7/28/2015 Board of Education Meeting

001So welcome and let's begin today's board meeting with non-agenda public comment and your if you've completed a slip we should have that and I'm going to start to read off some names and you can come in any any order that you choose. Non-agenda public testimony speakers will have two minutes each and when the Green light comes on you begin speaking yellow light comes on Means that you have a minute left when the red light comes on and I believe we have quite a few speakers That means you need to wrap up your last comment your last word and I just want to remind you that we you should be speaking on issues not individuals and We'll go ahead and start And I need to mention some other names as well. Francisca Salcedo, Linda K Williams,

002Ernie McCray, Michelle Bolton, Donald Guy. And we also have a citizen. This is all for the first. Asha Aiden, Muhammad Motem. Kadar Ismail, Masala Youssef, Nancy France, Hawa Abdi. And you can come up in any order and you can go ahead and begin. I want to speak to the budget. At a recent meeting, Jenny Salkeld explained that there is a savings of $300,000 a month in medical insurance costs because 719 ineligible recipients were removed from the roles. And that started happening in March of 2015. That's $3.9 million in savings a year. And I would like to know where that money is going. More money is coming in from the lottery monies, and some of that lottery monies are specifically for school supplies. Lots and lots of unexpected money from the lotteries is coming, but schools

003are still telling parents to buy crayons and paper, and the fundraising is already starting for August, and I don't think that's right. The school supplies list tells parents to buy everything that the kids need for their studies. so why is all this money that's coming in from the lottery and the savings and in uh... viva not going back to school supplies and instead of taking it from parents parents are fundraising and their fundraising so much and all that money's not being spent parents are questioning why some groups have two hundred thousand dollars in savings but it's not being spent principles are not following the policy of fundraising activities should be conducted for a specific goal and not simply to raise money for the non-district organization. That means you can't have non-stop fundraising for no purpose

004except to just continue to collect money. And a lot of it is ending up in savings accounts and not being spent. I tell parents, complain, complain to the PTA, complain to the board, but they're afraid because it makes them look like they're being cheap, but in fact they're being cheap. hit hard by lots of bills and lots of issues that are going on, the economy is still not the greatest. I also want to know if employees were required to pay back health benefits that they were not entitled to receive. The superintendent should verify all dependents each year because that money saved should be going back to the children in the classroom. Public employees should not personally benefit because they received benefits they should not have received. Thank you. Thank you. Can we have the next

005speaker, please? Hello, Linda Kay Williams, 4967 Alfred Court, and retired teacher decades-wise from the district. It's good to see you all again. And I would like to applaud and thank and encourage the continuation of the restorative justice efforts that have been happening in the district. I know we're in a little bit of limbo maybe right now. towards clarity, but I am very excited about what has happened so far, and I know that you will be getting in a packet in just a little bit here, a printed out statistics of the awesome results of what's been happening in Oakland and in Los Angeles. And the White House recently was applauding the efforts in Los Angeles and looking at the wonderful drop. in the dropout rate, the drop in the suspension rate, the drop in the onsite

006arrest rate, and saving money is also actually a part of the dollars and cents part of it. The districts that I mentioned have really invested in their youth in the LCAP, pardon me, in their budget. big time. They have not only made it possible to start it, they have been looking towards the future for sustainability and they are making sure that they have the personnel in place, the ongoing training in place, and I'm just looking forward to having the very same thing happen and maybe even more so in our own district. So thank you very much. Thank you. Greetings. I thank you for having us here today. My name is Michelle Bolton and I am a resident here of San Diego since 2001. I have two children that are still currently in the school system.

007One that has graduated and has spent... since his second grade here in San Diego. My fourth and fifth grader experience issues with some of the students and teachers that they have expressed to me on certain levels of the way that they're treated. So it kind of addresses an issue of bullying with teachers and students, not just the students. So I'm not sure what could actually be done to look into that. My children have attended Ibarra as well as Rowan. Rowan is great, which we are going back to Rowan. I'd also like to address the nurse being there a little more often in the schools if possible. I know that it is a struggle and it's still continuing on a fight. It would be great to see nurses actually there, maybe if it's even part-time. excuse

008me, not seven days a week, but five days a week. Also, parents' responsibilities in the parking lot when they're picking up their children, making sure that they're following the directions. And if there is someone out there who is assisting and volunteering like myself to make sure that the parents are aware that if they're acting in orderly, then their children will also follow. As well as language barriers, making sure that everything is aware in their language that they are to understand. and abide by the rules that everyone else has to follow so that our children will also be able to feel safe as we would like to have felt safe when we were going to school as well. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ernie McCray, long, tall African American. I'll make this very brief. When

009I heard that Joe Fulcher was leaving, I thought I would come down and just talk. to not letting what's been going on with restorative justice die. I think it's very important. I just don't think, and I'm not thinking that you're going to pull back, but I'm just asking you not to pull back from your efforts. Because to me, it's showing students how to be loving and caring and sensitive. And in this world, if those aren't characteristics we want our children to grow up with, then we have a big problem. And they're learning, and Crawford is a perfect example of how the program works, and they're learning how to approach repairing harm as a way of restoring a kind of justice to us. And sometimes I think it's more about us than them because it's a

010collective kind of thing. Our society is better when we have people who know how to treat each other right. And also as an educator, I'd like to talk about the relevancy. of restorative justice. It comes at a time when we need it more than we ever have with the new Jim Crow and white privilege and Black Lives Matter. All those issues are part of a collective of what we need to make our world better than it is. There are times, our children's times, call for creative minds, minds that are more bent on restoring. than destroying and I just wanted to stop by and say that now I think I'll go to Denny's and get the senior slam. Thank you. Hello, my name is Donald Guy and I would like to talk about what would be

011athletic coaches advice to parents and school children about what to look out for when jogging and wherever children run and play. So San Diego Unified School District can promote better awareness among children and parents about how dangerously slippery some public sidewalks can get from rainwater. We can prove the current lack of awareness among San Diego students with a survey among local high school. And we simply ask the students in the school, hey, Have any of your parents or any of your coaches ever told you that a gray public sidewalk can get so slippery from rainwater that a person can slide 10 feet or 20 feet and longer? Okay, that's extremely slippery. That's slip and fall type stuff. KGTV News 10 broadcast on May 15th of this year. They showed that a gray public sidewalk. This

