, and I know the other board members had as well with the mental health education with some of the leaders from Cesar Chavez, I believe from Roosevelt Middle School. And it was just, I was just so impressed. And Trustee Patterson met with me as well on this. And I know we're gonna be talking about this a little bit later in the meeting tonight, but. I was just really impressed with these students, how poised they were and mature and we actually shared some of our own struggles we've
054had in the past, you know, with, you know, mental health and depression, anxiety, things like that. And it was just, that was, like I said, they just were. you know, for middle schoolers, they just did such an impressive job of sharing. And this is a program where they're actually going to be doing peer counseling with their peers, which I hope, I believe it's starting at three schools. And hopefully we can incorporate that into more schools across the district. So those were just my two slides that I wanted to share. I also just wanted to also thank say congratulations and thank you to the AASD award recipients, the classified staff, and the teachers that we've recognized over the last few months. Some of them I have actually worked with as a parent volunteer and you know
055all their hard work behind the scenes. you know, hopefully this little recognition will highlight that. And we're so appreciative of them and all the people behind the scenes that are doing this work as this school year comes to an end. Like other people have said, it's been very unusual and I just kind of started right in the middle of it. So I'm just kind of, you know, jumping in, but you guys have been in here for the long haul. and so I wanted to say congratulations to those award recipients as well and that's my report for tonight. That's great thanks so much Trustee Bozzo. Thank you. Dr. McQuarrie. Thank you. So I want to thank Samantha and Austin for their service and being the voice of students on our school board. So Samantha, I chose
056a similar path to attend a community college and then to transfer to my dream school, UC Berkeley. I went on to get my doctorate at USC. So stay on the path. My memory of my years at Berkeley leads me to my next comment, which starts as a thank you to Principal James Lee and Keith for their presentation, which demonstrated the positive impact that physical and mental training has on the lives of our students. Thank you, Keith, for opening your presentation with the encouragement to think back and remembering what physical and mental training was like when we were in school. I acted on your suggestion. And this opportunity took me back to when I was a student at UC Berkeley and was taking private gung fu lessons from Master Jimmy Lee, who introduced me to Master
057Bruce Lee, whose gung fu instruction not only impacted my practice, but changed my life. Thank you for teaching the whole child. Now for my board report. Tonight I would like to highlight the PB Middle IB School that features the video that they produced celebrating their promotion to high school. So let's hear about PB Middle and what they feel about moving on. Please give yourself more encouragement Don't be upset, be happy Hello, how are you? I'm busy, I'm online every day, it's so boring Me too, I really want to go Where do you want to go? I want to go to Beijing to see the city of Changcheng Go to Japan to see the cherry blossoms I also want to go I'm a lemon I'm a raincoat That's great, Mike. Thank you. Thanks so much. It's
058been a big year at PB Middle. Boy, what incredible contributions they've made. Thank you. Okay. Trustee Beiser, do you have a report tonight? Yeah, I want to thank all the teachers that have almost near the end of this epic school year. I am a teacher in the math classroom this school year. And so I know what kind of a challenge and struggle it has been for all of our teachers in San Diego Unified. And I want to say thank you to all of them. for hanging in there. And I really want to also appreciate all of our AASD members and our classified employees. Thank you so much for pulling together and allowing us to continue our educational programs this year. Thank you so much. And if any staff have any videos of schools and sub-district
059B they want me to show during my board report, please send them to me. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Trustee Beiser. Trustee Patterson. Thank you, Board President Barrera. I want to start off this evening by taking a moment to acknowledge that this is one year since the murder of George Floyd. This moment cannot be forgotten, and we in our school district must continue to push forward policies and procedures in our district to break down barriers to access, increase equity, and support initiatives that remove preconceived biases. We must continue to work to stand against racism and teach our students to be tolerant and recognize disparities that lead to these respective systems. And now I want to shift our focus to addressed the increase of anti-Semitism that we've seen in the past three weeks that has
060arisen in the United States. There's been a 63% increase in anti-Semitic violence and hate crimes. And while every person has a right and should express their beliefs about the Israel-Palestine crisis, they don't have a right to assault and hurt others over it. especially American Jews who do not represent the government of Israel and Arab and Palestinian Americans who do not represent the government of the Palestinian territories. In our district, we cannot tolerate hate in any environment. It is never okay to blame a group of people for the actions of their government or because of a perceived association. We want to speak up, we should, and that's okay, but it can't be tolerated when harassment of any type occurs. It's definitely been very upsetting, and it's important that we as a district address it, and that's
061why I wanted to bring it up this evening. And on a more positive note, I wanted to thank all of the students here tonight presenting and speaking on behalf of their experiences, as well as extend my congratulations to the teachers and AASD. Thank you. Thank you, Trustee Patterson. And thank you for that statement. That was very, very important. Thank you. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Thank you, President Ferrer, for this opportunity. I have one of those videotapes that Kevin mentioned, so that's going to be shown shortly. I just want to say congratulations to all the AASD winners, and several of them are from my community. Vice President, Vice Principal at Knox, the Principal of Choyas Mead, the Principal of Oak Park, Dr. Celia. Ramirez is my Rotary President, Southeast San Diego Club. Russ Ferling, the VAPA Foundation
062Director, as well as our VAPA Fund. So I just say congratulations to all of the winners and not just this group of winners, but for everyone listening to me tonight, because you've all been winners. If you survived this, you're a winner and you need to tell yourself that. rather than to be depressed. Before we see the video, I would just like to say on yesterday, I had the opportunity to visit Wilson Middle School with Carolyn Smith and a professor from the community college to look at ways that we're going to recognize Reverend Smith, Reverend George Walker Smith. I must say I was totally fascinated with the campus. It's absolutely gorgeous. It's a beautiful campus and I congratulate the team that's been working on that. And I know they're busy working on Central. And I'm looking
063forward to us meeting on that campus to recognize him as we celebrate his contributions to San Diego Unified School District. Before we listen to the video, this video was something that I sent to Melissa at least two or three weeks ago. And she reminded me today that I had sent it to her for this board presentation. So it has nothing to do with what's been going on in the media. But you can see it for yourself. I've got the dates on my email to document that it came in earlier. So with that, I think we're ready to. share the video if you haven't. Today we are welcoming our eighth grade families with a drive-thru event. Typically every year around this time we schedule field trips for our eighth graders in the community to come to
064Lincoln High School, take a tour, talk to our counselors, meet our teachers. We were thinking about how can we create something for our students and still get them really excited about promoting from the school they're at and moving up to their next school to provide a safe welcoming environment for them and my idea of the drive-thru was born. Perhaps, you know, we've learned some things during the pandemic that will carry over. I think this is a wonderful idea to do this on a weekend and to have a drive-through. As we look now, there are cars coming in with children and families. At our first station here, we have food from our food services program, and they're getting a lanyard with a brag tag. Brag tags are one of the ways that we celebrate our students
065and welcome them and give them things that represent Knox and all the things that we stand for. Students and families can pick up their enrollment paperwork. We've got some Hornet swag for them. Henry the Hornet is here to greet our families. We don't want the pandemic to prevent us from engaging with our families. The heart of the community is coming back. The whole family can drive in and see. During the regular year, normally they don't come out as a family. and check out what's going on. This is wonderful. So, I mean, I'm just really excited that it's bringing life to the community. We want to let them know that we will be here, we will be welcoming them, and we are just as excited. We have been missing campus just as much as they are,
066and I know my staff has been so excited to just be here for the day, to be together putting on this event. What we want our community to know is that we are a community of schools, and we're working together in partnership to strengthen the pathways. So here at Lincoln High School, we do support the pathways that have started in the middle schools and the elementary schools. And I just would like to say thank you to the community members, the staff members who have been doing their best to make it well for our students and just going out, bending over weekends on and on and on. And without complaining, they have done their best to connect with the students, with the community, the parents. And I want everyone, if you're hearing my voice now, everyone
067to get on board to help them rather than to hurt them. So I say thank you to all of the school community. Thank you. Thank you, Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. And I just want to personally thank you for not just this week, but for every week, the way you stand up for the Lincoln community, for the schools in the Lincoln cluster, for all of the schools in District E. You're there, you're on the ground, you're close and connected to the school communities. And then you come here and you hold the district accountable to provide the support to the schools and district D that they deserve and that they need. And so your leadership is very much recognized. Thank you, Dr. Whitehurst-Payne. Okay, we will now move on to our item E1, our school reopening update. And
068should we start with Dr. Jackson? Let me kick it off to our folks. He can. However, I'm going to quickly turn it over to Tafka Bustani, our Chief of Leadership and Learning. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, Interim Superintendent Dr. Jackson, President Barrera, and Board Trustees. It's a pleasure to provide our San Diego Unified School District community with the most recent updates regarding the reopening of our schools. Looking ahead, it is our intention to provide relevant and timely information as we plan for learning in the summer and for our fall 2021 reopening. On this slide, you will see the content of the updates our team will be providing and our ongoing effort to keep our San Diego Unified community and families apprised of our reopening efforts. As we've shared in previous updates, decisions
069of two to four days of on-site instruction were contingent upon families' responses and health and safety mitigations. The data remains the same as reported at our previous board meeting. 93% of elementary schools are offering four days of on-site online hybrid learning. 83% of middle schools are offering four days of on-site online hybrid learning, and 73% of high schools are offering four days a week of on-site online hybrid learning. This slide demonstrates our weekly attendance and enrollment numbers for the week of May 10th to May 14th. In addition to percentage of attendance for our students, we are also presenting the average number of students present daily in both hybrid and online. The 53,862 students enrolled in on-site online hybrid program had a 94.9 attendance rate for the week of May 10th. On average, 51,277 students were
070present each day. The 42,999 students enrolled in the online program had a 92.2 attendance rate for the week of May 10th. On average, 39,551 students were present each day. In total, 96,861 students were enrolled with an overall 93.55 attendance rate. On average, 90,828 students were present each day, both in hybrid and in online learning. As part of our reopening updates, we share how educators across our system are providing supports to students within and beyond the instructional day. At the middle school level, our educators are leveraging office hours to meet the academic and social-emotional needs of our learners. Tonight, we would like to shine a spotlight on Clark Middle School to provide a glimpse of the power of office hours and the impact on the students. Middle schools in San Diego Unified School District had flexibility
071in how we delivered the fourth hour of synchronous instruction, sometimes known as office hours. After difficulty with office hours during distance learning, the Clark Middle School staff decided to place office hours within our on-campus instructional day. I'm Principal Nicole Hendricks and here's Clark Middle School's story of how and why we put office hours inside the on-campus day and the great success students are experiencing because of it. Office hours during distance learning was... challenging. It was very challenging to get students to join our office hours. It just wasn't working so it was a super easy decision to say okay let's put it attached to our last period of the day. We didn't want to word it this way, but we kind of got captives. You know, we've got them right here. You know, my other kids
072are right across the hall, and I've got an aide for the online kids. I've got my kids in the classroom that I can help. I've got my co-teacher that can kind of help with my other kids. So it has been a tremendous success. In my class, I use the time to print out students' grades for the classes they have C's, D's, and F's. And that way they can go ahead and circle what classes they have missing assignments or low-scoring assignments. First, in my mind, I thought it was going to be just our students with IEPs, but it ended up evolving to really pulling in any student who was struggling, any student who needed help. Kind of make it an open space for everyone to come, and I have students who don't need. like a lot
073of work to catch up on, but they're coming in and wanting to work. I've had students come up. Am I all caught up? Is there anything that you need me to work on? Or is there anything else I need to do to improve my grades? Thank you to Principal Nicole Hendricks and the dedicated team for their relentless effort to ensure the success of all learners at their school. I'd like to hand it over to Dr. Noemi Villegas. Thank you, Tavka. I'm going to be speaking to the counseling supports and also wellness opportunities for our students in the next couple of slides. So in this slide, you can see that during our last Board of Education update. We provided with a sample of school counseling practices at the elementary school level. Today, we would like to
074highlight elements of the work of our middle school counselors via Lewis Counseling Team. We want to thank Dena Weyes and our counselors at Lewis for their dedication to continuing to support our students. During the school closures and now the reopening of our schools, middle school counselors have continued to promote education, prevention, intervention programs in order to provide support to our students when they need it the most. These programs lead to student developing leadership skills, academic skills, personal and social skills, and so we have a video to show you today to demonstrate some of that work. Hello. Greetings on behalf of Lewis Middle School and the school's counseling team here for the 2021 school year. Lewis Middle School has three school counselors that serve over 1,000 students this year. Nearly 700 students are in person, while
075just under 400 students remain online. Our school counseling team has worked really hard to provide a comprehensive school counseling program. In some ways, the pandemic has really even helped us serve even more students. This is a quick snapshot of some of the services we provided the spring of 2021. In all domains of this American School Counselor Association, we have served students in academic, personal, social, and career. A couple highlights of some of our services in each of the areas that are notable this spring are some of our goal-setting academic review conferences, our student-teacher support meetings, RTI meetings, our individual and group sessions, helping students with organization, stress and anxiety, making friends, and communication and self-esteem. We've also been able to provide some in-classroom lessons on college and career planning, growth mindset, some interest inventories, and
076then really recently helping support our students with the robust summer school program that will be coming up. Our biggest, biggest, biggest success this year is that we became a No Place for Hate certified school. Our leadership team is a small but mighty group of students, mostly all sixth graders and seventh graders, that have really taken and made our pledge of success, our parent and family engagement activities with celebrating traditions, our leadership training, and some of our weekly workshops to help students. feel welcome at school, work with our students to break down some barriers, learn how to make friends, communicate, to be an ally, and to learn from one another as we are continuing to grow, not only as a school community, but as a global community. And we just received our designation last week, which
077was a big success for our students. On behalf of Nicole, Adrian, and myself, we are a proud school counseling team, and we are even more proud to serve the Lewis Middle School community. Thanks for listening. Thank you, Dina, for sharing. I also want to mention that our school districts and the Unified School District was the highest district in the county with the designation of schools for No Place for Hate. So we had 48 schools designated at No Place for Hate, and that was the highest in the county. So I want to recognize all of our schools that have been working really, really hard to make sure that our students understand and know how to bring equity. from their voice into their campuses. The next slide, please. Here I'm going to be speaking rather quickly about
078some of our wellness efforts. So our wellness efforts have not stopped during the pandemic and now continue to move forward in the reopening of our schools. We continue to have across the district coordination of wellness services through two, I'm just going to mention today, two of the different ways that we do that. First, I want to recognize all of the departments. that support the wellness opportunities available for students, for families, and for staff, and especially recognize our brilliant leadership of Kate McDivitt and Kate Adra. They have been working tirelessly to make sure that we have our community collaborations, that our schools get the supports and resources that they need. So we wanna thank them for their leadership. And also on this slide, you can see that there are wellness site coordination across the district. So
079we have more than 1,200 committee members that have been identified across 167 schools. What they do is they create wellness plans for their communities for student wellness, for staff wellness, and for family wellness. So about 124 school sites have developed improvement plans for wellness opportunities within our schools. And 93% sites have designated student wellness goals to activate student leadership within their programs. So we're very, very happy about that. The other thing that we're very continue to be excited about is the youth wellness coordination that is happening at the high priority high schools. So we have had more than 57,000 interactions in navigation of wellness for our youth in those schools. More than 1,000 wellness visits in navigation of wellness opportunities and referrals for our students. Within our youth. wellness coordination at the high priority high
080schools. Our wellness coordinators work in close collaboration with students and the staff at the school site to respond to the wellness needs of our youth and guided by their voice. So we have amazing examples from Hoover, from Lincoln, from Sarah, Crawford, San Diego High School, amazing opportunities for our young people to continue to be well. The other thing that you see in the slide to the right upper corner is our SWER committee. That's another thing that we continue to be very proud about. The SWER team is the Student Wellness Education and Resources Committee. We have spoken in this reopening updates about their work, but I wanted to make sure that I gave them a shout out. because within this year, even through the pandemic, they were able to get representatives from each one of our
081high schools to make sure that wellness and mental health is at the very center of their work. So very proud of our district for continuing the legacy of wellness. Dr. Jackson for continuing that work and appreciative to our... Chief of Staff Sophia Roditi for continuing to let us run with all of these wonderful ideas about helping our communities be well. And now I will hand it over to my colleague Susan Berndaler, who is going to be speaking about vaccines. Thanks, Noemi. Good evening, everyone. I have the pleasure of reporting tonight on vaccine. I can't tell you all how happy I am to be finally reporting on good news. Yes, thanks, Lamont. Big round of applause for vaccine. When this slideshow went to the board, we had just finished our first week of vaccine, and at