012is located directly across the street from San Diego City Hall on one side and the NBC building on the other side. And what News 10 cameras showed is I was jogging, very relaxed pace. I slid 18 feet, right? Now, Athletic coaches can look at this video, they'll see I was wearing good quality athletic shoes, and they'll also tell you plenty of your student athletes locally can run more than twice as fast as I was going. Because they can run more than twice as fast, they would have slid a lot further than 20 feet. I myself have put video up showing I've slid further than 20 feet on this sidewalk. How many people in this room are aware that a gray public sidewalk, you can slide over 20 feet on a gray public sidewalk? So what

013I'm, how much time do I have? None now. I thought I had three minutes. You have two minutes. I have two minutes. Your two minutes is up because the red light went off. I thought because I was a scheduled speaker, I would have three minutes. There's no way great good way to tell you but you thought wrong is not correct But thank you for your comments and we will direct them towards the superintendent And and we thank you for coming down here to speak. Can we have the next speaker, please? Good afternoon. Good afternoon. My name is Masala. You see I'm very happy to have this opportunity to talk to you. I came here several times ten years ago five years ago four months ago and today. Today we are here, all IFTN family united

014together with one concern. And before I go that concern, I would like to acknowledge some of the leaders, community leaders like Mikhail, could you stand up please? And IFTN Childhood School. and parent-commentee chairperson, Mr. Abdul, and Iftin Charity School interim principal, Amal Hirsi. We are here today to let you know that I was the co-founder of Iftin Charity School. I am parent of five kids who are going currently to the school. Three kids already graduated from Iftin, one of which is going to college. She's actually right here sitting there. Father, can you stand up? So for the last school year, we have had a lot of accomplishments which I bullet pointed here. I don't want to go through all of them. We spent so much effort and energy together with our staff, our parents, our

015students, and we are very proud to say IFTN is a very successful school, academically, financially, and operationally. However, the only concern we have is the board of directors who are just working for their own interests. They don't want to respond to the parents' concerns or staff concerns. And sorry, you have all the information you needed. But thank you very much for supporting us. Four months ago, you voted for our renewal channel 5.0. Thank you, money. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. President Foster, could we direct the superintendent to check into this matter? Absolutely. Absolutely. We'll direct the superintendent to check into your concerns, as with every speaker that comes to the podium to speak. We take those, yes. Good afternoon. Thank you for giving me

016the opportunity. My name is Mohamed Mactayn, M-A-C-T-A-Y-N. I'm a parent at Iftin Charter School. Of course, my son was the first student who was enrolled in Iftin Charter School. He did a great job, third year in college, hopefully going to medical school. the education and the guidance he had to get that school, he would not get anywhere else. Let's come to the issue we are raising now. Well, since the school started, I can say today we have the strongest board, the strongest board qualified to chair that school. I follow them very closely. I approve them their job greatly. I will leave my time for the rest of speakers. Thank you very much. Thank you. My name is Nancy France. Today, respected board members, I'd like to speak in support of the Ifton Charter School board

017members. Recently we had some changes at Ifton Charter School and the administration. I'd like to support our strong board members in making those changes. I have been a business manager at Ifton Charter School and also have sat on the finance committee and I know that these changes were necessary to be made. The new administration is financially savvy, communicative, open and ready to work with all stakeholders to achieve our mission to provide an academically rigorous education to all our students in a student-centered, safe, and caring learning environment. Our administration is committed to addressing the needs of the students, their families, our community, our teachers, and all community members. This change is the right direction for IFTN and will create a stronger school in the long run. Thank you for your time this evening. Thank you. Hello,

018my name is Francesca Salcedo. and I'm a mother of two children attending schools within our school district. And I would like to speak today about two events that occurred on May 26th and on June 23rd. On May 26th, during public comment, parents and teachers spoke about students at Horton Elementary School. who were exhibiting behavior or severe behavior problems. As a mother of a three-year-old with special needs, my heart goes out to these children and to their families. I was also deeply saddened to hear that families and staff at the school felt that their needs were not being, that the district was being unresponsive to their needs. I have spoken at DAC meetings about the unnecessary and excessive teacher absences. to attend professional learning communities and about how all students, especially students with special needs, like

019the students at Horton Elementary, low-income students, English learners, and English learners are being negatively affected. Teachers ought to attend these PLCs outside of school hours or during school breaks. We also need to demand that universities provide high quality teaching programs because every student deserves a highly qualified teacher. On June 23rd, the Board of Education approved SPSA's before hearing public comment. This illustrates complete disregard for parental input and further fosters a climate of fear and silence within our schools. For limited English proficient students and their families who are low income or minority, this is especially devastating because these families are already facing really severe barriers to their participation. I'm a little nervous. So going forward, I am going to be continuing to participate within our DAC and our DLAC committees. Thank you so much. Thank you,

020and I'll just remind again that with all comments we Value your comments, and they inform us so that we can better serve students So we will be directing all comments to the superintendent. Thank you. Good evening everyone My name is how I'm D I have been an employee at IFTTT for about two years now And I am the proud product of 12 years of public schooling with San Diego Unified School District I'm sorry. Ifton is an outstanding school having been with them for two years now. They've really embraced their community, their students, everyone with open arms and a positive mindset. A lot of the misunderstandings and disagreements we've come upon recently are mainly due to the fact of having a clash in Somali culture and trying to adapt to this new modern American society. I

021feel the change that we've made would be very beneficial to its students and its community. It would be a move in the right step having someone who both understands the struggles the students face coming from Somali culture and adapting to this American society and I believe it would be beneficial to both the community and the nation. Students are our future. Everything we do should be in their best interest. Every step we make should be considering the students rather than a lot of people's personal benefits and personal agendas, and that's not going to be beneficial to this nation. So I've had the same... mindset that I've had since I arrived in this country in 1999. It's to create a future not just for myself, but for my nation, not just Somalia, but also to be beneficial

022to this country that I currently live in. And I feel our students also share the same mindset as well. Yeah, that's all I have to say, so thank you. Thank you. Remind me what your, can you repeat your name again? Howell Abdi. Okay, thank you so much. Sorry, I'm a little short. Good evening board members and Superintendent Martin. My name is Asha Aiden. I will be here speaking on behalf of my mother, Sahra Gumbi. Sahra is a parent and also a community member who fought for the creation of Ifton Charter School. Currently, I have three siblings attending Ifton Charter School and we are here tonight to let you know we support Ifton board and their decision in changing leadership. We feel it being necessary to focus on the education of our children and to do