082that point, we had vaccinated a little over 2,000. Now I get to give you the data on two weeks of vaccine. A little bit of background, we've been working with our two community health partners, UCSD and SHARP, to bring vaccines to 12 of our comprehensive high schools to service anyone over the age of 12 in the community, in the school, anyone over age 12. We're targeting schools in high need areas. The clinics are being held at the comprehensive high schools, but word is out to all of the surrounding middle schools, all of the surrounding schools. Again, really anybody in the community over age 12. The schools where we were holding the vaccine clinics are Crawford, Hoover, Lincoln, Morse, San Diego High, Canyon Hills, Claremont High School, Kearney High School, Madison, Mira Mesa, Mission Bay, and
083this week we got to add La Jolla High School as well. We started with our clinics on May 10th, timing so that the second dose vaccine is before school is out June 15th. We had, like I said before, we had a clinic this week at La Jolla High School yesterday and Hoover High School again today. It's all Pfizer. So remember, it has to be 21 days between the second dose. Not including the two days of vaccine clinics this week, we have been able to vaccinate almost 5,000 people. 4,957 to be exact. Yes. Big round of applause. 66% of those vaccinated were for students aged 12 to 18. So again, a big, big happy push for everybody who's able to get vaccine. They're open to all of our students, families, and anyone in the community. Anyone
084who is able to walk in, no appointment was needed. We tried to make it as accessible as humanly possible. We will be continuing through June 14th before school is out. They will be having the second round of vaccine clinics and they'll be, again, welcoming anybody in the community, even if it's their first vaccine. So happy news. I'll report more next time. And I want to pass this on to Tavka. Thank you, Susan. We are delighted to provide updates on our graduation ceremonies for our San Diego Unified seniors and families. Ceremonies will take place at Petco Park on June 10th through June 14th. Each graduate will receive four e-tickets for immediate family members. As a support to our families, ceremonies will be live streamed for those unable to attend. Finally, to address health and safety and
085sanitation needs between ceremonies, a set amount of sections will be dedicated to graduates and guests. We are very excited to launch our first summer of Level Up SD academic and enrichment opportunities for San Diego Unified students. In addition to our morning academic program, we have a wide array of in-person enrichment starting in June and extending throughout August. Opportunities include experiences with our VAPA and CCTE educators, sports conditioning camps, and unique activities offered by our community partners throughout the city. We will also have amazing online enrichment opportunities through UCSD and UC Scout for Families, not yet comfortable sending their students for in-person learning. We encourage all families to visit the Level Up SD website at www.levelupsandiego.org and explore the many options for students to participate in the summer of learning and joy. We end our reopening
086updates with the faces of students we are honored and proud to serve. We'd like to close our update this evening with the face of Jason Gutierrez, a third grade English language learner at Encanto Elementary who receives services through an individualized educational program. Since returning to on-site during phase one, his engagement in lessons has increased and his access to content has improved immensely. While on-site, Jason receives hands-on materials and support to best meet his needs. In addition, he interacts with peers, allowing him to progress in language acquisition and in meeting his academic goals. Jason has shown both social and academic growth in a short period of time. Because of our collective commitment towards providing all learners in San Diego Unified a rich and meaningful educational experience, We continue to make a difference, not only on Jason's
087life, but the lives of all students across our district. Thank you. Thank you, Topka. Thanks so much. Thank you so much, Topka and team. Really, again, as always, a fantastic report. We've got some public speakers on this item, and I will give you each two minutes. So we'll start with Debbie Childs. I'm here. Okay, go ahead, Debbie. Good evening. My name is Debbie Childs, and I'm an early childhood, an education specialist with the Early Childhood Special Education Program at Erickson Elementary School. I have worked in this district for 36 years. 33 years of that have been with the Early Childhood Special Education Program. I have seen this program at its best, and unfortunately now at its worst. We used to be a model program in the county and in the state. We had strong leadership
088and a lot of support from leaders that understood our unique needs. They provided clear and accurate information, professional development, and easy access to them for information and support. Communication was timely and consistent. This year has been an extremely challenging year. Despite our concerns, major changes were made to our program. During this time, teachers needed specific guidance and leadership. It was not there. Teachers are leaving our district because they are frustrated with our lack of leadership. It's a sad statement. We need, in fact, we demand an instructional coordinator to help bring the program back to the program that teachers can be proud of and that our young children and their families deserve. Please follow Dr. Jackson's advice and wrap your arms around the early childhood special education teachers and give us what we need, an instructional
089leader. Thank you. Thank you. Sinai Sekola. Sinai, are you available? Yes, go ahead. Hello, my name is Sanae Sekola. I am a first year teacher teaching early childhood special education at Troy Smith Elementary. I want to share with you concerns about the lack of support for the early childhood special education program. My first year, without a doubt, has been a huge challenge. I am sure no first year teacher would ever want to experience what I did, not only because the learning circumstance was unique due to COVID, but primarily because of the lack of support. resources, and leadership in the early learning department. When I encountered troublesome issues, my principal and I reached out to the special education department and early education department for support, but received little to none. Or we were directed to resources
090that did not address our concerns. Another dilemma is contact information. It is a struggle and confusing to know who to contact for specific concerns. I frequently had to rely on colleagues for information, advice, and guidance. At an ECSE governance team meetings, when colleagues and I would ask questions, the department representatives would reply with, we'll get back to you or send me an email. This has been going on for months. No one wants to take accountability for the mess that the early childhood special education department has been and the teachers have been enduring. All in all, we need a great leadership with compassion, understanding, someone who will go above and beyond to make the early childhood special education program the best it can be. At the end of the day, it's about the students having the
091right tools and to help them grow and develop. Again, we demand a program manager. We ask you to support the ECSE educators in our request for an... ECSE program manager and an ECSE instructional coordinator who has experience in the early childhood special education. These positions should be filled no later than August 1st. And we ask you to direct the staff to provide routine updates to the board and to our governance team on their efforts to fill these critical positions. Thank you. Thank you. Trisha Costello. Hi, my name is Trisha Costolo and I'm also an ECSE teacher in the part day blended class at Alcott Elementary School. I'm also concerned about the lack of support for the early childhood special education program. There have been many changes to our programs, or there were many changes to
092our program going into the 2019-2020 school year, which were very challenging to navigate. And then we got hit with COVID and everything had to change. There was very little support at that time. It was very challenging. We had to support on each other a lot. And thankfully, we... have each other sort of to fall back on. But then we asked you, we all came together as part of the governance team and asked you to not make changes for this coming year or this current year, the 2020-2021 year. But again, without any UCSC teacher or parent info, more changes were made to our program. We were left scrambling for answers once again. With the changes and the lack of a program manager, we had issues at the beginning of this year with our enrolling office, knowing
093which students with IEPs counted toward ECSE teachers caseloads and actually continue to have issues with our caseload numbers matching between the office and the classrooms. When we are trying to find answers to questions, we have to search for people to ask questions, sending multiple emails and phone calls. Constantly being told or multiple times being told, I don't know, try so-and-so, and on other occasions just being completely ignored. Whereas in the past, like my colleagues have mentioned, we had an ECSE program manager that was either able to directly help us or at least be the intermediary to find us the answers that we needed. So please support the students that you serve by supporting their teachers and hiring a program manager and an instructional coordinator for our early childhood special education program. Thank you. Thank you.
094Melissa Baining. I'm here. Hello? Yes, go ahead, Melissa. Hello, Melissa Baining. I teach early childhood in a blended program at Walker Elementary. I want to share some concerns of the lack of support within early childhood, specifically with special education. As someone who has worked in various roles within the district since 2008, I've worked with teachers with students with mild-mod to mod-severe, self-contained at an elementary level. As a behavior support teacher on central office, and it is eye-opening to see the lack of support that the district places within the early learning level. Overall, it seems that the statements and the actions don't match. We often hear that the district is going to support those with the most needs. However, I pose the question, what does that look like? What is the plan? Because with early learning,
095I'm learning. It is very much what my colleagues say. Ask somebody else. follow up with that email, and there's not an answer. Or one person gives you an answer and the other person says something else. My history is that the cuts seem to occur mostly within special education. Now that I'm working within the area of early childhood, the cuts and the lack of support is even more apparent. There is no effort in hiring a program manager or an instructional coordinator or other staff with the specific knowledge of early childhood special education. Rather, diluting and hiring somebody just with the title. Because of this, we as teachers and staff have no one to go to for procedures, guidance, and support. We have no one to help support those families with the support or understanding of transition
096procedures or options. This year's specific early learning classrooms were created, and it is apparent that there were no guidelines or explanations of how these new pilot programs would be organized, taught, or planned with enrollment. I'm not asking. I don't think any of my colleagues are asking. We are stating there is a need and a demand to hire now and make it a priority for competent leadership and guidance. Thank you, Melissa. Thank you. Thank you. Nancy Palmer. Hello. Thank you. My name is Nancy Palmer and I teach infants and toddlers at Choyas Mead. I wanted to share with you our concerns about the lack of support for the early childhood special ed program. First, a little background. I've been a part of the ECSE community for Sandy Unified for 39 years. First as a sibling to
097a student and daughter to a staff member and a mother to two play peers. And now I have my dream job as a teacher in the infant program for the last seven years. The job of the ECSE program manager has been paired with many other positions, so no one can effectively focus on the needs of our community. Since I joined the ECSE department, I've experienced six different people out of my seven years. Since the occurrence of the pandemic, I wanted someone to address us all as a whole. Someone I could turn to fight for resources, who could gather us together and help us connect so we can share resources and ideas and not have to reinvent the wheel. I'm frustrated that I never have proper and appropriate professional development. like all the other teachers have.
098I'm frustrated that we're experiencing the same problems every single year and we cannot move forward to make progress without any leadership. And I'm frustrated that my head is constantly spinning with all the changes in policies, ways to roll, and the ever-changing continuum of different preschool classrooms. And if none of these matter, how about the almighty dollar? Early intervention saves money, not to mention if we had cohesive and consistent leadership with clear policies and procedures, we'd save significantly in lawyer fees too. Quit skimping and making ECSE second class citizens and give us a proper program manager and instructional coordinator. Thank you. Thank you. And Christina Gallegos. Hello? Yes, Christina, go ahead. Hi, my name is Christina Gallegos. I am an early childhood special education teacher. I am also the early childhood special education governance team chair.
099Last year, myself and other ECSE teachers and families stood in front of the board and asked you to support us in voting against the early learning program change. Not because we didn't want to support children, but because we wanted to create a cohesive and supportive plan that would not overlook the ECSE students, a plan that would not overlook the ECSE teachers. Unfortunately, you approve the plan and move forward with it anyways, against the advice of the stakeholders. And every day, cleaning up the mess that we predicted, cleaning up a mess that was only intensified when the reopening happened. And despite teacher feedback all year, the district has failed to fill the positions of a program manager or instructional coordinator for the early childhood special education program. We were supposed to have these positions filled in
100March, but when that didn't happen, the Early Childhood Special Education Governance Team reached out to you, President Barrera and Vice President Whitehurst-Payne, asking for your support in ensuring that we receive an Early Childhood Special Education Program Manager and Instructional Coordinator with extensive early childhood experience and knowledge. Well, here we are again, and we're giving you another opportunity to show that you actually support and care about early childhood special education. Listen to the individuals who are actually implementing the program changes, speaking with each other and speaking to families. We are demanding that a program manager and instructional coordinator for the early childhood special education program be filled no later than August 1st, 2021. We cannot repeat this year. These families and these teachers have been through enough. Also, the governance team is done. doing the job
101of the administration. Give us a program manager and instructional coordinator by August 1st, 2021. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, board member comments or questions on the reopening report? Yes, Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Just one quick question, really. On the weekly attendance, I know our total there of students enrolled is at 96,000. 861 students. And my question relates to those students who are early grads, because do we have any idea of how many students have graduated early who would have been in that number had they not graduated early? And you guys can get back to me later with that. But that's a question that's in my mind. Thank you all for talking about the No Place for Hate. And I'm glad to hear that we have 48 schools because I visited and I saw the children are
102engaged in that and doing a good job with the whole notion of No Place for Hate campaign. Thank you. Thank you. And Superintendent, do you want to take a shot at it? Yeah, thank you. We can make note of that and get those data to Dr. Whitehair's pain and the rest of the board members. Great. Thank you. Yes, Dr. McQuarrie. Yeah, I don't have the number, but I did hear that Lincoln High School had the highest mid-year graduation ever in its history. A hundred and something. But collectively across the district, would that be a thousand students? That would make it 97,000 instead of the 96,800. I mean, I'm just curious about the numbers, of course, math teacher. That's great. And then I know we had a number of speakers that had major concerns about our
103ECE program. I don't know, I received a letter and I believe that the staff is taking a look at those issues and will be. Yeah, Dr. McQuarrie, we are certainly aware of this. I know. I WAS ABLE TO MEET WITH SOME FOLKS FROM SDA AND ONE OF THE LEAD TEACHERS. SO WE'RE AWARE OF THIS AND WILL BE FOLLOWING UP TO CONTINUE OUR SUPPORT FOR THE EARLY CHILDHOOD SPECIAL EDUCATION PROGRAM. SO THIS WAS IN MOTION EVEN BEFORE THE SPEAKERS THIS EVENING. SO WE'LL CONTINUE TO MARCH DOWN THAT PATH TO MAKE SURE WE'RE SUPPORTING. THANK YOU. TRUSTEE PATTERSON. Thank you, Trustee Barrera. Yeah, I appreciate you saying that, Superintendent Jackson. Definitely want to be sure we follow up with all of those people that just shared that information. I wanted to focus on what Clark Middle School
104had going on with the extended learning office hours. You know, that really was the challenge. I know I had brought that up in the past, and I know students had brought that to me in the past. So I think it's so innovative on what they came up with. My thought was, I mean, that flex time portion, really that strategy should be shared to all of our schools across the district. I'd be interested to hear if this was like isolated specifically or if this was across the board more systemic for middle and high schools. Because as we said, that time was a little bit confusing as the teacher shared. And I think that they did such a great job with ensuring that there was a clear intent and purpose to that flex time. that was so
105critical to providing those full services for the entire school day. So I was super excited to hear that. I'll add on the vaccinations. I've seen all across our own campuses ads for getting vaccinations. I think the campaign right now is 100 reasons why you want to get vaccinated. And I saw in my classroom reason number 73, which was if you get in contact with somebody who has COVID, you don't have to quarantine. You can still meet with your friends. So that was reason 73 in my class. classroom, which I thought was a cool connection to see with what we're working on there. And then finally, those summer programs are really, really exciting. And I saw some of the different opportunities that we're having. I noticed specifically that partnership with UC Scout, which is actually going
106to allow students to take AP classes that are not at their schools and regular classes that are not at their schools across the board, which is super, super exciting. So we're actually seeing that coming to fruition through this summer program. So I applaud the district for their work there and invite students to recognize that you do have access to almost any course you want to take this summer. Thank you. Thank you, Trustee Patterson. Okay. Tomorrow, we have a press conference on this. Listen to the press conference and hear what's going on related to Level Up San Diego. It's going to be at the Elementary Institute of Science at 10 o'clock in the morning. Thank you, Dr. Fink. It's on the web. People can tune in and find out what's happening. That's right. That's great. Okay.
107And again, I just want to just acknowledge and thank the entire leadership team. You know, we push ahead with making what's happening this school year better and better. rollout of the vaccine clinics and the campaign to get people vaccinated, Susan, is just going so well. And at the same time that you're doing this work this year, you're already focused on the summer, you're already focused on the fall, and all of it is... work that's never been done. So again, I just, you know, the work that all of you are doing and under your leadership, Dr. Jackson, just continues to be so impressive. So we thank you for that. We will now move on to item E2, and this is our Freedom Summer 2020 update. And tonight we're talking about transforming school police and culturally responsive
108and sustaining practices and our ethnic studies update. So Dr. Jackson, we'll kick it to you. Yes, thank you, President Barrera. And very excited for this presentation because we're actually going to be combining two reports. And the purpose behind this is to show the integrated approach to our work from transforming school police into our academics that we are working on throughout the district. Very exciting. And tonight's presentation is just one example of how we are looking at this work. combined with our ethnic studies. The team has done a great job and hats off to them. And as we think about transforming school police, we certainly want to focus on eliminating the barriers that prevent our students who have historically been marginalized, particularly students of color, from receiving access and experiences and academic outcomes. We know this
109to be true. And our work around transforming school police is to bring change to the interactions. from increasing our training of our school police officers and also our school site staff. I want to really thank POA and Officer Bonilla, who we'll hear from this evening for their partnership and collaboration. And also when we think about ethnic studies, we really want to think about culturally responsive curriculum that is responsive and sustaining. to increase student voices. We bring that idea forward, that theme of voice forward. And thank Wendy and her work with the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee. This work and all of our work must be about engagement and conversation that leads to action. And I think this presentation is one of those that lifts this up. At the end of the presentation, you'll see some recommendations.