023what we need and we need a fresh start and change in the mindset along with the great leadership and I know you'll agree. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Good evening, dear respectable Board of Education, parents, children and community members. I greet you all. My name is Abdi Abdul. I'm parent of community, I'm parent committee of chairman of 15 Charter School. Excuse me. I'm asking all the parents of 15 Chartered School, first of all, who are supporting this agenda to stand up. These are actually the legitimate parents of 15 Chartered School. I myself have four kids attending 15 Chartered School from 8th grade, 6th grade, 5th grade, and 2nd grade. As a parent who cares about the well-being of my children, I choose to volunteer and get deeply involved in school activities from parent

024capacity at the beginning of 15 Chartered School to present. As a parent committee, our focus was how to create a better learning environment for our children by working with teachers, parents, administrations. Our goal is success for these schools. But unfortunately, on the other hand, our board of directors, who are supposed to put interest of our children... are not school ahead of agenda, they chose to do otherwise for the purpose of personal interest gain. As a parent committee, we attempted to resolve these issues with the board based on transparency and accountability, but board members refused to resolve the issues because of their personal agenda. The parents are tired of decision-made secrecy by the majority of board members for personal gain. We don't need board members who put their personal interest as their priority at the expense

025of our children's educational... well-being. With this respect, we as the United Parents of 15 Charter School, we say we have no confidence in the corrupt board and we urge them to resign with immediate effect. We request the Board of Education to launch an investigation for the purpose of finding the naked truth and dissolve the board based on our vote of no confidence. We want our school to be successful and back in the hands of the parents. We have no other place. We have 500 children, but at the same time, we don't need to be hijacked by the board members who just served only six months in board and tried to abuse their power for personal gain. We stand united, and united we prevail. Thank you. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Mikael Hussein. I'm

026actually president of United Tax Workers of San Diego. I represent the majority of the 15 parents, actually. They are my members, actually, of the United Tax Workers of San Diego. I think FD make easy for me, so at least to identify who's here today, so I don't have to repeat that. So as a member of the community, we try to solve this issue. And we had a first week actually, we identify leaders, I was included. And I was trying to resolve this issue. But it didn't work out because the board, they decided not to see us. And as Abdi mentioned, and Masla, I think, his paper can prevail all this. So we are not here actually to destroy our school. We love our school. And that's why we have so many things actually going on

027right now as far as our students doing well in school. So all we need actually, we want to make sure that we don't have anything against her. If whoever wants to come in, like Amal, we don't have nothing against her. But the board actually, they abuse their power and their personal gain and need to be stopped. And here we are as a front, as a community leader. We want to distinguish. You have to stand the truth. That's the reason I'm here. So thank you very much for your time. So I don't want to take much of your time. But definitely, we need to stop this. Thank you very much. Thank you. We also have Masla Youssef, Qadir Ismail. So could you come forward, please? Thank you. Good afternoon, distinguished guests, board members. Cindy Martin who

028is the superintendent. My name is Kadar Ismail. I've been living here. I came here in 1996 and then moved to Atlanta. I moved back with my kids. Two of them actually goes to Iftin Charter School and one of them goes to Crawford. Also, I am a council member, actually council chair of Iftin Charter School site. I'm the chair. I am informed parent. who knows what goes around the school. I'm here today to thank you, first of all, renewing our school five years. And the second reason I'm here today is I would like to talk about the mission of Iftin Chartered School is to empower our kids who live in the Seaford area to abide... and become a by citizen for all community including ours. And as you might know IFTN has more than 500 students

029who are majority are from our own country and the only reason we left there was a civil war and the other reason I'm here to say that I am for there was a recent change in our leadership especially the principal. I am actual support and I have a full confidence of all members of the IFTN board members. knowing that most of them are parents and there is no other person who knows more than them. Because they are parents, again, there is no, that's my personal belief, that there is no any benefit to them except to empower our school and to empower our kids. So they they become a better citizen of this country and back home. So thank you very much That's the reason that I stood up to inform you this and have a

030good day. Thank you Can we have the next speaker please? So this concludes on non agenda public comment Being that there are no more speakers Okay, can I have the following? folks come to the front. I have Alan, Bridget, May, Edith, Larissa, and Fong. Please state your names. And you will have two minutes like all of the other non-agenda public comment. I apologize. I didn't see this one slip that had the list of names. Okay. Thank you. My name is Bridget Lambert and I'm a mother of fifth graders. I'm here this evening to restore to... We might want to pause because we can't hear you. Just give folks a moment to exit. Is that the PowerPoint? Yeah, we should do the invitation. So yeah, you should come back. Sorry for the confusion. Thank you for

031having us. My name is Bridget Lamb. Excuse me, just one moment. We need to take a pause because we cannot hear you until a number of folks are able to safely exit. We have a great video you could be watching while you're waiting. That's cute. So you can go ahead and start. It's pretty quiet now. It's okay? Yes. And you'll have two minutes each. Okay. And if I run a little short, can we add it on to that? There's no extending of time, but you have two minutes each, so just, you know. Appreciate that. So my name's Bridget Lambert, and I'm here. I work with Justine Darling at the National Conflict Resolution Center, and we've been supporting the efforts at the district level with placement and appeals, student services. pilot school level supporting administrators in

032a professional learning community and also working with the students at Crawford and at Kearney on student-led efforts. Tonight I'm honored to introduce These fine students from Crawford, you'll probably recognize their faces. They were here before. At that point in time, they talked a little bit about the efforts, what they were doing, and their student-led effort on Crawford. And tonight, they're here to come back and report their recommendations. We also, we have a PowerPoint that's available, but it seems like there's been, that's not going to be an option this evening to present that, and we appreciate that and look forward to perhaps coming back another time to present that. But all of their preparation, literally months of preparation, is kind of tied to that PowerPoint, so hopefully you can follow along on the slides. Just let

033me share a point of clarification. When a board item is agendized, that is the appropriate time to give a presentation or during a student presentation which is not scheduled. So I'm glad that you all are able to speak on non-agenda public comment. And so we'll have the next speaker. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us this evening. My name is May. We are from Crawford Law Academy. Our mission is to engage... students, parents, teachers, administrators, staff, and community members in building a restorative district by creating campus cultures that are peaceful, safe, welcoming, and conductive to student achievement. Some of the core values are that it's youth-led, so students are leading the three programs because they understand the school climate and each other. It develops strong relationships between students and parents, students and teachers, community,

034and overall. It's empowering to all, so it empowers not only the person who was harmed, but it also empowers the offender because they have a chance to make things right. And student accountability. Students are still taking responsibility for their actions without being punished or shamed. So at Crawford, we've been doing these two programs, which are community building circles, which is a process of being in a circle and building trust and community, and 100% of students can participate in that. peer mediation. which is where two student facilitators facilitate communication and help two students who had a problem come to a win-win solution, and 15% of students can be a part of that. And Teen Court, which is a legal diversion program for youth first offenders who can earn a second chance and get their criminal record

035erased, and offenders must plead guilty to the crime beforehand. Teen Court is confidential and voluntary, and Teen Court is confidential and voluntary, The court is for crimes off campus and jurors need to be trained so approximately 5% of the student population can participate. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Larissa and I was talking about the community building circles. So in total we received 14 hours of training by Justine Darling, Dan Stacey, and a number of undergraduates from USD. In the total, 26 juniors were trained, but only 16 facilitated dicta-conflicting schedules. Those 16 were split into four groups of four facilitators, and each of them had two different classes. Class A would go up first on third Monday. Class B would have... second and fourth Mondays with a total of 40 circles for three

036months. 92% of the circle participants agreed that the circles were a positive experience. In fact, some of the things of the feedback they left were, when we did the circles, I really had a better day than when I don't talk about my days. It's really about sharing each other's story and trying to connect with others and trying to get along with others. We have the circle so that there won't be a lot of bullying, and it kind of helps. I like the circle because I feel that everybody needs a circle just to share our thoughts and feelings of experiences with people. We did have challenges with the community building circles. One of them was a lack of time into the school schedules. We needed more than every two weeks to build a community within the

037classes. A lack of student facilitators. Our capacity was only eight classes, but the need was of 45 classes. And a lack of mentoring and coordination. We missed four weeks of circles and debrief. And training, we don't have anybody to train next, the upcoming juniors. We as seniors, we won't be able to devote as much time facilitating circles, but we can serve as mentors, but we won't really have enough time next year to do the circles due to our senior obligations. Hello, thanks for having us today. So I'll be talking on behalf of the peer mediation, the successes and the challenges we've had. In the past year through this year, we had 65 peer mediations and 59 of them resulted in agreements, which is really great. A few of our challenges were time restrained. We only

038had lunchtime and after school, which frustrated most of the students who wanted to participate in mediation because of sports, clubs, and also free time to have during lunchtime to hang out with friends and get lunch. Another one was weak referral system from the students and teachers not referring the students because... lack of knowledge of peer mediation. So we had a weak referral system. And also adult supervision and support to the training for mediation. And last but not least, Thomas Jefferson no longer provides for us the training we need for peer mediation. And so with specific grants, the NCRC can provide us with that for the upcoming juniors. I have a few statements that were stated by the conflicting students who participated in peer mediation, which said, I came in angry and frustrated and left feeling

039better. I felt the mediators knew what they were doing, and the mediation resulted in me feeling better towards the other person. So thank you for having me here today. It's great seeing you. Good afternoon. My name is Fong, and I'll be talking to you more about teen court. Now, this year alone at Crawford, our teen court has taken 22 cases, and we have trained 122 jurors, which is a very accomplished feat. These numbers that I'm going to be giving you are pulled from sources at, say, San Diego, where we have a collaboration with our teen court along the teen court downtown. Now, from 2012 to 2013, 98% of parents who participated in teen court reported that teen court had a good effect, a positive effect on the kids' behavior. 87% of offenders who participated in

040teen court completed the sentence within the deadline, which is 90 days. So they were able to erase their criminal record and receive a second chance. Now, 95% of the juvenile offenders who went through teen court said that they had a positive teen court experience. However, 92% of juvenile offenders who went through the juvenile court said that they had a negative experience during the process. Now at Crawford, we have a few challenges because many of the students outside of Law Academy do not know about teen court. So we would like to really have a dedicated space for restorative practices in order to promote more teen court and promote more restorative. programs at our school. Now we also lack personnel to verify programs that are actually restorative and not punitive for teen court sentences. So we want

041to send offenders to programs that are very restorative and actually helping the students instead of punishing the students for what they did. We also have a limited capacity to do intakes at teen court and do follow-ups with the offenders. Now, for, say, San Diego, they had approximately... Okay, so I'll wrap it up. So if we could get a little dedicated finance through our teen court, we could take up to hundreds of cases for teen court, which they have at downtown. Thank you. Can I just say happy birthday? Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. So I'm up here to just give the overall recommendations that we feel would really benefit the programs that we're trying to conduct in the district. So my first recommendation, our first recommendation is to have a dedicated area for restorative practices. This

042dedicated area is a place where students and staff can have access to these programs and could come to reach out to us if they see a need for our programs. This will also help peer mediation have a set location for their mediations and it will allow classes that maybe don't have enough room to conduct restorative circles in their classroom, they could come to this dedicated area to conduct those circles. Our second recommendation is that there be a restorative club in each pilot school that will be conducting restorative practices. The club would be in charge of the dedicated area and would help advertise restorative practices and would also run the restorative programs. And the executive members, such as the president and vice president, would be part of a monthly meeting with the student senate, which is

043a program that we'd like to set up. And our biggest recommendation is to leverage the existing interest and resources of restorative practice. This meaning that we recommend having people such as Megan Boltoner and Lori Williams, who is here, that would help restorative practice. They've helped us. These people have helped restorative practices. also had a job at the same time. So having them in a position such as campus coordinator where they can support these programs directly and in addition have a campus coordinator, have a district director overseeing everything that is related to restorative practice and the district director would be the go-to person that the campus coordinator may go to if they have any issues. And lastly, unfortunately you didn't get to see our little video that we made about restorative practice, but I'd just like

044to give a big shout out to our video producers from Kearney High School that is in the audience, Memo Ramirez and Michael Karina. So I'd just like to end on that note. Thank you. Thank you. You all have done an awesome, awesome job. And I really like the collaboration between different school sites. you know she was sharing best practices and information on I'm also going to just take this privilege just to say that you know I apologize that whoever was advising you wasn't fully aware of the process so that you could get on the agenda and have the full time that you absolutely deserve. Because I understand a little bird told me that you put in lots of hours for a very professional presentation. And so let's look to the future and actually agendize that