110These are recommendations not for action, but just to inform the board that we will be collaborating with our Ethnic Studies Advisory Program to solidify what resources are really needed to elevate our Ethnic Studies Program and support our students. So I'm going to turn it over to Area 1 Superintendent Bruce Bivens, who will take it from here. Thank you, Bruce. Appreciate that, Superintendent Jackson. And thank you, Board President Barrera and Board of Trustees for this opportunity to present this update to you and our district communities we serve. You know, after we passed Freedom Summer, we identified five areas for our district to focus on. One of those areas was reviding our grading practices with a standards-based grading policy. Another one was reshaping our discipline practices with a restorative discipline policy. We also focused on recruiting, selecting,
111and retaining diverse educators and leaders. A fourth area was transforming our school police, and the fifth area was building out our ethnic studies program. Tonight, we're going to talk about the last two, transforming our school police and building our ethnic studies program. Next slide, please. We know that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. So as a district, we are pledging to our community to rebuild our system by reimagining a new system that is anti-racist and restorative at the core. And by doing so, we will eliminate the barriers that prevent our most vulnerable students from gaining access and opportunity in a system that was originally designed to create barriers to entry. By eliminating these barriers one by one, we are becoming an anti-racist and restorative district that can respond to the
112needs of each and every one of our students we serve. In an effort to create the conditions for learning where success is a natural byproduct and outcome, and the process of learning and the process for learning with our students is the real reward. Next slide, please. Today we have two updates for the board. One is in regards to our transforming school police update and the other is our ethnic studies update. As you listen to both of these presentations, I would like to invite you to listen for the following connections and how these two themes are interwoven and pivotal to our work as a district as we are creating the conditions of becoming an anti-racist and restorative district. The two themes to focus on are deepening our connections with students, theme one. And theme two, honoring
113our students' lived experiences. As we, within these two themes of student connections and student lived experiences. we are better able to understand how to eliminate the barriers, dismantle the policies, and disrupt the practices in order to create a system of conditions that truly support all of our students. Next slide, please. I want to thank Trustee Patterson for raising this awareness today as today, May 25th, marks the anniversary of George Floyd's murder and the horrifying nine minutes and 29 seconds that stole his life from his family, from his friends, from his community, from our world. And at the same time, it shook us all and shook up the world with protests and awareness around systemic racism, police brutality, and the need for a better community-based accountability system for public safety. As a district, we started on
114this journey of transforming our school police and removing police out of school discipline before George Floyd's murder. And we continued with this work after his murder to deepen our awareness and actions that reinforce us to always examine ourselves, our decisions, our policies, our actions, our overall system to consistently shift in ways to better align our policies and practices as we continue this journey. of becoming a stronger organization built on and around anti-racism and restorative justice at its fundamental core. Our first update is on transforming school police today. We will have myself, Drew Rollins, Officer Roberto D'Ambania, and four of our students that have been in discussions with us in our work group and breakout committees. We have Bao Nguyen from Mira Mesa. Arlene Magdalene at Morse, Isalina Delgado at Lincoln, and Mayo Castorina at Sarah
115High School, which is now, or officially is becoming Canyon Hills. These are a few of the amazing and many student voices that have helped shape the direction, the vision, and the strategies for implementation as we reimagine together the strategies within these recommendations for transforming school police. Next slide, please. The board approved the following five recommendations that we will be presenting on tonight for transforming school police. Assessing the impact of our school police interactions, training our school police, training our site leaders and our site staff, shifting to a cluster-wide model of support, and changing our school police uniforms. I want to remind you to continue to listen for the interwoven themes of deepening our connections with our students and honoring our students' lived experiences. I would like to introduce Bao Nguyen, a current junior, class of
1162022 from Mira Mesa High School, speaking on bridging the gap between student voice and the role of school police. Hi, as I've been introduced, I am Bowen. I am a junior at Miami high school and I serve as secretary on the student advisory board under Zachary. And my thoughts in regards to the matter. bridging the gap between student voice and the role of police district is that I feel in regards of matter that students oftentimes are not our voices are not often heard by the police and I feel that in regards to this that a session in which the police listen and actually take the time to express the ideas that they want to communicate to the students and how we as students can give our own personal opinion to that would be something that
117would be really impactful. When we as the student advisory board sat down with the police chief and he took the time to listen to our opinions in regards to the to the policing matters within each of our own sub-districts. We felt that as a board, he really took the time to understand how each sub-district and how each district is different in regards to how they address police. And in regards to this matter, I think that the best way to gauge the gap between student voice and the police is that every sub-district is different in its own unique approaches and how they respond to the police. So in response to that, we should find a way to gather how each district or how each. sub-unit response to police and then train our police to adapt to
118within every unit because no same environment is ever the same in regards to police and no same environment will ever be the same to how students react to the police and that is something we have to address in regards to voices of students. I just think that not everyone's voices will be heard, but in the fact that we have student representatives that take the time to come in and show the police how they feel within their sub-district and how they represent their district as a whole, their sub-district as a whole, that will allow student voices to really reach police. And with all the changes we're making to police, having a student voice will allow us to really adapt and change the way that police are standardized within our district. Thank you, Bao. Can we just,
119as the students are speaking, can we make sure that we take the slides down so we can all see the students as they're speaking? Thank you. Thank you, Bao. Absolutely, President Barrera. Thank you for that. And thank you, Bao. Next slide, please. So it's really important to note that valid and authentic assessment of and for change within a system has to be... Sorry. I think you're back a slide. No, this is it. Thank you. Has a few critical components that need to be embedded within our structures. Some of those components include intentional opportunities for feedback. accountability structures for consistency within feedback mechanisms, depth and breadth of stakeholder outreach for feedback cycles, personal and experiential feedback from those directly impacted, and safe structures for anonymity within feedback mechanisms themselves. By listening to our students and stakeholders
120within the working group, it was clear that these components needed to be embedded within these recommended strategies for assessing the impact of school police interactions. For example, have a working student advisory committee consisting of students from a variety of neighborhoods across our district representing diverse demographics. Additionally, having students that have personal experiences, lived experiences involving their interactions with school police was paramount and highlighted as a strong criteria for committee membership. Valuing voice and feedback within the hiring process will help us with improving our input structures for what matters to our communities we serve and those that we hire. It will also help us to continue to strengthen our hiring practices for building our diverse workforce. Students also provide a strategic feedback to develop opportunities for anonymous feedback, so any and every stakeholder has an opportunity
121to have voice within our system. Additionally, set up structures for cluster forums with school police in like town hall discussion settings and to have site level committee structures that can discuss specificity to site needs and impacts with school police. This could be an opportunity for overlapping work with our site equity teams that have been launched at our schools this year, which is the site monitoring arm for disproportionality and equity at each school site. All of these strategies are about valuing the voice of those we serve and creating opportunities for a 360-degree feedback system and cycle from a personal level to a site level to a cluster level to a district level, all creating an aligned system of accountability for monitoring. Next slide, please. Now we're going to turn this over to Arlene Nagatalone, senior at
122Morse High School. Thank you for the introduction. And as Mr. Bivens said, my name is Arlene Nytallon, and I'm a representative of the Student Advisory Board as the Communications Director under Zachary Isabel. So when I was in elementary school, I have to admit that I feared the police. To me, their stuck-up demeanor, their dark shades and visible weapons sticking out from their belt made it difficult to not notice. But my teachers would constantly reassure me that my thoughts were irrational. But back then, we all feared the looks more than the intention. But now when we see the news of police brutality attacking others for their mental health issues or sexually harassing them and committing other crimes against the citizens they swore to protect, how do you think students feel to see them walking on around
123campus? With all this in mind, I think it's crucial that new and continued training is implemented to ensure that The safety and well-being of students on and off campus are being considered, especially in these difficult and unpredictable times. Thank you. Thank you, Arlene. I'll pick it up from here and hopefully I can move us on to our next slide. I'm hoping. Our second action item is training for school police. And the training shown here. It's training that the police department has taken on since May 2020, a year ago. I think we need to point out that all this training is continual and continuing. It's hard work. The training is part of what makes school police different from the other police organizations. And it is aligned with us becoming an anti-biased, anti-racist district. On the right-hand
124side. You can see the critical training that was already taking place. It was set up and had been trained on prior to May 20, but it's training that continues and happened recurring since then. And on the left side, you see the training our police added in this last year. They have the right focus on things like anti-bias, critical self-awareness. de-escalation. You can see on the right-hand side, again, there was work already underway with anti-racist practices, implicit bias, restorative training. And this list will continue to evolve to ensure our police are matched with our student and school needs. And I'm going to hand back to Bruce there. Thank you, Drew. Training for our site leaders and our school site staff. As we launched our new policies around both the implementation of restorative discipline policies and creating
125the conditions for restorative communities in our schools, we strengthened our PD opportunities for restorative justice trainings from classroom conditions to the site level practices and to cluster-wide alignments. These trainings have been ongoing and continue to support our school sites, our site leadership, and our school staff. with both cluster-focused and site-specific based PD on need and request to our restorative justice department who are very responsive and adaptive to the need of the community and support the training development based on the entry point identified in partnership with site-level teams and leadership. Site leaders have reshaped their discipline plans to remove school police out of school discipline and provide alternative approaches to removing students out of class and alternative strategies to suspension. We believe pushing in support is more effective and better for students than removing students from
126class or from the school as a form of discipline or punishment. Being a restorative school community is about understanding the root cause of need, looking at the whole child and being responsive in a supportive and caring manner that focuses on growth and development. Our district has aligned our forms to support the revision of the restorative discipline policy, which supports the implementation at the leadership level. All of these adjustments help us create the conditions for a system to eliminate the school-to-prison pipeline and decriminalize behavior, and look at behavior as an outcome of the environmental conditions that trigger behavior and or trauma from our students, and for us to put the mirror up as adults and take the responsibility to self-reflect on how our actions and messages can be triggers for our students, and how we need
127to make the necessary shifts in order to better support better understand, and better connect with our students by building the relational trust, lifting their voices, and honoring their lived experiences. Now I think I'm passing it back to Drew and our cluster-wide model approach. Thank you, Bruce. Shifting to a cluster-wide model is something we set in motion a few years back and are formalizing now. This means our campus police officers have a broader responsibility for all the schools. in their assigned high school cluster. One of the benefits of this is the opportunity to establish positive relationships earlier. As an example of this, I think of Officer Julian Gonzalez, the Lincoln Cluster Officer, who created a program with students at Knox Middle School, creating that opportunity to establish that relationship early on. Another simple but important change
128we executed was the revised school police officer job descriptions, removing language and duties related to student discipline. This is consistent with what you just heard about the training for site administrators and school site staff. We have our police focused on doing the right things. And finally, related to the last bullet, this summer, our police officers are creating introductory videos for our police officers to display with the clusters they support. This was another idea that we heard from our students in that they don't, at all locations, don't know their police officer. And we thought of, we, again, working with our students, thought of this as a great way to broaden and deepen that connection. With that, I'm going to hand off to Isalina Delgado to talk about police uniforms. And I'll stop the share. Hi, thank
129you again. I'm Isalina Delgado from Lincoln High School. So personally, I'm very excited that the school police officer uniforms are changing the move from military-esque towards more casual design to be alter the perception of the officer. The new uniform now offers a much needed balance by allowing my fellow students and I to easily recognize someone as a school officer while also having them appear much less. This effort definitely humanizes the officers and will foster more positive relationships between them and our students because of the increased approachability. Hopefully this uniform change will also help to continuously remind them that the purpose is to serve and protect the students first instead of unintentionally creating a sense of discomfort. Thank you. And Officer Bonilla, please take this to... Yes. Good evening. I'm Officer Bonilla. I'm a campus officer
130currently assigned to the Safe Schools Unit. And I'll be talking about Pillar 5, which is changing school police uniforms. You can go to the next slide for me. I am trying. So in the meantime, the changes to our school police uniforms will be to make us a little bit more approachable. We want our students to feel that we are there to protect them. We do not want to intimidate our students. However, we do have to be identifiable. So the changes will make us and maintain us identifiable and will preserve the safety of our officers and those we serve. I mean, we've all heard it on the news that there's an increase in. shootings across the nation and for that reason and we also you know work we we are our district is in San Diego
131so we do work with a lot of allied agencies so we have to maintain our identification for the safety of the officers and those we serve these changes will be in effect this fall 2021 we're introducing a polo shirt it's going to be a blue short sleeve uniform shirt which is what I'm wearing now it's very similar in material It's not the regular polo. It's actually a nicer polo. It has an embroidered badge in a patch. And it does have our names, which are bigger. Sorry, we're going to have a picture on the next one. But it's a bigger name. So, you know, the public could identify who these officers are for different reasons, right? Just pure identification, accountability. So that's very important. Our cluster officers will also have their high school mascot. So for
132this shirt, I have the Lincoln Hornet. And, you know, if you're a Moorish, you have the Tiger. So that will create a sense of unity. We are part of the school. You belong to the school. And that's something that we are very excited about. Our student led shoulder patch. If you haven't noticed, our school police patch is very, very similar to highway patrols. So we want to have something that is more unique to the district, something that is led by the students, something that they're going to create and design. And we all, parents and staff, we all agree that this is going to be our unique patch for school police. And we're also going to transition from wearing leather safety equipment to a softer nylon equipment. It's not going to be as shiny. It's not
133going to have the certain design that traditionally police officer uniforms have. This will be a softer look. And we're also removing holsters, any type of exterior holsters, drop-down holsters of any kind. They're not going to be used. Again, to soften that look, we do not want to look like we're military. We are not wanting to intimidate anyone. We are there to be safe. We want to be identified. And we're also going to downsize our from three firearm magazines to only two. And it's also going to be in the same nylon pouch material, but it's going to be covered. So there's no more, you know, you're not going to see an officer carrying. several magazines, you're going to have a little bit more of a cupboard. So the pictures here that are being presented, you can
134see the Lincoln Hornet, the embroidered patch, the name, the patch on the side. So you can see the officer on the right picture there, or at least right on my screen. There is a difference on the bulkiness of the gun belt, the softer look of the polo that will be used for classroom presentations, the True Blue Buddies events. And there's so many things that we could use it for. So we don't have to necessarily be in that traditional uniform. And we'll be able to have that more, again, softer look. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. And now Maya Castorena will provide a student summary. And I'm going to stop share again. Hi, my name is Maya Castorena. I am from Sarah High School, soon to be Canyon Hills. So during these meetings, I realized there was
135a lot I did not know at first as a student about school police. So learning about their roles and the expectations of them was a really great thing to know. And I think that this information going forward should definitely be a part of creating connections between students and the police and the school police. And I definitely really appreciate being part of these meetings and being able to focus and have actual discussions and learning about the importance of this change and just being able to share my voice and perspective to benefit other students. And as a graduating senior, I am so glad that student voice was such a large part of this. And just being able to witness the incorporation and strengthening of student voice within a district was a fantastic experience that I hope other
136students will get to experience as well in the future. And overall, learn that change is a lot more difficult than it does seem at first. But through thorough discussion and multiple meetings, just figuring out. There are multiple different ideas and opinions that go towards this. And this was a general consensus of multiple different people and everything like that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Maya. I still struggle with changing screens here. Okay, there we are. So that concludes our presentation. I had to reflect on the idea or the things we heard at the start of this meeting today. We heard from our board president about the powerful student voices. And I think you heard that again in this presentation. And then we also heard from our superintendent about getting closer to our students. And I
137think, again, that is part of this work. It's the work we've done now and admittedly probably needed to do more of it. But it's really the work that we need to do into the future. I'd like to thank our students, Bao, Arlene, Isolina and Maya. We appreciate their willingness to talk. with us, appreciate their candor. We've had some really some good discussions and dialogue. It's truly an honor to serve and support with them. I also want to thank Officer Bernia to be here standing side by side with us. This is just an update. We know there's a lot of work ahead of us, but I believe we set the right course. There's so many ways to look at this. We are protecting our campuses from the outside. We are supporting a safe and equitable learning
138environment. And we want to establish that continued dialogue and positive relationship early in the student's career. And again, realizing that there are many more conversations that that should come with students, with our community. And part of our work is just continuing to build the various avenues to have those best conversations. With that, that's kind of that is the end of the Transforming School Police conversation. We're ready to jump into ethnic studies. However, if Mr. Brayer, if you'd like to pause and have questions regarding transforming school police or save those to the end. I think even though I know board members are anxious to engage in the dialogue, I think we should save it to the end because we do have several public speakers that have signed up on the item, which is a combined item.