045so we can give it the full respect and honor that it deserves. Happy birthday and I look forward to you coming back. And then also, I'm just gonna say that San Diego Unified is very committed to restorative practice and becoming a restorative district. And I think that, yes, absolutely. And there is no way that we are going to turn back. In fact, if you check the LCAP, it is identified as one of our major initiatives and focuses in the 2015-16 year. So if you look under the LCAP of Goal 4F, if you remember that, go for F, right? Go for F on page 13. F is an A, okay? Just get that straight in this case. Then you'll notice that we are extremely committed to restorative practice. in this district and once again I just

046want to thank you because we do have unwavering support for restorative practice. I think that you remember that some of us have visited your programs, even put on a separate workshop about the power of a restorative district and that is a deep commitment to what needs to happen in the future and really look forward to it. YOU SPREADING THOSE BEST PRACTICES ACROSS THE DISTRICT WITH THE LEADERSHIP. OKAY, SO THANK YOU, AND HAPPY BIRTHDAY AGAIN. OKAY, SO I BELIEVE IT'S SAFE TO SAY THAT THIS ACTUALLY CONCLUDES NON-AGENDA PUBLIC COMMENT. OKAY, CAN WE 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, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. You may be seated.

047Okay, so this completes on agenda public comments if there are any that are interested in speaking on a future board item Please make sure that you complete a speaker's form that's at one of the two exits here and then bring it forward to our board officer Cheryl Ward and seeing that all board members are present. I would ask to adopt the agenda. I'd like to move that we adopt the agenda with moving item E3 to the front. Do I have a second? Wonderful. Can we please vote? Okay. So are there any reportable actions taken in closed session to report out? Right after we hear what's reported out. Yes. Okay. Not other than personnel appointments, which Superintendent Martin will address later. Okay. Perfect. Okay. Okay. So E3. Okay. So we're going to have the informational update

048of the Office of Youth Advocacy. And Superintendent Martin, would you like to give the introductions? Thank you, President Foster. Dr. Vernon Moore is going to be joining us for this presentation as we give our update for the Office of Youth Advocacy. And what we're very clear on back in March when we launched this Office of Youth Advocacy and brought together many key initiatives that this district and this community has been desiring for years. We launched the work, we brought Dr. Vernon Moore in and have begun to create the plans, the actions and the services that work across all areas that involve student and youth advocacy that are so critically important to the student's success. When we talk about a district that's about serving our broad goals, that this does not happen without executive level leadership.

049work with our community and work across within the school district and outside of the school district. And when we developed our LCAP, some key messages around our LCAP around Vision 2020, we talk about closing the achievement gap. And closing the achievement gap with high expectations for all doesn't happen without a lens on equity and without the right supports around youth advocacy. some key areas that we've highlighted in our LCAP is we look at the key metrics that we need to compare year over year, student outcomes, and we've identified those in our LCAP. We looked at in order to close the achievement gap with high expectations for all, some of the key initiatives that happen around our restorative practices, around trauma-informed schools, and Dr. Moore is going to be presenting each of the areas that his

050division is going to support systemically and systematically across the district. We know that when you've been waiting for a long time, for something to happen and it feels like it hasn't happened. There's impatience, there's urgency, there's fear, there's disappointment, there's worry that it won't happen, that we won't deliver. And we have so many stakeholders, internal and external, who have been waiting and want to see this come to fruition. And so as Dr. Moore began his work last spring, has a very clear vision. That vision comes from... watching our students, listening to our stakeholders, listening to our advisory groups, listening to stakeholders internal and external and develop the plans moving forward. And so tonight's presentation is meant to bring that all together. When I announced the Office of Youth Advocacy back in March, it was a

051broad idea. It was a concept that we had many different departments working on many great things for students, but the work was not happening systemically. It was not happening systematically. It was good work in pockets. But I've talked... very often about in order to be a district that can promise and deliver on the promise for equity, we need systemic approaches to it. And it can't just be pockets of excellence and hoping that things happen. And things happen right for students doesn't just happen because of hope. It happens with strategic efforts. It happens with building capacity. It happens with building the infrastructures that allow something to work. When we have a clear moral imperative, We want to, from our seats as elected officials, as superintendents with formal authority and a large budget that we get to

052control, we want to mandate. And we want to make it happen now. But what we know is you can't mandate what matters. You don't mandate the things that matter. You create systems and support and infrastructure that allows every single individual serving in our schools and in our community to be able to become the equity warriors, to be able to have the equity lens that's needed for our students so that at each and every school, we can keep the promise that we've made to our students in our LCAP, the promise that we've made to our community in Vision 2020. That promise is about unlocking the genius. inside every student and making sure that we have conditions where every student is able to connect to their strengths that will lead to real opportunities for them to be

053contributing members of their community. We'll keep that promise through the efforts that Dr. Moore was going to highlight tonight. We also have a promise that we've made in the way in which we go about our work. We go about our work... in community. We believe that we people come together, they decide what they want, they decide why they want it, and then they get to action. And we hold each other mutually accountable and responsible for those actions, and we contribute in ways that change our community. And we change our community by using our community. And our community is broad and large and has a huge heart and passion for what we want to deliver on to our students. And the third commitment that we made in our LCAP, in our bigger, broader vision, is that

054we know that it's not just our words that talk about justice, it's the actions that serve the social justice mission of a public education system. We are committed to confronting racism, inequality, bigotry, sexism. We are committed to interrupting the inequalities that live inside our system and live outside of our system. These inequalities severely limit the life outcomes for our students. And it is our job as public stores, as public educators, to interrupt and to support what will happen to change life outcomes for our students so that they're more equitable. And our students leave our system knowing that they've received the education to be able to be the ones who are the social agents for change in their communities and they know how to confront the biases and the things that limit outcomes. and we build

055the competencies and the capacities of our employees and of our students to be agents for change in their community. The Office of Youth Advocacy is the central office that brings together several different efforts with our stakeholder groups, with our advisory groups, and with... Each area that Dr. Moore will present tonight, you will see how we're bringing all of those efforts together to deliver on the hope and the promise of public education, not just in San Diego, but in our state and in our nation. So with that, this office was developed in the spring, has gotten more clear, more concrete, more support, and there's very clear tie-in to what Dr. Moore presents. that when you analyze our LCAP and you look at specific things called out in our LCAP, it's hard to see the detail behind

056it, and you will hear more detail in what Dr. Moore presents tonight. But his work is called out in our LCAP, whether it's our LGBTQ youth in our LCAP, whether it's our trauma-informed care, our restorative justices, our approach to how we use school policing to support students. This is the work of Dr. Moore and you can see he's surrounded by a team that he's going to have present with him. And given that your office is not even a year old, we are excited to hear your update as you are developing plans to launch a very strong school year in September. And we're so happy to have you join us here tonight. Thank you very, very much. And I'm thrilled to have this opportunity to present on some very, very important work, some work that we've

057been very diligently planning for, and some work that really addresses and tackles some of the dire... complexities of our education system and our work in public education. This work and the Office of Youth Advocacy is really a forward-looking, innovative, really visionary effort to bring forward a team around these complex ideas. I certainly hope to give a great overview. I think as I progress through this presentation, you will find it very easy to see that I could do an entire board presentation on any one of the topics that I'm presenting and speaking about tonight. This is really billed as an overview of some of the work that the Office of Youth Advocacy is doing. And I also want to add that one of the pieces of this work is reaching out to community members and stakeholders.

058And we know that... Sitting in a room here at the Ed Center, we cannot tackle these complex issues that face our students and they come to school with every day. It cannot just be some administrators here that come up with overall plans that address the complex needs of our students. And so you'll see that community engagement. working with our partners, forging more partnerships with our stakeholders is really at the key of our work. I mean, one of our main things is collaboration and collaboration across our district and the offices within our district and collaboration with our community members. So I absolutely hope that comes across in our presentation. I do have some folks that will be presenting with me and I want to make sure that they are introduced and I will introduce them as

059they come up to present because they do have specific pieces of this presentation. Just again, before I begin, the pictures that you see on the initial slide here were put there obviously purposely. One is our Laurels for Leaders event where we honor the work of our ASB leaders. And the reason why that's on the youth advocacy slide is because the Office of Race and Human Relations and other entities work directly with our ASB leaders. And that is one of the, you know, that's our democratic process for identifying our student leaders and student voice. You'll see though that we also want to incorporate other voices beyond our ASB in our work. The next picture is a restorative conference at Crawford. You'll see President Foster there with some of the Crawford folks and Linda K. Williams, who

060was just up. She's also featured there. And restorative work will continue, as was mentioned earlier in the presentation, and the Office of Youth Advocacy will be picking up that work. And then lastly, that last picture is of the National Equity Project, and Superintendent Martin presented on that last board meeting what the sessions were about. And the cultural proficiency pieces we'll be speaking to as well in this presentation. I'd like to call your attention to our mission in the Office of Youth Advocacy. Really, the main... The first bullet is probably the one that you're going to hear consistently throughout the presentation is maintaining these dynamic, empowering student-centered environments where all our students can thrive. In order to do that, of course, our environments need to be safe, our educators need to be culturally proficient, and we

061need to ensure that our students are getting the highest quality educational experience. The other topics really speak to, or the other bullet points, I should say, really speak to ensuring that our students have multiple opportunities and pathways to be successful. That is something that we really have to challenge ourselves in our belief systems. there isn't just one way to demonstrate success and to demonstrate proficiency. Our superintendent speaks very often about multiple indicators of success and that there's not, our students are not just a test score. And the Office of Advocacy really reiterates and builds upon that because there are so many ways that we need to really think about our students being successful and demonstrating success in voice. Obviously, I had mentioned cultural proficiency. I've also mentioned creating meaningful dialogue. That's our fourth bullet involving

062our stakeholders within our district and our external stakeholders. Ensuring that we have multiple opportunities for our students to have voice. and providing a myriad of ways for our students to develop and demonstrate agency. We spoke about our foundational documents and Obviously we are very keyed into our Vision 2020 plan. There are two points in the indicators of quality school in Vision 2020 that really align with the Office of Youth Advocacy. The first being closing the achievement gap with high expectations for all. That's exactly what the youth advocacy is all about, is ensuring, again, ensuring student success and recognizing that we've got to create multiple pathways for that success. Also, another indicator, indicator eight, is supportive environments that value diversity in the service of all students. And that idea of diversity is sometimes... comes down as

063we're only talking about race and ethnicity. But diversity has a much, much broader definition that the Youth Advocacy Office will continue to push on that the definition includes our lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning students. Our definition of diversity includes gender issues. Our definition of diversity includes students that come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, students that speak different languages other than English. Our definition of diversity is very broad, so when we think about equity and we think about having supportive environments that value diversity, we've really got to expand that and really think about Are we providing supports and services for students that misbehave? For students that have received a suspension? For students that are coming into our schools from incarceration, from juvenile court and community schools? The idea of equity and the idea of advocacy are

064extraordinarily important for our work and we look forward to continuing to provide those that advocacy and that info and those trainings and that information for educators. With regards to the LCAP, the LCAP indicates that we're looking for multiple measures of data, that we're looking at cultural proficiency. There's, for example, it was mentioned earlier, goal 4.4 that we're going to provide more emphasis for restorative practices. That's in our LCAP. We're going to plan and develop training and support related to safe schools and safe spaces specifically designed for our diverse students, specifically our LGBTQ students. We're going to develop an ethnic studies course that meets the A through G history requirement. These are items exactly lifted from our LCAP document and these are aligned to the work of the Office of Youth Advocacy. Of course, this work

065does not exist in a vacuum. This is actually the culmination of an extraordinary effort. and many, many years of... board resolutions and board documents and I haven't even captured all of them. In fact, this is not at all an exhaustive list, but if you go back to October 2010, there was a resolution directing district leadership to devise a training plan to ensure that all of our educators were aware of issues that our LGBTQ students face. The Office of Youth Advocacy will be taking up that charge and I will be speaking to that in just a few moments. But there's a ton of resolutions and board actions that have really shaped and focused the work of this group and will continue to focus. I think you'll see as our presentation continues that we have looked at

066these resolutions and we want to ensure that we are honoring the direction that the board has provided. The other piece of the Office of Youth Advocacy I think is extraordinarily important to note is that we work with a lot of district teams. Actually, there's a org chart that will be coming up later on as part of our board meeting today. And you'll see that the Office of Youth Advocacy has moved, and I'm not going to steal any thunder from the superintendent, but it's moved into the instructional branch and into the heart of the organization. And that was purposeful. I'm sure our superintendent will elaborate on that, but what I want to reiterate and what I had a meeting with the team this morning in preparation for tonight's presentation, but these structures that you see here,