139So I think we should do the ethnic study presentation, then allow public speakers, and then we can have board discussion on both parts of the item. Thank you, Drew. Okay, thank you. Okay, Wendy, over to you, please. Thank you. Thank you, Drew. Thank you, President Barrera, trustees, Dr. Jackson. As the Instructional Support Officer who oversees ethnic studies, my name is Wendy Rankber, and I'm very proud to present updates on our work in this area tonight. So as my colleague Bruce Bivens mentioned, a theme that runs through our presentation tonight is around the critical role of relationship. Sorry, can we mute everybody other than Wendy? There we go. So a theme that runs through our presentation tonight is around the critical role of relationships. As this quote from James Comer states, no significant learning occurs without
140a significant relationship. In San Diego Unified School District, we believe that every member of this organization matters and has a place in this community. We believe that all of our students can learn at high levels and they are best able to do so when they are surrounded by trusting and caring adults. Next slide, please. Significant relationships with those we trust and care about helps all of us, not just our students, helps all of us to feel connected. At San Diego Unified School District, we're investing in our students' well-being and academic success through connections. connections with all of the adults in the school community, as you heard previously from my colleagues. That includes our school police, our office staff, custodial teams, teachers, and site leaders. Connections between and among students. Connections with counselors and other adults
141who provide support staff for social-emotional health. and connections that students have with their own learning through meaningful feedback that we're doing through our approach with standards-based grading. Our presentation tonight in Ethnic Studies will focus on these final two items, developing connections with relevant content and student-centered instruction and culturally relevant content and pedagogy. Next slide, please. Before we launch into the detailed updates on ethnic studies, my student co-presenter Corinne Evans and I would like to acknowledge that although we are representing the work of ethnic studies tonight, we do not stand before you alone. We are here as the result of a collaborative effort with many other individuals, and to just name a few, Our Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee members who have held to this work for a number of years and are true collaborators in this
142journey. Our Ethnic Studies Lead Teachers, Guillermo Gomez, Kiki Ochoa, and Larry Thurman. Our Ethnic Studies Resource Teachers, Ratha Kelly, Brian Batugo, and Ricky Medina. And our Program Manager, Toya Proffitt. It is with pride we present this update on behalf of the entire team we represent tonight. Next slide, please. So what is ethnic studies in a TK-12 environment? Ethnic studies began more than 50 years ago at the university level. And at the university level, the focus is primarily on the content. At the TK-12 level, it's necessary to expand that focus and be broader so that it's not just about what is taught, but how it is taught. It is essential that ethnic studies instruction includes opportunities for students to process, consider, and purposefully examine race, identity, and power. At one of our recent Ethnic Studies Advisory
143Committee meetings, Dr. Dominguez, an ethnic studies professor from SDSU, shared, it's not enough to just swap out the content. We need to change the questions we're asking and the approaches that we are using. Ethnic studies provides opportunities for all students to see themselves in the curriculum and to engage in the work that is called for not only in the California social science framework, but also in SB 48, also known as the FAIR Act, which has been around even longer than the revised history social science framework. I would now like to introduce my fabulous co-presenter, Corinne Evans. She is a senior at Mission Bay High School to offer a student perspective on the ethnic studies experience. If you could please take down the slides and Corinne, unmute yourself. All right. Thank you. And good evening, everyone.
144So Ethnic Studies Matters because it allows students to have a greater appreciation for and understanding of cultures. It also teaches students to advocate on behalf of one another in difficult situations. So for an example, the first elementary school I attended had a student body that was composed primarily of Black and Chicano students. So at that school, I learned about our cultures and influential civil rights leaders in conjunction with standard curriculum. And that helped me better understand my peers. Understanding led to compassion, which helped me realize the importance of setting systems of power and fighting for greater equality. Aside from this experience, unfortunately, I haven't been in a school environment that values culture in such a way. I've never had the opportunity to take an Ethnic Studies course, but given the chance to, I absolutely would
145have. Ethnic Studies is important for all students to experience, but for students of color, it's a way for us to connect to our cultures. Oftentimes, if lessons focus on the experiences of people of color, it has to do with our struggles and not our triumphs. But if I was able to take an ethics studies class, I would have learned more about the peoples whose contributions to society were diminished or even erased from history. It would have been a great experience for all of us because it would have taught all of us, regardless of race, how to identify and combat inequities within our society. And this is an important lesson for all of us to learn. For students of color, we can learn from the strategies that our ancestors used. And for white students, it's a
146way for them to become more aware of injustices that they may not have even known existed prior. So because of this, every student deserves a chance to take an ethnic studies course and learn how to make the world a better and more equitable place. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Thank you, Corinne. And Corinne's heading off to UCLA. She's a member of our Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and a great contributor in that space. So what have we accomplished in 2021? It certainly has been a challenging year, but despite the challenges, we have made accomplishments in four areas, professional development, course enrollment, student grades, and instructional materials. Next slide, please. Our lead teachers and resource teachers have provided substantial amounts of professional development this past year. Ethnic studies continues to be one of the top
147two most frequently requested areas of professional learning that teachers in our district request when they are surveyed on that question. I would like to draw your attention to the portion at the bottom of this table where it's referencing our micro-credentials. Micro-credentials is a new approach for us this year in offering professional development that focuses on a specific topic and provides 15 hours of professional development. So this school year, we have had 85 teachers. complete the first 15-hour series, which is a more in-depth approach rather than a one-time seminar. So I wanted to particularly highlight that micro-credential work. And you can see from the table above that it's our lead teachers who have been providing that work with micro-credentials. Our resource teachers are working across our system K-12 and offering a variety of sessions for our
148teachers. A quote from one of our participants in the micro-credential program said, what I really enjoyed was the clarification of the objectives of ethnic studies to help me figure out for myself what it is and what it is not, and how to implement it in all classes. It's a reminder that we teach because we love. and that we need to intentionally think and act on this so that we don't burn out or fade away or become bitter. Next slide, please. This slide highlights the growth in enrollment in ethnic studies courses over the past three years. The table at the top shows the number of students that have been taking ethnic studies has more than tripled since last year. The table at the bottom shows that students are not only taking these courses, but they are
149passing these courses at high rates. The percentage of students passing is approximately 97% of students enrolled in ethnic studies courses are passing those courses. Next slide, please. Our final area was around instructional materials. If teachers are going to teach content representative of our students and aligned with the state frameworks and the FAIR Act, they need materials to do so. So we purchased 4,580 books for students. Many of those books were teacher resource books at elementary level for read-alouds and also class sets that teachers have access to through the IMC. I wanted to particularly highlight this series shown on the screen, Land of Our Ancestors by Gary Robinson. This is a three-book series and is part of our fourth-grade curriculum. It is the first adoption in our district of tribal-endorsed curriculum, and we were noted for
150this purchase of supplemental curriculum through Sacramento State. This is standards aligned equipment, standards aligned instructional materials, and will help us transition from some of the old materials that we used around the mission projects. Next slide, please. So we have tripled enrollment in ethnic studies. We've certified 85 educators in the first level of the ethnic studies micro-credential, and we purchased instructional materials to support instruction. All great accomplishments, to be sure, but we still have miles to go, and we must persevere. It has been decades of work trying to get ethnic studies into our schools. And if we are to achieve our vision of creating anti-racist and restorative school communities where all students are seen, heard, and valued in the curriculum, in the classroom, and in our communities, we must expand our work and stay the course.
151The staff recommendations here were developed in collaboration with our Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and include funding instructional coordinators who help to integrate and leverage central office resources to expand our professional learning using a cluster approach. We want to be able to reach all of the adults in our system because that is truly how schools and communities will transform. We want to fund additional resource teachers. We have three currently. We would like to fund and expand our lead teachers. We only have lead teachers currently at the high school level, and we need them at other grade levels because they provide critical on-the-ground support to other practicing educators. We would like to fund the purchase of ethnic studies-aligned instructional resources. Our Student Equity Coalition has also requested additional materials so that they can be represented and seen
152in our curriculum. And finally, we would like to fund a consultation with a local tribal elder to assist us with some of our resource development. Thank you, and I appreciate your time this evening. That concludes our presentation. Fantastic Wendy, thank you so much. So much to talk about in both parts of the presentation. And we do have a number of public speakers. So I'm going to ask everybody to limit your comments to one minute. And we'll begin with Lori Bailon Yagyagan. Hi, my name is Lori Bailan Yagyagan. I'm a history teacher at Bell Middle School and a member of the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee. I am speaking in support of the growth of the Ethnic Studies program in San Diego Unified. I really want to commend the board for continuing to fight for the needs
153of our students in San Diego Unified, especially our students of color, and also to thank the students who spoke today. And I just, you know, want to emphasize that you know, with a resolution to establish a graduation requirement and then also to hire full resource teachers. You've been doing a great job and hopefully today you'll approve again to further grow ethnic studies. This ensures that our students of color have the opportunity to learn as early as TK, not only about their... themselves and their identities and histories, but also about their shared humanity with their classmates who might be different from them. So I believe ethnic studies is really a solution to achieve racial and social justice. So please find the plan that was proposed today by Wendy and Corinne. Thank you. Thank you, Lori. And
154Sharon Apple, our teacher of the year. Hi, everybody. Hi. Thank you for having me. Special thanks to Dr. Jackson and Martha. Congrats. So I've been on the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee since 2018, and I serve on the subcommittee, curriculum subcommittee. And I've been here and support, vigorously support an expansion of ethnic studies. I just want to ask probably about a couple of days after I found out I was district teacher of the year, someone hacked into my Zoom account during class and plastered the word in chat, N-I-G-G-E-R. I can't even say the word. It devastated me. It devastated my students. And we were able to have a circle for healing. However, that showed me that we have a lot of work to do. And I'm so proud to be a part of a district who
155is Freedom Summer 2020 to start that work. But we have so much more work to do in expanding ethnic studies with more resource teachers, more lead teachers, resource materials. We'll show that we have, we show we're action, we're using our actions to show that equity is important in our district. Thank you for allowing me to speak. Thank you, Sharon. Thanks so much. And Tricia Gallagher-Gertson. Good evening, everyone. Thank you, board members, for this opportunity to speak about the benefits of and the need to grow funding for TK-12 ethnic studies. I'm chair of San Diego Unified School District's Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and a parent of three children in the district. Our ESAC board members have worked very hard with ethnic studies staff in the district to create a plan for next year that will build
156on the strengths of our budding ethnic studies work in the district. It is fitting that as we remember George Floyd today, that we are lifting up a rigorous academic ethnic studies program that has great promise to ensure our institutions and systems and the people inside of them are just and humanize all people and build respect and love for all. I ask that you accept our proposal to grow our professional development for teachers and leaders, curriculum and positions for ethnic studies. It is no exaggeration to say that our youth's lives are depending on you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Dr. Kyle Weinberg. Kyle Weinberg, Vice President of San Diego Education Association, Union for Certificated Educators in our district. founding member of our district's Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee that was established by this San Diego Unified Board
157in collaboration with grassroots advocacy organizations. I encourage the board to continue the work to strengthen the implementation of ethnic studies in our district that we have carried out in the past few years and to fund the plan proposed by the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and the district support staff. On this anniversary of the murder of George Floyd, it is more important than ever that our district maintain its leadership role in our region on the rollout of district-wide ethnic studies, K-12, with fidelity to the pillars established in the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee bylaws and in our multi-year plan. If we expect San Diego Unified students to be changemakers who resist racial injustice and stand up for human rights, we have a responsibility as a district to provide educators with the training and resources we need to
158facilitate the development of those skills and mindsets. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle. And Rene Zambrano. I'll let, um, more, um, statement, Kyle. I'm Rene, um, educator. community member, especially as I work with the Association of House Educators, San Diego chapter, and also a member of the ESAC, founding member. I also urge you to support the growth of ethics studies inside the Unified School District. Ethics studies will ensure that we humanize and respect all people and help our students and communities stop racial injustice. I support ethnic studies because teachers also need additional resources to continue to profess development and have the materials to teach authentic ethnic studies. And by the way, I was also part of the cohort that Wendy was talking about. It's powerful. It's powerful work. I mean, every human being should be part
159of this process that Kiki, Guillermo, Larry, and I know other teachers will be doing the work in the future. Okay. Also. you know, funding is critical to the growth, but most importantly, it ensures that ethics studies maintain its integrity and fidelity. And finally, we know that it helps students that we label in the gap achieve and become contributing members of our society. So again, support the growth of ethics studies. Thanks so much. Thanks so much, Rene. Yeah. And Ariana Gallegos? Hi, yes. My name is Ariana. Thank you. My name is Ariana Gallegos. I am a Cesar Chavez Service Club manager, and I am in favor of ethnic studies. I believe that our children need to be exposed to new curriculum, one curriculum where they can actually picture themselves with making a difference. So I am
160here to support and to support teachers that need additional professional development and materials to teach authentic studies. So please continue to fund the plan proposed by the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ariana. Thanks so much. Diane Wall. Okay, yes. Can you hear me? Yes, Diane, go ahead. I'm a San Diego resident and parent, and I have a special interest in social sciences. My BA from SDSU includes a minor in American Indian Studies. While I was at first excited about ethnic studies, I have concern after reading the curriculum you're implementing. Instead of making positive additions to U.S. history that should emphasize contributions of and current opportunities for people of color in America, it seeks to instill a narrow-minded ideology. Some assignments teach children how to become civically engaged in anti-America objectives.
161And taxpayers and parents ask you that you not seek to create young activists, but that you instead focus on teaching facts and how to think, not what to think. As you implement the central focus on anti-racism, know that many families in the district are multiracial and we do not want our children classified based on these skin colors. Please remove content that encourages kids to either feel like an oppressed victim or to feel guilt as an oppressor based on their race. Instead, I urge you to embrace the constructive ethnic studies such as at Los Angeles Unified School District. And at the very least, if you cannot veer from your path, how do you plan to actively announce and inform each and every parent on exactly what the new history English and math curriculum changes involve? Okay.