067I think I said the exact words, we're not staying in our lane. And the reason I said that was, you know, there were questions about, well, you know, isn't that going to be part of leadership and learning or doesn't that involve the secondary school's office or, you know, is that part of IT and the innovation office? Youth advocacy is going to be part of all of these offices and part of all of what we do. It's, again, a forward-looking, innovative effort to ensure that the complexities that our students bring to our schools are addressed in a systemic and systematic manner. So the teams that you see listed here again are not exhaustive teams. They're just some of the group of the things that the Office of Youth Advocacy will be doing. We'll be working with

068leadership and learning. We'll be working with secondary schools, school police, the innovation office, student services. All of these offices will reflect that work. And I want to emphasize And this is important that the Office of Youth Advocacy is not necessarily the keeper or the equity police. We're the folks who I would rather us be considered the catalyst or the folks who are... constantly reminding us of our charges. But the idea of youth advocacy and equity, it resides in all offices in our district. And the Office of Youth Advocacy is really the office that's going to ensure that that's at the forefront. Because this is a board presentation and that... I couldn't be up here all night. I did narrow our topics down to seven today, and I could have had 70, but these are some

069major, major points that the Office of Youth Advocacy has been involved in, and these are things that we have supported. And we'll continue to support. As Superintendent Martin indicated, we've been charged with coming together right around March in the spring of 2015. But there were lots of pieces of this work already in play. when I served as the Executive Director of Student Services, a lot of these pieces we had been working on. And so the Office of Youth Advocacy has allowed us really to galvanize around these efforts. So some of these things I will be presenting on today has been ongoing work that our district has been doing that youth advocacy will continue to carry on. They are listed there, cultural proficiency, LGBTQ trainings and supports, restorative practices, ethnic studies, the Pathways Project, substance use

070intervention, and then the last piece is kind of all pulled together regarding our school police diversion attendance challenge and mentoring. So I'd like to begin by... with our cultural proficiency work and I'd like to bring up our program manager over the Office of Race, Human Relations and Advocacy, Mr. Ajine Shahid. Mr. Shahid's going to share with you our refocusing, we had discussed this term, our emphasizing of the Department of Race, Human Relations, and Advocacy and how that work is aligning to some of our larger work in our district. But I want to speak just before he speaks on our work with the National Equity Project. And again, the superintendent presented that work in the sessions that we had earlier at a board meeting earlier this month. But the National Equity Project has charged us with

071really interrupting when we see inequity. And in order to do that, the strategies that we've been given and are working on are not a shame and blame strategy, but a strategy of continuing the dialogue. It really aligns with the work of restorative practices, which is creating an environment where collaboration and conversation and dialogue can take place. That's the work and the charge that happened in that equity institute. We were discussing some very tough topics. I heard Mr. McCray in the opening talk about things like white privilege and cultural inequity and things like that. Those are difficult topics to discuss and when there's a shame and blame rhetoric going on, then folks tend to shut down and get defensive and don't want to continue on with the dialogue. Well, our charge and the work that Ajin

072Shaheed has been dedicated to is continuing that dialogue around these topics. So without that, I wanted to indicate that that work is ongoing and it's really culture changing work that we're doing in the National Equity Project. And I wanted just to say that, but I want to turn it over to Ajin so that he can talk about the re-emphasis of the work in the Office of Race, Human Relations and Advocacy. By context, this is a great day for me. I've been in the district for about 30 years, and I've watched the collective effort of all of us to get to a labor. A labor of love with a harvest like we're about to have now. And I'm calling it a harvest. I really have to say to you by context, I was once asked by

073past superintendent Alan Berson to do a report on race and human relations. And because I felt so all by myself at that time and era, I gave 64 exhibits. They had a satchel, each board member. And after that, it was declared that no one would ever do that again. But Sue Braun did read it twice. I tested her, as she was wont to do. But that was a lot. So I'm happy now to have this scaled-down presentation because I'm working with everybody now, and this feels really, really, really good. So the equity project is important, and I do want to recognize some other partnerships that have assisted racial relations and advocacy, and that has been the Legal Aid Society, that has been the Anti-Defamation League. 14-year relationship. The SCALI, USD Ethnic Studies Department, the Horn

074of Africa for Cultural and Linguistic Services on East African Refugees, State Department of International Relations, Overcoming Gangs and Beyond. The Martin Luther King All People's Breakfast has worked with us. The San Diego Padres, one of our strongest supporters for our department. The Council on Islamic Relations, the Tarek Khamisa Foundation, and the San Diego County District Attorney's Office has really assisted us. We could not have done what we've done. And over the years, with staffs drinking and being asked to do more and more, as we all have been, we've needed that community help. But the National Equity Project does bring that equity lens. It does look at racial bias and oppression on how it impacts educational experiences. It looks at racialized outcomes. I just love the language. You don't have to say you're a racist. racialized

075outcomes will cause us to investigate a little differently. How we enroll people to do that and then finally our work to support to be an equity leader, equity warrior, equity leader, interchangeable. Racial relations and advocacy once was called the conscience of the district by Superintendent Tom Pezon. I'd like to now bequeath that to youth advocacy that we're in the heart of the district. But in the heart is the conscience. And if you study brain research, there's considerable evidence that the heart works just like the brain. It has cognition, it has awareness, and will be a part of that conscience. We had been under court mandate the Carlin case, but I've often said that we're on our own volition. We're on our own volition now beyond some mandate from a court or someone. Of course, we

076welcome the lens, but what are we going to do on our own volition? And I feel like we're in that day. So the district assistance that we have offered in summary has been conflict resolution. team building and mediation and more recently dismantling racism and collusion, how we collude. So we had a chance to meet with our superintendent and chief of staff and they met very purposely with us on the day and just listened to us and that was an additional connection. And then thereafter we met with the national equity team and again our superintendent and chief of staff. joined us that i mean we had a full two hours who gets that these days two hours uh with that kind of group uh just problem solving and listening and and getting to next steps so

077it's kind of cute what i'm going to say cindy got up with her pencil in hand and circled we had done a three-day retreat and we i left purposely all the stuff on the wall so they could see what we were doing okay and she got up and circled cultural proficiency restorative practice, LGBT, and Latino and African American males initiative. And we said, well, wow, that's where we are too. So we're all on the same page. Now, of course, there are other services that we have traditionally offered. They will have to be scaled down. Upon request, we'll do some of that. But that really is our focus. And so the end of this goes that the growing cultural proficiency that looks at beliefs, values, and assumptions for school sites and departments. And those are to