162Thank you, Diane. Thank you. Audra Mandler. Audra, are you with us? No, no, Audra. Okay. Kiki Ochoa. Hi. Hello, Richard. This is Kiki Ochoa. Board members, thank you for sharing this space with us. It's been a huge honor to be one of the lead teachers in our district. At the core of our Ethnic Studies trainings and our principles is the concept of Enlakesh. Enlakesh means I am the other you. You are my other me. If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself. If I love and respect you, I love and respect myself. I think anyone who's concerned about what's being taught. you know, through the ethnic studies classes and our pedagogy should really seek us out, you know, because everything that we're doing is to create unity. That's the number one goal
163of all the courses. And in order for us to be united, students have to love themselves. If they don't love themselves, it's very difficult to love your neighbors, right? So that's the central objective. And I just want to highlight there's so many different teachers and administrators that have been implementing this work. And there's so much more work that has to be done. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Samantha Cruz. All right. Hello. Can you hear me? Yes, Samantha, go ahead. The never ending question, right? Hello and everyone. My name is Samantha Cruz. I am an education specialist teacher, ADL advisor and equity team lead at University City High School. Please support the growth of ethnic studies in San Diego Unified. There's a proverb that says, until the lion tells his own story
164of being hunted, history will always glorify the hunter. I support ethnic studies because it is vital for our students, their communities, and our futures. Ethnic studies does more than just provide hindsight into our history and society. It helps us navigate the present and well. and while putting student voice at the forefront of their own learning. Ethnic Studies prepares our students to be agents of change, critical thinkers, and to strive towards equity for all. Having Ethnic Studies allows and encourages students to feel empowered. They will do better academically if they feel and see that they are reflected in their curriculum. Teachers need this additional professional development to teach authentic Ethnic Studies. All of our students deserve and need ethnic studies. Please fund the plan proposed by this advisory committee. Let us be the district that sets
165the precedent to tell, listen, and learn the stories of Lions. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Samantha. Rolando Robles-Ramirez? No Rolando. Okay, Danny Blass. Danny, could you please? Yeah, go ahead. Go for it. My name is Danny Blass, a district educator and member of the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee. Thank you, Board. Your actions have brought ethnic studies to this day. We continue to grow ethnic studies in our district. Authentic ethnic studies unites people and communities. There is plenty of evidence to suggest all students educated with an authentic ethnic studies foundation are more successful academically and attend and successfully complete college at higher rates. I support increasing our district's investment in ethnic studies because our students want it. They find the coursework uniquely challenging and further investment will offer students a first time
166opportunity to learn about our BIPOC ancestors and the many contributions they made to our country. We need more investment in district educators who need more and deeper professional development and materials to teach authentic ethnic studies. Authentic because anything less would do more harm to students. Authentic because anything less would be an investment with no dividend. Please fully fund the plan proposed by the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee. Thank you for your time. And most importantly, George Floyd should be alive today. Thank you, Danny. Thank you. Henry Maxfield. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, Henry, go ahead. Awesome. Hi, so I'm Max Henry Maxfield. My pronouns are he, him, his. And I don't really know how exactly to build on what already has been said, except that I have like kind of a unique role compared to
167everyone that's spoken before me. I'm a resource teacher for youth advocacy. And specifically, I work to help establish and facilitate school equity teams. to help them become educators for equity and anti-bias, anti-racist practitioners in their schools. And educators all over the district and in all of the 15 schools that I've worked in this year want to do the best for their students, especially our most marginalized, in specific, our Black, Indigenous students of color. However, they need a lot of support to get there. And I hope that they'll trust me from my perspective that they need that support. This district initiative of Ethnic Studies for All can be reached and reached with fidelity only if we properly fund and strategically move forward in our implementation of Ethnic Studies for All. This is not just a teaching
168practice or curriculum. It is a pedagogy, a mindset, a way of being, and it's love and truth. Teachers and educators need support, professional development, coaching. Please fund the plan proposed by ESAC. Thank you for your time. Thank you, Henry. Vanessa Moreno? Good evening. My name is Vanessa Moreno, and I'm the school psychologist at Morse High. I'm calling in support of funding ethnic studies programming and instruction for the following reasons. After 12 years as a school psychologist in this district, I continue to see the growing need for social, emotional, and mental health supports now more than ever. In my opinion, ethnic studies will allow students to access these supports proactively and preventatively because they're embedded within academic instruction with teachers in the classroom. Speaking from a mental health perspective, Ethnic Studies helps students develop compassion for
169their peers, sense of self and understanding of who they are and where they came from, a solid foundation for identity development, an increase in self-efficacy and self-esteem, a sense of belonging and connectedness in school with staff, which all can result in a more positive school climate throughout the district. When it comes to social, emotional and mental health supports, many times we tend to be reactive. Ethnic studies allows these supports to occur for students during instruction in class with their teachers, which is proactive and preventative. This is why I fully support the continued development of ethnic studies program. Thank you. Thank you, Vanessa. And Rocio Weiss? No, Rocio? Okay. And can I just ask Dr. Jackson to just clarify kind of where we are in terms of the staff recommendation tonight? Thank you, President Barrera. Yes,
170for everyone, this is informational. However, we do have some recommendations that we would like to pursue with the Ethnic Studies Advisory Group. So, for example, where it calls out resource teachers, for example, we need to flesh that out. What does that look like? What would be the role? So we still have some work to do, and we'd like to be able to come back to the board with specific action items for approval. Right now, what we're asking for support around our recommendations so that we can proceed with the planning and solidifying our plan moving forward in ethnic studies. Thank you, thank you, Superintendent Jackson. Okay, board member questions, comments on this major presentation tonight. Dr. McQuarrie. Yeah, very, very, very comprehensive report. And it's always a thrill to know that when we establish a committee
171and when we're in pursuit of a goal. that we are staying true to that goal and we are more than just words. We want to take those words and take them to action. So I do want to thank the leadership, the teachers, staff, students, and community stakeholders for the work and the public comment speakers for the update and the advocacy for the transformation of police and ethnic studies. I want to acknowledge the student that declared that making change is difficult, but engaging stakeholders in meaningful discussion does make the difference. Establishing an authentic anti-racist and restorative district requires a change process that reflects the goal. The report tonight indicates that we have embraced a means for change that aligns with our goal. So we are staying in alignment. We've established a goal and we have a
172process that's being implemented. And I do have one question. So I know in our police reform effort, our restructuring effort, we're talking about cluster-wide model. And I'm wondering... what does that cluster-wide model look like for policing? And I'm wondering if that model could also be expanded to include these other curricular and instructional changes so that we can get input from clusters and have that feedback loop that enables stakeholder input. Dr. Mike, I can take a crack at it. And I do have Chief Florentino is also within the Zoom. So if we'd like to hear directly from him. Prior to this, well, let me back up a little bit. As far as our field police officers, we have two job classifications. We have a patrol officer and we have a campus police officer. The campus police
173officer was assigned to a specific high school campus. And what we worked with with Superintendent Martin and what we're formalizing here is the idea that that police officer assigned to that high school isn't just assigned to that high school, but has taken on the ownership and responsibility and coordination across their cluster. And some of some of our discussion in the Transforming School Police Working Group was about the idea of. protecting our students from the outside and limiting the time on that high school campus and being more outward facing and then also working within the cluster of schools that roll up to that campus. And again, supporting those schools, developing stronger relationships earlier at those schools. So that's the overarching feel. There are other officers that are patrol officers that travel around that will also support
174that cluster officer. But if you will, that officer has the ownership for that cluster and, again, is focused on that relationship building. Does that help? Yes, it does help. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Drew. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. I actually want to thank the committee. I want to thank the students too, because I remember a year ago, we challenged the students to work with us and some of them said no, they wouldn't. But overall, the success of this presentation tonight rests upon the students getting involved and making suggestions, folks listening to it. those suggestions coming in as a partnership. I heard the young lady from, I believe it was from Morse, say that she didn't really know the police before then. And now she feels like she knows the police officer better and
175what their roles are, what they're supposed to do. So it was informative to her. And as a larger piece than that, it should be that way for the entire community. I think that. This country has seen some things. And, you know, I just must frame this with I came from the south and I saw a lot of things. It was with cities right down the street from the town that I live in and grew up in. And Virginia, you know, the trooper, I mean, the military person down the street, I own property near there. So I grew up with serious racism. and brutality and all of that. But to see how we're trying to work through our concerns together with students, with police, with staff. I personally used to say I would fire all police
176officers and bring a team in to interview every one of them for their jobs back to see whether or not they're sensitive to our needs and willing to work with our students and with the community. And I think in a way I feel differently about our school police. Maybe it's because I know them. And that's what we want to happen for all of our students, for all of us, so that we're all a part of the same community. That's where I come in. And I just want to say thank you to all of you who've been working hard on this. And I know that you'll be making some adjustments, but I look forward. to the work that you're doing. And I commend all of you for that. Thank you. Thank you, Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Other
177board comments or questions? Yes, Trustee Bozzo. Yeah, thank you for everyone's comments. And I'm agreeing with a lot of what's being said, so I'm not going to. repeat a lot of that, but wanted to share with regard to the ethnic studies, again, as a new board member, I'm actually still kind of learning. And I actually spoke to Wendy and I appreciate her sharing information about the program since, you know, I wanted to have a better understanding of it for questions that do come up in the different clusters and parents will have questions. And looking at it, and she's provided some resources to me, and I looked at like the purpose of the ethnic studies that's meant to educate students about the full range of experiences, perspectives, contributions, and knowledge of people of color that have
178been left out of the curriculum. And that kind of says it all right there. I mean, the more I'm learning about it, it's just something that's really overdue. And I wish they had this program around when I was younger and could. have it in my curriculum, just because it's actually reflecting the students' background in our district and, you know, nationwide, and it just... It makes sense. And I also wanted to share yesterday, we had a conversation during the Mira Mesa cluster meeting around ethnic studies. The topic came up and I kind of, you know, wanted to hang back and just listen. And it was just, it was very positive. The parents have had students that have students that are taking classes around the ethnic studies curriculum had. very positive input. So that was really nice
179to hear just, you know, kind of listening to their feedback. And then with regard to the school police, also a lot of these initiatives overdue. But at the same time, I feel like we've come so far since last summer, a relatively short period of time from all the Black Lives Matter protests that were going on. And, you know, on a personal level, you know, I had a daughter living in Philadelphia going to school there, another one in Colorado. They were actually part of those protests. that were on TV. My daughter in Philadelphia had friends that were getting tear gassed and arrested. So from a mother perspective, you know, it was concerning, but at the same time, I was proud of her to be part of, part of what was happening, you know, but it was
180scary. So I really liked the emphasis of the, the, the police being more cluster wide, I think, as other people have also said. And I just wanted to share also. So when my daughters were in the Mira Mesa cluster at Sandburg Elementary, they had, and I know this was true across the district, they had a pretty strong safety patrol program. And along with that, it wasn't just the kids doing safety patrol, but, you know, it was, I just remember Officer Carter, who I think is retired now, but just being a mentor for the kids and being there at the elementary school level, doing more like. fun activities. He was part of the career day and just on campus as more of a mentor. And so I really think we need to get back to that,
181not just at the high, I mean, I think it's important at the high school level, but I think it's been mentioned middle school and elementary school, because if we start those relationships early, those kids are going to know that individual. he can become more that long-term mentor and role model for them. So I think it's important that we're going in that direction. Thank you, Trustee Pazza. Great. Trustee Patterson. I think about what Arlene shared. That was the student we just heard from Morris High School who serves on the student advisory board for our district. She shared an experience. I believe it was Arlene, at least you can correct me if I'm wrong, Arlene, who was another member. But they shared that they were on campus and they have an experience where the police officer was
182being introduced. And I think one of the administrators made some comment that was, you know, and you don't want to be seeing you don't want to be seeing him too frequently. You want to. And if you're as long as you're good, you won't see me around. And I think that really frames this shift in mindset that we want to get away from. And this old archaic perception of what this what school police. should be doing when we found out that's not really effective and that we're not being successful when we do that and that we're hurting students by doing that and i think that was Getting down to some of the things that Arlene and Val both talked about, where they were talking about that discomfort and that idea of not feeling that community-based perception.
183And I think what we've accomplished here is just so amazing. I mean, we made a commitment as a board to sit down and listen to the lived experiences of students. And I'm proud to say that I think we've done that here today. When we talk about creating policy with the primary stakeholders of our education system. I mean, this is what we mean. And we still have a long way to go. But I think tonight's work speaks volumes to what we will accomplish and talking about reimagining this system and looking at the steps to get there, what we've laid out tonight. I just had two questions that I wanted. to ask regarding what we've gone over. My first one would be, I wanted to hear a little bit, just a quick few sentences about how you
184would include students in that hiring process for school police. I was specifically interested to hear what is the actual process of including students in that. And then my second one would be knowing that site equity teams will not be known universally across campuses. What processes can a student directly take if they feel that the response matrix has been violated? I'm happy to take that, Trustee Patterson. And thank you, everyone, for all the hard work. And again, I echo the compliments to our students. It takes a lot of courage to step up and do what they did. And we have got some great feedback over the last year. We're looking at more, possibly including students in our interview panels, maybe some parents. I think it's important when someone's coming to interview for a police officer position
185with school police, from the very start, the applicant is seeing what's important to us, which our customer, the people that we care for are there and they have a say in whether or not that person gets hired with our police department. So that is very important to us. As far as. sharing if a student's unhappy or if they want to file a complaint or if they want to share anything. We're working on some anonymous reporting. We've got some apps that we use through Students Speaking Out, but we're also modifying our website so that it can truly be anonymous and that students can leave any comment they need. If they don't want to remain anonymous, of course, they don't have to, but it's important that students feel that they, you know, if they're uneasy or for
186whatever reason. that they can leave those anonymous comments. And also, you know, when they do leave their name, ensuring that we close the loop and give that feedback, because nothing's more disheartening when you leave a comment or ask for some constructive, provide some constructive criticism, and then you don't hear back. I think we've all been in that situation where you send an email or you make a phone call and, yeah, I'm going to get right on that, or I'm going to follow up, and then you don't hear anything back. And that really, for school police, it's all about building trust. And so it's one of the reasons we really want to stay in blue, because we want our students to know who we are on the campus. The last thing we want is our students
187to feel like we're sneaking around trying to bust them. So everything's got to be based in trust. And the most important thing is to make sure everything we do builds on that effort. Did that answer your question, sir? Definitely. I think that I definitely think. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Somebody else can say something. Go ahead. Perfect. Yeah, so I definitely think that we are moving in the right direction. One of the things I want to see is that students are really, really clear on what that process is and that we work to disseminate that information. We just had our student boardroom election and one of the people that I happen to be running against, one of her central points in her platform was, I want to know a clear way that students can report incidents of
188racism or can specifically bring up interactions that... are not positive and I brought up this response matrix specifically but I think it emphasizes that larger problem where students don't often know where to go specifically and I think it's our job as a board and as a district to ensure that students have that direct connection and have that direct understanding. As I said site equity teams are probably not going to be known by my friends specifically in that specific term site equity teams so if I don't know it what am I supposed to do as the average student that wants to speak up, that wants to report this? And how do I feel comfortable with my specific instance? So that's kind of where I was getting at. And I appreciate your response. Thank you, Trustee Patterson.
189Yeah. And so, first of all, again, thank you so much to everybody who was part of this presentation tonight. And I just think about both aspects of this. The conversations that... that people are having around transforming school police, like the chief said, are tremendously courageous. I think students, officers, administrators are putting themselves in a vulnerable position in order to listen to each other and to learn from each other. And again, I think there's the specific recommendations that you're bringing forward and the work that you're implementing now. is very powerful, but perhaps the most powerful part of this is that this process is really only beginning and will be ongoing and will allow that dialogue to continue and we'll learn a lot, you know, as we keep going through that. So I just really appreciate that.
190And, you know, the ethnic studies and I, you know, Superintendent Jackson, I really appreciate you clarifying that what you're looking for from the board tonight is kind of support for the general direction moving forward of building our capacity as a district to take ethnic studies to scale. And the only thing that I would say about that is don't hold back. We're in a time where you think about the concept of culturally relevant content and pedagogy. So why would we be willing to accept any content or pedagogy in our district that's not culturally relevant? So when we talk about taking ethnic studies to scale. We're talking about building something that we know is powerful, that we know is effective, that we know engages our students, that we know, as Wendy said, is to the benefit of
191everybody, adults and students. And we know that we have to do it well. And I appreciate that. And I appreciate that's always been the approach of the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee and the district. But, you know, to move forward where we have one student in our district that doesn't have access to culturally relevant and pedagogy means we're failing that student. And so as we think about, you know, the general recommendations, you know, tonight, I would just encourage you to come forward as you, you know, work with the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee. and bring more specific recommendations forward that we really think about a sense of urgency and a sense of opportunity to take this work to scale now. We've got an opportunity to do that in a big way now. Thank you so much and
192appreciate that. And certainly our Ethnic Studies Committee and the work that Wendy is leading and others. Certainly listening, we want to emphasize that self-awareness and in like catch all I can is certainly a foundational principle to recognize that I am another you and you are another me. I think Kiki pointed that out and we have to provide a space through our ethics studies work. That gives young people an opportunity to see themselves and have awareness. And it's not to. you know, box students. It's actually to open the awareness. As one speaker said, hey, let's not teach our children this. Yes, we need to teach them how to discern and make sense of the world. And so I know Wendy will probably, she probably took a lot of notes and we will certainly come back with
193that frame, President Barrera. Thank you. Thank you, board. Thank you, presenters. Okay, amazing work. And we've got a lot of work left tonight. So we'll move on to item E3. And this is the revision of our administrative regulation concerning grades and evaluation of student achievement during the emergency school closures. So Superintendent Jackson. Thank you so much. And thank you, Nicole DeWitt. I know she's been working on this. So just a reminder to the board, this was approved by the board on April 14th, 2020, around the administrative regulations 5121. And what we were really focused on was emergency school closures and a hold harmless process in the event of an emergency. And we noticed this. for short-term closures as March 13th happened of last year. Now, this is not to alter the regular policy, the regular
194grading policy. What it is doing is it is revising the emergency school closure by defining the short-term and long-term. And to give an example is With the extension of online learning past our initial school closures, we recognize a need to include long-term language that would necessitate things, for example, where a student would be online for a long period of time. And that would be the primary source of learning for more than one grading period. And in the event that that were to occur. a hold harmless policy would not necessarily be used. Instead, grade validation would be used. And in this, this would allow the second semester grade of a D or higher to validate the first semester course in the event that a student were to have failed. So that's the revision here. And we're
195asking for approval to these revisions. And I know Nicole DeWitt is here if you have any questions, she can support us there. Perfect. Thank you, Dr. Jackson. Do we have a motion to move by Dr. Whitehurst-Payne? Second. Second by Trustee Beiser. Thank you, Trustee Beiser. Any board questions or comments? If not, and again, just to clarify, and I think you spoke to this, Superintendent Jackson, we're talking about courses that are cumulative in nature over a first and second semester. That is correct. Great, thank you. Okay, so let's move to vote. Trustee Patterson. Aye. Trustee Beizer. Aye. Trustee McQuarrie. Aye. Trustee Bozzo. Vice president Whitehurst-Payne. You want to unmute yourself? Sure. Thank you. And Barrera, aye. Great. Thank you. Okay. Let's move on to the board consent agenda. Could we get a motion actually for items
196F1 through F5? So moved. Moved by trustee Beiser, second by trustee Bozzo. And I think we don't have any comments on any of those items, any board questions or comments. If not, Trustee Patterson. Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Aye. Trustee Bozzo. Aye. Trustee Beizer. Aye. Trustee McCrory. Aye. and Barrera I. Item F6 is being introduced by Trustee McCrory and me. And I would actually ask the board to table this item to bring it back on June 8th. Some of the supporters of this resolution want to do a little bit more work. So if we could just get a motion. Thank you. I move by Trustee McCrory. Seconded by Trustee Whitehurst-Payne. We do have one speaker on this item and so I'll call citizen 25, not present. Okay, so the motion to table this to June 8th,
197Trustee Patterson. Aye. Trustee McCrory, Trustee Abazo. Aye. Trustee Beizer. Aye. Vice President Whitehorse-Payne. Aye. And Barrera, aye. And now we'll move to item F7. And I'll ask Student Trustee Patterson to introduce this item. Thank you, Trustee Barrera. Super, super excited to present item seven, what we're looking at today, our resolution in support of student mental health, but not just in support, but really directing monumental action in our district to move the needle in support of student mental health. What we're going to be looking at today and what we're putting up for a vote is the initiative to formally create a mental health curriculum for our school district and to put that mental health curriculum into action so every single student in our secondary schools gets an education on health and wellness before they graduate high
198school. What we're doing here today is formally saying that mental health really, really does matter. And we're showing that we're walking the walk here today. And we're looking to put, we're looking to put together a committee that's going to come forth with formal recommendations on what this curriculum should look like, how this should be implemented on a larger scale wellness as a whole. So we are super excited to bring this forth and I'm excited to hear from everyone today that's helped make this happen, which I'll speak about more in a little bit, but I want to turn it over to hear the public comment first. Great, thank you, Trustee Patterson. Can we get a motion to support item F7? So moved. There we go. Moved by Trustee Patterson, second by Trustee Beizer. And we have
199speakers on this item and we'll actually give you up to three minutes each, beginning with Catherine Delgado. Hello, can you hear me? Yes, Catherine, go ahead. So thank you to the Board of Education for allowing me the time to speak today. My name is Catherine Delgado. I'm a senior at Mayor Mesa High School and the co-founder and co-chair of the Student Wellness, Education, and Resources, or SWARE, committee. I speak to you today in support of this agenda item. When my colleague Hannah and I co-founded the Swearer Committee, we visioned an inclusive education system for San Diego Unified that prioritizes mental health as an essential factor in education and wellness. We dreamed of comprehensive education on serious mental health illnesses that would destigmatize mental health, create an atmosphere of understanding, and be proactive in addressing the
200needs of students. We conceived a future that supported young students with the coping mechanisms needed for basic wellness. And we had this vision because we believe that to effectively support young students, it is not enough to address the issue in the short term. We must instead create systematic, long-term, and large-scale solutions. By implementing mental health curriculum within San Diego Unified Schools, our school district can effectively support young students with the tools and the resources they need to lead happy, healthy, and productive lives. The implementation of mental health curriculum will transform how education is viewed for years to come. As someone who struggles to cope with their own stressors and who dishearteningly observed their own friends attempt self-harm and suicide, this resolution is the best proactive measure that can be taken to protect the lives of
201young students. It is time that we do our part to prevent situations from worsening. It is time that we bring an end to the struggle and empower our youth. It is time to fulfill our commitment to San Diego Unified students. And with this in mind, I urge the members of the board to vote in favor of this resolution. Thank you. Thank you, Catherine. Kate Chason. Do we have Kate with us? Yes. Hello. Hi, Kate. So, hi, I'm Kate Chason, a junior and the current vice chair of the SWER committee. Sincerely, I want to thank all of you for granting our committee a voice, both in this meeting and in the district overall. About four hours ago, I spoke at a press conference run by the Chavez Club program to promote and discuss this resolution. Multiple
202kids at the elementary, middle, and high school level spoke about the importance of mental health to them. Some spoke about destigmatization of mental health. Some gave personal stories of family members with mental illness. Some provided alarming statistics about the raging and ongoing mental health crisis. But all of them had a hope for the future of mental health in our school district. Every single one of them is optimistic because of the historic resolution before you today. This resolution is, as Zachary Patterson just said, monumental. It creates a crucial curriculum aimed at destigmatizing mental health and educating students in order to give them the power to make positive, real change. And this resolution is so significant because it was created solely by students who want to make positive, real change in this district. The board meeting up
203to and including this agenda item has the common theme of student voice. the transformation of school police with student testimonies, the wellness report highlighting student willingness to make change, the ethnic studies presentation, and the repeated contributions from the student board members, Zachary Patterson, are all evidence of that. And this resolution is no different. It is an amalgamation of the district-wide student voice on mental health. So by passing this resolution, the district is not only showing that they care about their students, but that they are willing to accept the changing role we are taking in advocating for our needs. This is critical to save students' lives. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. So well put. Samantha Gantney? Hello. Yes, I would like to begin by saying thank you to the board for this opportunity to speak. My
204name is Samantha Gantney and I serve as the membership and communications coordinator for the Swear Committee. I speak to you in support of this agenda item. This year, San Diego Unified has taken monumental steps to support the mental health of our students. By forming the Swear Committee almost a year ago, Passing the mental health excused absences resolution in late January and requiring that teachers undergo mental health training via the living work suicide prevention and the youth mental health first aid courses, this district has set a precedent of advocacy for student well-being. As proven by these past actions, this board understands the cruel severity of mental health amongst students and the necessity for urgent action. Incorporating mental health education into school curriculums is urgent and doable. With a task force of dedicated student representatives working in
205union with district administrators, a curriculum that helps the social and emotional development of students, which will last their entire lives, will be created. San Diego Unified must continue its remarkable actions supporting the mental health of our students. Thank you. Thank you, Samantha. Alexandra Monjorgon. Is Alexandra not with us? Okay. Hannah Griswold. Hi, I'm Hannah Griswold, a University City High School senior and the SWER Committee co-founder and co-chair. For the past two years, I've been advocating for mental wellness curricula to be incorporated into public education. My advocacy began with my creation of an issue paper that I presented at the state level, which I then brought back to our own district so that I could make direct change. I worked with so many phenomenally supportive and caring district officials. for almost a year, and I soon
206realized that I couldn't do this work alone, especially after the death of a classmate and family friend from suicide. His death was almost one year ago this week, and I want to in part dedicate this resolution to him. This also would not be possible without the hard work of so many student mental health champions throughout our district and amazing district officials, such as our advisor, Mrs. Urbacava, and Dr. Noemi Villegas. This resolution will eliminate the stigma surrounding mental health in our schools, provide essential knowledge for students' long-term wellness, and demonstrate to students that their mental health is not an afterthought, but an essential part of our education. I appreciate everyone who has put their time and effort into this resolution, and I hope that the board will support it. Thank you. Thank you, Hannah. And
207Evelyn Navarrete? No, Evelyn. Okay, so we have a motion and a second in support of this item. Board questions or comments? Yes, Dr. McCrory. Yeah, I want to thank the students who spoke tonight and those who met with me and advocated for this resolution. I agree with them and Student Trustee Patterson that this is an issue that demands attention and requires urgent action. I look forward to supporting this resolution. Thank you, Dr. McQuarrie. Trustee Bozzo? Yeah, again, I also agree with Trustee McQuarrie. Again, something extremely important. So many students affected by this. And I just, I also want to congratulate trustee Patterson for taking the lead on this. I mean, you know, he's done so much, you know, bringing the students together and, and really, you know, coming such a long way. And again, a
208relatively short time and bringing this matter to our attention and then actually, you know, taking that next step and, and. to something that's gonna be more long-term, going forward in the district and is really gonna impact our students going forward. So thank you to him. Thank you, Trustee Bazaar. Vice President Whitehorse-Payne. It's long overdue. Thank you. There's no, it's long overdue. So I just say thanks to everybody. Thank you. And Trustee Beiser, did you wanna comment on this item? I didn't want to repeat previous comments from earlier. I think that the students have done a great job, and I think that this is a wonderful resolution. Now let's implement. Sounds great. And again, I just, you know, I want to thank the students, the leaders on the swear committee, the Chavistas, you know, the students
209who are just there. They are transforming our school system right now. You know, this isn't about developing leaders for the future. This is, you know, as we've heard all night tonight and as we see every board meeting with Trustee Patterson, you know, young people who are just making an impact right now that will leave a. for students who come after you. So just thank you so much for your work. Okay, with that, we will vote on this item. Trustee Patterson. Aye. Trustee Bozzo. Aye. Trustee McCrory. Aye. Trustee Beizer. Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Aye. And Barrera aye and the motion passes. And I'd like to ask Trustee Patterson to say one more thing at this point. Thank you, Trustee Barrera. Well, first of all, I just want to thank all of my fellow colleagues for supporting
210this today. It gets me a little bit emotional, actually, to just think about my own journey to this point and all the people that tell us as students it's not possible and that you're young. You don't have the knowledge to speak on these items. You don't know these things, and we do. We do. And you see that with the Chavez Club. You see that with the Swear Committee. You see that with our work to continue pushing and pushing and pushing. And who says a student can't put forth the mental health curriculum for the district and push that forward? Who says a student can't serve as the head of a district committee? Who says a student can't serve on the board? Those are only constructs in our minds that we've put forth to stop youth from
211being able to be these leaders of tomorrow. In 2019, if you remember when I originally spoke, I said, you know, we're going to create the society of tomorrow today and that the future leaders of tomorrow are now. And just as Trustee Barrera said, that is so, so true. And two leaders in specific that I want to honor this evening, I believe they're in the room. Catherine and Hannah, if you could both turn on your screens, I'd love to say a few words before we move on. So as you heard Catherine earlier, Catherine Delgado is a senior at Mira Mesa High School. Catherine has been involved in district activism with a focus on mental health for many, many years. Catherine started her work with the founding of her podcast first, advocating for health and wellness. Catherine
212has been in the mental health sphere in the district since I was a student in middle school. And as you know, last year in 2020, Hannah and Catherine co-founded the Swear Committee. Catherine joined with Hannah in setting the basis of this district work, pushing for meaningful mental health reform was always Catherine's number one priority. She connected students, prioritizing equity in her work, ensuring that every student in every school, even our harder to reach schools, was represented. And she's a senior that's going to be heading off to George Washington University this fall. And Hannah Griswold, who you also heard from, a senior at University City High School, started her advocacy for mental health lobbying at the state level. After working to push for mental health education, she was told to go back to this district to
213achieve those goals. Hannah set out on a multi-year project, actively working to achieve her goal of mental health education for all students. In 2020, Hannah experienced a death by suicide from a student at our school. And she was moved by this experience and continued to push forward and learn to advocate with strength of all students. In partnership with Catherine, she wrote a multi-page constitution and recruited students from every high school and founding our swear committee. Hannah worked to complete the puzzle of the district wellness council by formally placing students on our wellness council subcommittees. And Hannah is a senior proud to be attending Stanford University in the fall. To both of you, you have dedicated so much of your high school to ensuring health and wellness for all of our students in San Diego Unified.
214The resolution that you will all work to write, that we worked in partnership together on. and that we've now passed as the culmination of your work. On behalf of the San Diego Board of Education, I want to formally recognize both of you for your commitment to students. We are so privileged to have you in our district and for me to have you as peers. We'd like to present to you formal certificates of achievement on behalf of the Board of Education. They'll be sent out to you in the mail coming soon. We wish all of you the best of luck in the future. And I know I have no doubt that you will both achieve great things. And whatever you do, don't leave us behind. Remember your roots in San Diego Unified. And just as you
215were here for us, we're all here for you. So thank you, Hannah and Catherine, for everything you've done for our district. And I wish you the best of luck in the future. Thank you, Trustee Patterson. And congratulations, Hannah and Catherine. I know you're super excited about the certificates of achievement, but you're probably a little excited about just transforming board policy as well. So congratulations. Great, great work. Okay, we will now move on to item G1, which is our semi-annual update from the District English Learner Advisory Committee. And the chair of the DLAC, Lalya Alali, will present. Welcome, Lalya. Good evening, Board of Education, Interim Superintendent, and all those attending the meeting tonight. So my name is Lalia Alali. I will be presenting tonight. So I'm going to start with highlighting some of the celebrations. Next
216slide, please. Yeah. So we started our monthly meeting with interim superintendent Dr. Lamont Jackson, with Dr. Sophia Roditi, chief of staff, and also Teresa Laskowski and myself, the DLAC chair. And we hope that this meeting will continue. Next slide, please. So the EL data, we have about 129 functioning ELAC. We have 21 ELAC delegated to SSC and we have 19 ELAC with fewer than 21 English learners and three in process. Next slide. So for the DELAC attendance, as you can see, we have a large number of people attending our meeting. And before COVID, we didn't, we never reached that number. So we are so pleased that we have so many parents attending the meeting online. Next slide, please. So the EL data reclassification, the total number of students assessed. In the spring of 2020, we
217have about 8,690. The total of students with OPL of four, 824. And the number of students who have been reclassified, 744. So the statistic of the English learners, the total number of the English learners, we have about 17,677. The long-term English learners, 3,737. And the English learners who are dual identify, 3,835. As far as the state literacy. In the spring of 2020, we had about 394 students who have been awarded this SEAL Bailoracy. In 2019, as you can see, it was less, 382. And in the spring of 2021, we have 409 students who have been awarded by the state of SEAL Bailoracy. I'm going to move now to our concerns. So number one concern is the learning loss. So the learning loss will present challenges next fall, even with the summer school for both students
218and teachers. So DLAC recommends the district to provide the best practices for intervention and emerging idea for rapid makeup of lost instruction. We believe that the traditional approach to scheduling, course offering, and intervention are not likely the best for these unprecedented times. Number two, ensuring language and culture as seen as assets. So it's essential that teachers recognize the strength and value student for what they bring to classroom. Home language and culture are great assets to build on language acquisition and content mastery. DLAC recommends ongoing PD for teachers and staff to embrace our English learners and help them succeed. DLAC also supports ethnic studies because it ensures that every student is represented and respected in the classroom setting. Ethnic studies is important for our English learners to thrive and succeed. Grading policy. DILAC understand the purpose
219of changing the grading policy for the English learners along with other groups. However, DILAC believes that instead of lowering the standards, the district should focus on the academic and non-academic support to meet high standards set equally for all students. Next slide, please. So the other concern is regarding staffing. So for the English language instructional resource teacher, for this year, they have been offering instructional support for the English learners across the district. DLAC believes that compliance and instruction are intertwined, and for that we recommend to expand the LEs assignment to include compliance for next year. LEs have years of experience and expertise and will be the best to assess English learners and ensure that they are being served in programs that are best suited for their needs. The second point, fill all the LEs position for
220next year. So we are asking the district to fill all the position and that means the position from last year and this year. The other concern of us is we are asking as a DLAC to assign an EL coordinator for all schools. a person per site responsible to organize, coordinate, and evaluate the services and staff of English learners. And for that, thank you so much for listening to our presentation. Thank you so much, Lalia. As usual, very clear presentation with a lot of great recommendations and information. Any board member questions or comments? If not, oh, yes, Vice President Whitehorse-Payne. I would just say that I know that our interim superintendent will be working closely, and I think I read somewhere that they have been meeting with him already. So that's a good thing. We look
221forward to hearing the next report. Thank you. And yes, my thanks to Lalia. Thank you so much for meeting with us. And yes, those meetings will continue. And we will be sharing our district's plan to support and align with what Lalia presented on behalf of the DLAC during our LCAP presentation. So we look forward to sharing that. But thanks again, Lalia, for your leadership. being a voice for our students. Thank you. And I want also to congratulate Martha. Congratulations. That's right. Martha says thank you, Lalia. Great. Okay. Good. We'll move now to item G2. And this is the Charter School Facility Committee Measure YY Project Recommendations. With the staff input and recommendations, can we get a motion on this item? So moved. So moved by Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Second. Second by Trustee Beiser. And we
222have one speaker on this item, Ryan Elliott. Good evening, Board President Barrera, Vice President Whitehurst-Payne, Trustees, and Interim Superintendent Dr. Jackson. I'm the Executive Director at Elevate and just want to share just a couple quick words this evening. At Elevate, we strive to create the conditions for every student to learn and lead, to realize the great and unique potential within them, and to find and use their voice. We've heard so many amazing examples of that over the course of this evening from so many students in the district. We're proud of our students' achievements. and growth since opening seven years ago and the diverse community of students, educators, and families that we have built together. We're thankful for the opportunity to engage in the facility master planning process as we are currently serving students at three
223different campuses, including a co-location with a neighborhood school in Tierra Santa. Recently, Dr. McQuarrie said the effectiveness of a school is related to its instructional environment and the quality of its facilities. We agree wholeheartedly and are hopeful for the prospect of serving all of our students on one site. On behalf of our school community, I want to thank the Facilities Planning and Construction Office for the time invested to collaborate on our application and plan and the Charter School Facilities Committee for their recommendation to approve this project. We ask that you vote in alignment with the recommendation from the CSFC so that we can move toward our goal of serving students and families at one location. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Okay, any questions or comments on this item? If not, Trustee Patterson? Aye. Trustee Bozzo?
224Aye. Trustee Beizer? Aye. Trustee McCrory? Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne? Aye. And Barrera, aye. Congratulations, Ryan. Okay, item G3, can we get a motion on our ratification of our MOUs with bargaining units related to COVID? So moved. So moved by Trustee Beiser, second by Trustee Bozzo. Any board questions or comments? If not, Trustee Beiser. Aye. Trustee Bozzo. Aye. Trustee McCrory. Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Aye. And Barrera, aye. Okay, and we'll move on to item G4. And this is a public hearing on the initial proposals from the San Diego Education Association to bargain our successor agreement. Can we get a motion on this item? So moved. So moved by Vice President Whitehurst-Payne, seconded by Trustee Beiser. And we have one speaker on this item, Dr. Kyle Weinberg. Thank you, President Barrera, Vice President. I am the Vice
225President and Bargaining Chair of the San Diego Education Association, proudly representing over 6,000 certificated educators in our district. I'm here tonight to sunshine our bargaining proposals to the San Diego Unified School District. Our goal is to ensure that we can negotiate a fair contract that provides our schools with the supports that our students need. The funding provided to our district from both the state and federal governments in response to COVID Give us an opportunity to deploy unprecedented supports that will address the real impacts of the pandemic on our students. Through this round of bargaining, we want to make special education work by capping caseloads, hire more counselors and nurses for our schools, increase the number of school psychologists in our district, create elementary class sizes that allow for contacts between teachers and students. Create a
226pay and benefits package that is competitive in this era of teacher shortages and the ever increasing cost of living in San Diego. There's a lot of work ahead of us and COVID has not derailed our commitment to meeting the needs of all students and particularly those in our highest need communities. We look forward to being partners with the San Diego Unified Board and the district in ensuring that these supports are provided for our schools. Thank you. Thank you, Kyle. And do we have any questions or comments on this item? If not, Trustee McCrory. Aye. Trustee Beazau. Aye. Trustee Beizer. Aye. Vice President Whitehorse-Payne. Aye. And Barrera, aye. Okay, we will now move to item H1. And this is the update on the May revise. Superintendent Jackson. Thank you so much, President Barrera. And this is
227a presentation on a very high level based on the governor's proposed state budget. And we'll speak to, I mean, what the governor pushed out was very high level goals and objectives for the next fiscal year. As we know, this is not a plan that is solidified at this point. So there are some high level ideas, policies and initiatives that we really appreciate. and again this is a presentation based on the governor's proposed budget And the governor did outline funding related to K-12 education for the next fiscal year. We appreciate that. Specifically focused his intention around early learning, around mental health we spoke about earlier. And so I'm going to invite Dr. Oettinger to prepare or I'm sorry, to present. our summary of what this may mean for us, understanding that we're going to be back
228in June with much more detail after the approval of the state budget. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Adegar. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Jackson. Good evening, members of the board, and thank you. Mr. Rollins and I are here to provide you with information about the Governor's May Revise. As noted, we will start by taking a look at process. So here you'll see the process along with some, so tonight we'll look at the process, the May Revise, along with some potential district implications. So thank you, next slide. Timelines. We know the May revise, as Dr. Jackson mentioned, builds upon the January proposal from Governor Newsom and marks the point in time where the state legislators now weigh in as the state works towards the statutory deadline to pass a
229balanced budget by June 15th, with, of course, the governor's approval no later than June 30th. Meanwhile, we're going to take a look at the May revise as was presented by the governor. And Mr. Rollins is here to walk us through what we know now. Good evening again. From the big picture perspective, we're seeing the marquee education aspects of the May revise centering around the California for All Kids plan, supported by both ongoing and one-time funding initiatives. In presenting the May revise, the governor proposed a budget for K-12 education of $122.7 billion. To provide some context, here are the last three budget years showing the change in budget from the governor's budget in January to the May revise. As you can see, there have been large swings going from January to May, resulting in a $17.7
230billion overall increase to the Prop 98 guarantee. The May revise proposes the five-year build-out of the California for All Kids Plan. With equity at its center, the plan provides various supports, particularly for our neediest students. Transitional kindergarten is a major component of the plan, phasing in access to all four-year-olds for the next five years. The centerpiece for the governor's May revision, the California for All Kids plan, is a broad five-year plan. As I mentioned, the plan includes full implementation of transitional kindergarten and many other items, year-round access to enrichment, teacher training and supports, and other items supporting by recurring and one-time resources. Highlighting one item, the state is intending to provide recurring funding to support participation in federal universal meal programs. As is the case with much of the May revised, we don't know many
231of the details at this point or how the approach will impact our district. We currently have universal meal programs at 127 of our schools. And funding to expand these programs would obviously be well received. The May revise proposed increases in the cost of living adjustment as compared to the governor's budget. As a reminder, last year was a zero COLA. And the May revision provides a catch-up for that. That's why you see these noted as compounded. In addition, the LCFF COLA includes an added 1% of the Prop 98 general fund to help address ongoing fiscal pressures. When looking at funding specifically identified as ongoing, the May revise includes $1.1 billion for increased staffing to provide direct support to students. You can once again see, again, the $150 million as well supporting expanding childhood nutrition programs is
232also included in the recurring ongoing funding. There are a number of one-time pieces captured in the May revision intended to build and support the California for All Kids plan. As we know, we need to be sensitive to one-time sources of funds and their restrictions and structure our budgeting accordingly. Now, as we look at the potential district implications, I'll turn it back to Mr. Ottenberg. Thank you, sir. And we know that with the very brief timeline between the May revise and the end of the fiscal year, as lifted up by Dr. Jackson with first read of the budget coming on June 8th, we are expecting much more detailed information as to the specifics in the coming days and, in fact, weeks. So let's take a look now at the high level aspects we can predict at
233this point. So as we are meeting this evening, the increase from 3.84 on the COLA in January and the 1.5% COLA in... special education, so LCFF increase and special education increase, we can expect an uplift of $11.6 and $1.6 million to the district in those respective areas. However, the details around the $1.1 billion Drew mentioned earlier with the concentration grant and also the non-LCFF COLA still forthcoming, which does take us to a little bit of a nebulous area. with regards to the one-time funds. So in fact, with the list of details that Drew provided, frankly, we're waiting for the specifics to assess if the district will be able to take advantage of those funds, to what degree, if we qualify. So as we await those oncoming details, this is really the time for advocacy. And
234we do want to thank Enrique Raucho for supporting our collective work in advocating our priorities in Sacramento. A couple aspects to lift up. The May Revise reflects San Diego Unified's advocacy. First of all, in our work around co-sponsoring AB22, which would fund universal transitional kindergarten. Notably, this has moved through the legislative process and even most recently in sending a unified officials have met with the state to encourage its inclusion in the May revise. Additionally, we have advocated for the deferred COLA that was mentioned, the cost of living adjustment. This was something that leadership brought forward with the Senate pro tem Atkins in December and also with the other members of the administration and the governor's office. And so this compounded COLA, we do attest to strong advocacy by San Diego Unified and many others in
235terms of this deferred COLA. yet there are. So we've h strong influence. We also that we are continuing to decision makers in Sacr we'd like to see a conti will be advocating for th We'd like to see some rel of the pension contributi for the unemployment insh remainder of the deferrals still needing to be paid. So our advocacy will continue. And I do want to thank Dr. Raucho for continuing. We have heard from him today that the Senate's version of the K-12 aspect of the budget is looking similar to the May revision. And so thank you. Thanks for the ongoing updates. And to conclude, just a reminder of the upcoming attractions in terms of the budget as we close things out. We will be coming back. First of all, we have LCAP coming up on
236June 1st. We will be back for the first rate of the budget on June 8th. So at this point, we want to thank you and we will pause. Thank you. Thank you so much, Greg. Do we have questions or comments from board members? Yes, Dr. McCrory. Yeah, I just want to thank the leadership in Enrique for their advocacy for AB22 and the other funding and policy bills. been submitted and looks like will be successful. Thank you for the hard work. Thank you, Dr. McCrory. Trustee Patterson. And do you think it's important to highlight as well that this budget, despite even our smaller things, this is significantly, this is a significant improvement towards education that really is unprecedented, at least in my lifetime and what I've seen since I entered the education system in. kindergarten. So
237I do think it is important to recognize, and I would just say from our state government perspective, we are seeing pretty large investments, especially in mental health and things that students are really focusing on. So I would applaud the state government for that, and I'm excited on our advocacy on our level with our focus on TK specifically. Thank you, Trustee Patterson. Other questions or comments? Yeah, I would just echo that, Trustee Patterson. This is a historic and transformative budget for education in California. I've heard an estimate that sort of when it all rolls up, which, you know, might include things like, you know, the education portion of the Rainy Day Fund, but when it all rolls up, this could get California to $21,000 per student. And you think about what that is compared to, you
238know, just where we've been just a few years ago, you know, coming out of the recession and really going back to, you know, 42 years since Prop 13. And I think that level would get California into the top 10 in education funding, which is required by law by Prop 98. But of course, we've never achieved that. So I agree. There's a lot of work to do on this budget, as there always is. But it does reflect really an historic commitment to public education in our state. Yeah. Vice President Whitehorse-Payne. And it's our opportunity to put away all the excuses and to get it done. We have no excuses. We as a system, we will get the job done. It's our commitment. The governor and the legislators are stepping up to help. then we're stepping up
239to make that difference. Thank you. Thank you, Vice President Weintraub. Trustee Baza. Yeah, I was going to add to that, that in talking with other school board members from across California, as well as other big urban districts, yes, it's fantastic. I mean, that we're getting this funding, but now, you know, there's a lot of expectations as well with the funding, I mean, that we need to do. what's right and really make it effective use of the funding, you know, showing because that's what, you know, people are going to be watching for. So, you know, it makes sense. We want to use the taxpayer dollars wisely, but it's exciting to be in a situation where we have this opportunity. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Thank you, Trustee Baza. Okay, thank you, Greg and Superintendent Jackson for the
240update and we know that there's more to come. So great, great overview. Okay, item H2, this is the renaming of Lindbergh-Weitzer Elementary School to Claremont Canyon Elementary School. So moved. Moved by Trustee Beizer. And do we have a second? Second. Second by Trustee Bozzo. Any comments or questions on this item? If not, and we have no public speakers, I can... Oh, we do have a presentation. Yeah, we have a presentation. Yeah, okay, great, absolutely. We have a presentation. We have a teacher from Lumberg Schweitzer. We also have a student that will be presenting. And then the principal's here as well, just for any questions following the presentation. Thank you, Jamie. So whoever wants to lead off, go for it. I'm sharing the PowerPoint presentation, Karen, if you're ready. Thank you, Jamie. I appreciate it. Thank
241you, board trustees and Dr. Jackson. As introduced by Jamie, my name is Karen Wesner, and I have been a Claremont community member for over 40 years. I've raised all four of my children in the Claremont area. The youngest is graduating from Claremont High. I'm thrilled to death. I've been teaching in Claremont for over 10 years, specifically at Lindbergh Schweitzer. As a community member, parent, and teacher at Lindbergh Schweitzer, I'm excited to present what we believe are our new beginnings. So just very quickly, our discussions began in 2016 when the community addressed our current names. And what I'd like to present to you is what the current demographics are for our school and the community. And then I'd like to present information on how we address the stakeholders and provide you with our recommendation. Thank you,
242Jamie. Although we recognize the efforts of Charles Lindbergh and Dr. Schweitzer, it is our responsibility to be culturally sensitive and listen to our community. That community has voiced their concern over the name of our existing school. We listen to their concerns, we respect their concerns, and now we agree that it's time to change our name. Next slide, please, Jamie. Lindbergh Schweitzer is located half a block away from the Islamic Center of San Diego. You can see from this slide, these are some of our current families and some of the languages that are spoken at our school. We also lease a portion of our campus to Kavod Hebrew Charter School. And so I'd like to just take a look very quickly at the demographics of Lindbergh Schweitzer. So as you can see from this pie chart
243that our school has a very diverse population. Considering our largest ethnic group is our Hispanic and Latino students at almost 30%, followed by 27% of our white population and almost 20% African-Americans, 10% Asians, and 8% of our students are of mixed race, 3% Filipino, and under 1% are our Native American students. Next slide, Jamie. Thank you. I think it's important to recognize that concern over our existing name actually came from the community, not from within our school. So I just wanted to share what the Claremont community looks like with you. So if you could go to the next slide, Jamie. As you can see, Claremont is a densely populated area in the city of San Diego. 41% of our population is made up of families with children under the age of 18. Within about a
244three mile radius of our current school, there are 30 different elementary schools. This is an important piece in the development in naming our school and it creates a competition in turn for our stakeholders, a desire to rebrand ourselves. Next slide, please. These are the demographics of the Claremont Mesa area. Please note that 50% of the population says white. However, that percentage includes a good portion of individuals who are often do not have a race designation. So it may include a large portion of Southwest Asian students, Middle Eastern, I'm sorry, Southwest Asian individuals, Middle Eastern individuals, and North African individuals. It's not entirely limited to European white community members. So the third step of our process in our name change was addressing our stakeholders. We reached out to obviously our current students, current families, current staff,
245and We recognize that student voice is important and you'll hear one of our alumni speak after myself. However, a large percentage of our students are actually below the age of six. We have over 100 different preschool students and then over 30 students with moderate to severe disabilities. So engaging student voice was reserved for our upper grade students. We turn to staff and family to get our most feedback. Next slide. When we began to listen in 2016, because that's when this process started, it has not been a quick process for the stakeholders and our community. In fact, it's been very thoughtful and intentional. And in the fall of 2019, our school community asked the Claremont Town Council to post the top three choices or to post the top three names that came out of our school
246discussions. These postings were listed in the Claremont Times, the Claremont Town Council Facebook page, and there was even an article in the Union Tribune where we solicited community voice. Next slide. I'm sorry. So the community input involved a lot of sentimental feelings to not change our school name. This was actually the largest portion of opposition, maybe not understanding the need for the name change. Some individuals offered name suggestions, including reverting back to our original name, Sunshine School, electing individuals' names such as Bessie Coleman. However, the school community declined these suggestions, understanding that the Sunshine School was a segregated school entirely for students with physical disabilities, and that is not the image that we want to portray for our students. Choosing an individual name for the school often brings risk, and so the school community decided
247to honor the community with a name that reflects the community. Most recently, members of our district's names committee suggested a name that would honor cultural identity and tribal citizens. Last week, our school site governance met, and we would like to request that a land acknowledgement plaque be added somewhere to the new campus as a formal statement that would recognize and respect indigenous people as traditional stewards of our geographic area. Next slide, please. So after soliciting input, the community names that were brought before the names committee were Claremont Canyons Academy and Claremont Canyons Elementary. Our school and the Claremont community was and continues to be surrounded by canyons. Our protected open spaces are an incredible learning environment for students, children, families, and community members. Our Claremont Canyons are something that we are proud of and we
248want our students to be proud of where they go to school. So I understand that you already took a vote for what the names committee presented as their recommendation, which is Claremont Canyons Elementary. And I certainly don't want to delay that vote. but I'd like you to just consider for a moment the idea of Claremont Canyon's academy. 75% of our students are socioeconomically disadvantaged. One-third of our students are emerging bilingual students. As a staff, we respect our students and we have very high expectations for them. We believe that they deserve the very best education and opportunities available to them. We believe that they deserve the prestige and honor that comes with a name that ends with Academy. Based on our mission statement and new pillars of education that we've developed, we feel that Academy is
249actually better suited to the work we wish to embark on in Claremont as we begin this new chapter. Academies are known to prepare our students to be college, career, and civic ready. Our Claremont community deserves a school name that brings together the LCAP vision goals and our combined effort to propel our students into a globalized 21st century. The names committee vote was very close. Jamie, could you go to the next slide, please? The names committee vote was very close. It was six to seven with three members abstaining from the vote. So, Jamie, can you go to the next slide? I would just ask that you would please consider Claremont Canyon, and one more click of that, Jamie, one more click. Please consider Claremont Canyons Academy as our name. Thank you. And I'm available for questions
250or we have one student voice to hear. This is Lalia's daughter, Maria. Hello everyone. Good evening San Diego Unified School Board. My name is Maria Hussain, a Lindbergh-Sbykeshire alumni and the 2018-2019 ASB president. I would like to begin by thanking you all for being here and taking the time to listen to the many reasons behind changing our community school name. I have a long history with the school, having not only graduated after attending for nine years, but it was also where my two older sisters attended and graduated from before moving forth with their academic careers. We're living in an exciting time. one that calls for action, social justice, and lasting positive change. This moment in history has been driven by the revelation of anti-Semitic and racist histories of many people, two of which our school
251had been named after. I thank the board for not only acknowledging this fact, but also allowing our school to make a decision towards change in the right direction. However, the question tonight is whether our neighborhood ought to be able to use Academy as part of our new school name. Our Claremont community is no stranger to academies in the area. Mount Everest Academy is about a mile from our school. John Muir Language Academy is less than two miles away. Bright Horizon Academy is within a five-minute walk from what I hope will be Claremont Canyon's academy. To conclude, I would like to offer the educational definition of an academy, which states that an academy is a learning community, often a place of study that offers a special focus. In this case, our school is categorized as a
252magnet school, offering a specialized focus in service learning. This would put Claremont Canyons Academy in a very unique position to meet several of the upcoming district goals for the future, namely activating youth leadership by giving back to the community and placing community engagement at the forefront through the immersion of civic responsibility. I thank you all for your time and consideration in voting for Claremont Canyons Academy. Okay, so thanks very much, Karen and Maria. I just want to clarify what action the board is being asked to take tonight. So the recommendation coming forward, is this coming forward from the staff and is the recommendation for Claremont Canyons Academy or for Claremont Canyons Elementary School? Thank you, President Barrera. Currently, the recommendation coming forward for approval is Claremont Canyons Elementary School. I would defer to Jamie in
253terms of the process of where we've landed and also Victoria Peterson, the principal, in terms of that. I think Karen spoke. Thank you, Karen, for speaking and sharing. perspective but that's the recommendation Claremont Canyons Elementary School just to clarify for the Claremont Canyons Elementary that came from the names committee they recommended it by a vote of seven to six for elementary and so the community and the school site have both been pushing for it to be Academy so that's why they're asking the board now if the board could approve it to be Academy I'd like to make a motion that we rename it Claremont Canyons Academy. Okay, we've got a motion from Trustee Beiser to name the school Claremont Canyons Academy. Do we have a second? Oh, we did have a motion on the original.
254Okay. Okay, so Kevin, you made the motion on the original recommendation of Claremont Canyons Elementary. So are you amending your motion? That's correct. Okay. Thank you. And Sabrina, you made the second on this. Would you be acceptable to Trustee Beiser's amendment? Yes. Okay. So we do have an amended motion from Trustee Beiser, seconded by Trustee Beiser to name this Claremont Canyons Academy. Any board discussion? Yes. Trustee Patterson. I just want to understand what was the controversy over moving it towards the academy? Just because since I don't have anybody that's supporting elementary right now, I just want to be sure I'm doing my role of going of understanding both sides of it. So is there anybody that was for elementary or can anybody explain to me why this was controversial? Go ahead, Victoria. So, hi, I'm
255Victoria Pearson, principal of Lindbergh Schweitzer. The two names were both submitted from our site governance team. The number one choice being Claremont Canyons Academy and the number two choice from the community, the school community being Claremont Canyons Elementary. When it got to the names committee, when they voted, I believe Jamie just read that it went seven to six on the. voters from the naming committee and I believe three members abstained from voting. And so right now, Ms. Wesner and Maria Hussein are sharing their opinions about Academy. Got it. So the site governance team, the actual site governance team did support Academy over elementary. Yes, but both names are submitted to be possible names. Got it. Okay. Perfect. Okay. So what we could do is actually, because we have a little bit of lack of clarity
256about who's recommending what, we could table this item to come back on the 8th. How does the board feel about either voting tonight or tabling? I've been trying to make this vote for 10 years. Okay. Okay. I would support, if you made a motion, Trustee Breyer, I would support tabling it just due to the fact that I am a little bit confused as you just shared. Point of order, there's a motion on the floor. We do have a motion on the floor, understood. Yeah, Trustee Whitehorse-Payne. I don't want to vote on this tonight. Okay. Any other discussion by board members? Yeah, this is very important. I mean, you know, I am surprised that my colleagues aren't enthusiastically voting as we voted to rename, you know, Lee Elementary School. This is very important to the Jewish
257community and to the millions of Jews that died in World War II. And I'm Jewish, trustee Beiser. One at a time. One at a time. Thank you. Trustee Whitehurst-Payne, I believe, and then Trustee Patterson? Well, frankly, I personally like Claremont Canyon's academy because I tend to like name academy better than elementary school. However, this is controversial. I don't understand why it's so close. Why would we vote one way or the other when they need to work this out? Whatever the issues are, they're not clear. So it's going to come back anyway. If we vote and it was six to seven and then the seven group wants it changed back. So it's controversial. Is it going to hurt it to wait a week? I mean, a couple of weeks to do this? Tell me if it
258is, because I think that I don't like this kind of closeness on something like this. It's unnecessary. Okay. So, yes, Trustee Patterson. Yeah. Yeah. And I would agree with Trustee Whitehurst-Payne that it's a little hasty. As I said, I'm a Jewish American. Charles Lindbergh was no friend of the Jewish community, to say the least. But yet, I'm okay with waiting an additional week to make sure we make the right choice. And I don't think there's any damage done in that sense. Okay. So, yes, Trustee McCrory. Yeah, I don't think there's a question as to whether the name needs to be changed or not. I think it really is whether it will be elementary or academy. I personally lean towards academy. I think it's forward thinking. I think elementary, and apologies to all elementaries in the
259district, I think it looks back to a traditional system. I think we have an opportunity to provide a progressive name for a school that has aspirations for their students. So we have that opportunity to do that. I would lean towards Academy, but I'm also sensitive to having the community to work this out. And I can see that. So I believe that it's important that we do recognize the name will be changed. And we want to make sure the community is clear about what they want that to be, whether an academy or an elementary. And it's the community's decision, regardless of what I might think. I'd like to hear more clarity regarding that. Is it appropriate for me to offer some clarity at this time? Yeah, because I was also just going to respond that we
260already have the input from the community for academy. I will address that. And Trustee Patterson, I appreciate you wanting to hear what the negative was that was associated with Academy. And more often than not, what we were told is that Academy sounds very prestigious and pretentious. And my response to that as a community member of Claremont for as long as I've lived here raising my kids, our socioeconomically disadvantaged students deserve the prestige that comes along with academy. I believe, again, this has been something as board member Visor is saying, we have been working on this since 2016, the community of the school and put forth their vote. And that vote is for Claremont Canyons Academy. The names committee is a newly formed, a newly appointed group that is now going to be operating under new
261procedures. their pushback was actually that we did not consider a name that was associated with Indigenous people. And in hearing that and listening to that, we want to recognize that, but I would really urge you to be able to vote on this tonight. I know I see the students faces every day. Our kids deserve academy. Thank you, Karen. I think we're going to move the motion to a vote and then we'll see where we're at. So we've got a motion on the table to name the school, the Claremont Canyons Academy by trustee Beiser seconded by trustee Bozzo. So we'll take this to a vote. Trustee Patterson. No. Trustee Bozzo. Can I just not vote or what? You want to abstain? Abstain. Yes, thank you at this point in time. Trustee Bozzo abstains. Trustee McCrory. I
262will go with my feeling of, and with the presentation that was made tonight, I think others had the opportunity to be here. that wanted to make the difference and made the report were here. I would like to hear more. However, I agree that we need to move forward. So I vote yay. Okay, thank you, Trustee McCrory. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. You're muted. As Sabrina said, it's a long night. I'll abstain. Okay. And I, even though I'm not comfortable with the process and the way that this has come forward, I do respect the work of the school community and I understand the notion of wanting the school named an academy. So I will also vote yes on the motion. So the motion passes. Advisor votes aye. I'm sorry, Trustee Beiser. Okay, so the motion to name the
263school the Claremont Canyons Academy passes with three ayes and two abstentions. And I would just, again, you know, as a recommendation, maybe more to the staff. It's very helpful that when the staff recommendation comes forward, that we can feel confident that the process has been fully vetted and that there is consensus. And I think you heard a little bit of a lack of comfort from the trustees tonight. President Barrera, I take full responsibility for this. It won't happen again. Thank you. Thank you, superintendent. Appreciate that. Okay, so we will, and thank you, Karen and Maria and Principal Peterson for your work and for your presentation tonight. Yes, Trustee McCrory. Point of clarification, my understanding is an abstention vote may be called, but the vote does go with the majority. Yeah, there's three votes in favor
264of the motion. So this motion passes. Right. Yep. I think just a matter of how is it going to be recorded? Oh, how it will be recorded. Marty, do you want to speak to that? Yes, we had three trustees voting yes and two trustees abstaining and the student board member voted no. Point of order, can the trustees that abstain vote in support of the motion at this time to go into the record? Is that a possibility? I'll vote that way, Kevin, because that's the name that I like. But I'm glad the superintendent has assumed some responsibility so that we don't get here and have this kind of messiness in the future. And he understands that. So I'm good with that. Okay, so we're getting an echo here. Process wise, sounds like the trustees who abstained
265would want an opportunity to vote on this. What I guess I defer to- I'll do yes. I'll do yes. It should be changed. Okay. I understand. Just give us a second, Vice President Whitehorse-Payne. I just want to understand from maybe our Andra, what we need to do in order to allow the vote to be. recorded with the... It's President Breyer. It's my understanding under Robert's Rules of Orders that one of the affirmative voting members can recall the question and then it would result in a revote. Okay. Can I ask Council Green to weigh in on this? Okay, now you can hear me. Yes. Okay, thank you. Sorry about that. I'm going to recommend as well that you just take a re-vote. Motion second to re-vote and then call the re-vote. That would be the cleanest
266way to do it. Okay, let's do that. So let's do a re-vote. We've got a motion on the floor from Trustee Becer, a second from Trustee Bozzo. I can just comment for one second. Please, yes. Yeah, so definitely, as we said, the process was my issue. I definitely am not going to be one to... vote to keep the name of an anti-Semite, that would really, especially as a Jew myself. So yeah, I will vote in support. But as I said, the confusion of the situation worried me to make a split-second decision that I didn't feel comfortable with. But understanding more details now and seeing where the position of the board is, I'll vote in support. Okay. I've been working on this issue for years with some of the local rabbis. So I have to find
267out where you go to temple. Emmanuel, my rabbi, same as Cindy Martin. Okay. Trustee Beiser, how do you vote? Aye. Trustee McQuarrie? Aye. Trustee Bozzo? Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne? Aye. And Barrera, aye. Okay. So now we've got a unanimous vote in support. Great. Okay. Good work, thank you. Okay, now we're on to speaking of items that have taken quite a number of years. So this is item H3 and it's a public hearing and there's a lot that's... contained in this item. So I'm going to read the entire action. So this is a resolution certifying the final environmental impact report for the San Diego High School whole site modernization and long range facilities master plan project pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act, adopting a mitigation monitoring and reporting program, making findings of fact. adopting a
268statement of overriding considerations for significant and unavoidable environmental impacts, approving the San Diego High School whole site modernization and long range facilities master plan project, public hearing and resolution of an intention to exchange district owned property as consideration for a lease with the city of San Diego for the San Diego High School site. a lease with the city of San Diego for San Diego High School and Balboa Stadium for a 99-year term. And this requires a four-vote majority. And I would just say, just for context, we all know the issue involving San Diego High. San Diego High sits on property owned by the city of San Diego. The district leases the property for purposes of having San Diego High School on that property. San Diego High School has existed on that property since, I believe,
2691883, making it the oldest high school in San Diego County and I believe the second oldest high school in California. Several years ago, out of concern that when the lease expired, the land would automatically revert to the city, which would result in the necessary relocation of San Diego High, a group of stakeholders from the San Diego High community, led by students and supported by staff, alumni, parents. went to the voters and asked the voters to approve a charter change, which would allow the district to continue to lease the site in perpetuity. That was in 2016. That measure passed with 77% voting yes. And it has taken up until now to complete the lease agreement with the city that allows the district to move forward. primarily with our ability to do whole site modernization work on
270projects that have been approved by the voters in various bond measures. So finally, we're at a point that we can actually move forward with the construction work on San Diego High. So this is a long time in coming. I want to especially thank Lee Dolgoroff for your leadership in moving this forward. My understanding is that if the board approves this item tonight, next step is to go to the city council for final approval of the lease. And then we can get to work on San Diego High and the San Diego High community can be assured that the school will remain where it needs to be for the next 99 years at least. That was a little editorial. I've seen my move by my president. Whitehurst Payne, thank you. And do we have a second? Second
271by Trustee Bozzo. Thank you. And any board comments or questions? I want to thank President Barrera for your leadership with the charter initiative back in 2016. And I'd also like to thank the mayor's office for actually coming to an agreement. Thank you. Thank you, Trustee Bozzer. Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. With that said, Trustee Patterson. Aye. Trustee Bozzo. Aye. Trustee Beiser. Aye. Trustee McCrory. Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Aye. Barrera aye. Congratulations to the KVER community. Okay. Can we get a motion on the superintendent's consent agenda? So moved. Second. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. We've got one comment. Item I-26, citizen 25. Not present with that. Any board questions or comments? If not, Trustee Patterson. Aye. Trustee Bozzo. Aye. Trustee McCrory. Aye. Trustee Beizer. Aye. Vice President Whitehurst-Payne. Aye. And Barrera, aye. And just a clarification, no suspensions or
272readmits this board meeting, just so I don't need to abstain from the items. That's correct. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. And we have one public speaker, a familiar voice, Roy McPhail on non-agenda public testimony. Thank you very much. Good to talk to you all again. My name is Roy McPhail. I'm a resident of North Park, former employee of San Diego Unified for 21 years. And I'm currently a commissioner on the City of San Diego Redistricting Commission, along with your former colleague, Mitz Lee, and seven other commissioners. Our task on the Commission is to redraw the nine city council districts once the 2020 census data is released and to engage the entire San Diego community in that process. I'm not here representing the Commission, but I wanted to urge the Board to begin
273your required redistricting process as quickly as possible. Having now worked on the City Commission for about seven months, I know there's a lot of pre-planning that needs to be done for this process and I want to encourage you to begin promptly. Ten years ago, Bernie Reinerson, who was then the District Chief of Staff and I, led the redistricting effort and we worked with a five-member redistricting advisory committee that was appointed by the board. and with a redistricting mapping consultant that was hired by the advisory committee. That advisory committee was formed in June 2011, and they produced a new board of trustee map that was presented to the board on your September 13th, 2011 meeting. And there's a board doc that explains all that. So you might just about be on schedule if you start your
274process for this cycle next month by appointing your advisory committee for the new redistricting cycle. They'll have a lot of work to do in a very short period of time, not least of which is contracting with a mapping consultant to do the analysis at a time when mapping consultants are in high demand. We and the commission are in the process of hiring one as we speak. I strongly recommend for appearances sake that you have an outside consultant to do the mapping analysis as you did 10 years ago. It looks like this time round, our city commission will have to make significant changes to the council districts due to population change over the last 10 years. And I suspect that the same will be true for San Diego Unified. The sooner you form your committee and
275begin engaging the community in this process, the more smoothly it will hopefully go. So good luck and good to see you all again. Good to see you, Roy, and point well taken. And I know Superintendent Jackson will follow up on this suggestion as well. Yes, sir. Okay, thank you. And with that, we are adjourned and we will reconvene for our LCAP workshop next week on June 1st. Thank you, everybody. Good night.