078look at assessing cultural knowledge. Valuing diversity, managing the dynamics of difference, adapting to diversity, and institutionalizing cultural knowledge. We then look at, more recently, we have had the board adoption of cultural proficiency standards. That also was a labor. At one time, we were ready to just jump right into it about two years ago. And I'll never forget the day that Cindy Martin said, I'm new here. I know you guys are all excited, but I need to learn about this. And so that invitation was to get other people to learn about it, too. So actually, we have much, much more buy-in than just the growth that it did emanate from the Latino Advisory Council. Now it's passed through many, many, many lenses and much, much, much more collaboration. So that resolution was to signify a commitment

079to engage in the complexities of providing services to diverse populations, to establish a framework to do so, and the outcome and the sustaining of that is the Unified Through Diversity Committee, and we will be meeting in an implementation posture to further those goals. The last issues that I will share with you is that we are going to join the restorative practice effort. Our team has been trained by many, many, many trainers throughout the nation. We're quite an interesting team and our partners, and we're going to assist in that restorative practice effort, bringing that expertise. The LGBTQ, we will assist in providing training. Our partner is GLSEN. But beyond listen, you know, the LGBT community is not a single story. It's a bundle of many, many, many cultures. And we will work with the length and

080breadth of those cultures to make sure that we got the right lens on that. And then, of course, the Council of Great City Schools asked us to look at the African American Latino Males of Color Pledge. And that is in part to revitalize the pupil advocate program. which some believe is the district's historical single most dedicated effort to looking at a marginalized group of students has been that program. We have been invited by Superintendent and Chief of Staff and others to consider joining the teams that visit the schools, the superintendent teams, where we prospectively will have a counselor and an advocate. look at, even by policy, diversity and equity outcomes. And then last, the Unified Through Diversity Committee. It engages the services of one of its committee members, Dr. John Robert Brown. Some of you

081know the name. He was a member of our district. He ran the County Office of Education for 22 years. He travels throughout the country, and he has a book called Walking the Equity Talk, a Guide for Culturally Courageous Leadership in School Communities. What we're asking him to do to assist us in my final piece here is to assist us. Our National Action Project asked us to look at culturally hegemony. Hegemony is it? Not hegemony, hegemony, I was told. And to look at the social conditions where particular racial, cultural, or socioeconomic classes have been ardent influences and dominance over all others. which is against the idea of cultural democracy. So my final statement is, what a great day. Research says that daring superintendents and boards who have dared to have coaches have had far greater outcomes

082when they've had that collaboration. So coaches from the Equity Project, coaches from John Brown, and other coaches, why we can't help but win. Thank you. Again, moving on to our next topic, I want to reiterate that just as Ajin Shahid pointed out, he could have done a full board presentation with 64 exhibits on that. And we actually reduced him down to about six minutes. So thank you for that, Ajin. This could also be its own topic and board presentation and quite honestly I think that it will be in the future as we go down the line with our LGBTQ training and supports. It absolutely deserves and requires the attention of a full board presentation. I look forward to doing that. I will be giving some highlights of some of our work that we will be

083engaging in. And I want to reiterate again that we're at the beginnings of this. Our superintendent mentioned that there has been a lot of waiting and there has been a lot of frustration around perhaps some hesitation or what it might be perceived as hesitation around getting to work on these policies and some actions. And I think that's the idea that the Office of Youth Advocacy is a catalyst. I think that that's where that really comes into play because we look forward to leading the charge on this, but the work of LGBTQ training and supports resides in many offices throughout our district. The first bullet point indicates that there has been an extensive revision to our bullying and intimidation policy. And that revision includes a robust way to ensure that our employees, all of our employees,

084are trained the same way that we require our employees to have sexual harassment training and blood-borne pathogens training and mandated reporting training. We are also going to devise a way that we can electronically deliver training regarding our bullying and intimidation policy and ensure that our employees sign in and make sure that they've taken that training. The key piece to this is that our students have to be safe. And there's legislation, including AB 9 and California CESS law, that mandates that if our employees see a bullying... or see students or get reports of bullying, that there's protocols that we have to follow. And that's what the policy indicates is those protocols that need to be followed and the reporting and the follow through, not just at our school sites, but also at our district office. The

085Office of Quality Assurance. is very involved in the revision and is very involved in the collection of the reports and protocols on this particular policy. In addition to this, our district website is undergoing an extensive reboot and update, and it will include not only a mechanism to report bullying to a centralized office that will then follow up and report back to school sites, but also include extensive resources for interested parties, parents, students, and community members. that look to follow up on resources that when students are facing issues, where can they go, what kind of community responses can they look for. So the bullying and intimidation policy and our revisions of that are very, very important piece of what we're doing. The second bullet. is a training for all district employees. And I have to really,

086I want to make sure I'm very clear about this because there have been lots of discussion about this. This training is if you even look back to that 2010 resolution, so that's about five years ago, was an effort to ensure that all of our employees are aware of our responsibilities, legal but also our professional responsibilities to keep our students safe and create these environments that our students can thrive. So this initial LGBTQ training for our employees is really to ensure that the employees have the knowledge of our legal mandates. California Assembly Bill 9, Seth's Law. The California Senate Bill 48, the Fair Education Act. California Assembly Bill 1226, Pupil Rights Regarding Gender Identity. These are recent measures, but it's extraordinarily important that all of our employees understand the obligations under those. There's also the idea

087that we need to change the culture and ensure that our schools are inclusive environments. And so the LGBTQ training that I'll be speaking about and that youth advocacy will be leading is really a two-pronged approach. The first approach is ensuring that we cover some of the basics, including the laws and some resources in our communities. The second piece is part of a larger ongoing effort to change the culture in our schools. to be more inclusive. And so I'm gonna flip to our next slide then flip back. This is a conceptual draft of of how this work ties into a larger effort. You'll see at the top is the Office of Youth Advocacy, again, as the catalyst. But our work goes through the instructional cabinet of which I'm a member of, and again, the idea is

088that all of us are youth advocates throughout the organization. Really with a lot of feedback and guidance from our Safe Schools Task Force. There'll be some specific activities that I'll speak on in a moment regarding doing a climate survey. We have an initiative to do some Out for Safe Schools badges and support the GSAs and all of our secondary schools. And then there's some school site professional development. And that's really that initial LGBTQ training that we'll be doing to make sure that the laws are covered, the bullying intimidation policy is covered, and that folks know what resources are available for our students. We also are looking to develop a new employee training protocol where our new employees are trained and as they come to our district because we can do a school site training but

089then later on in the year when a new employee is hired we need to ensure that that employee gets the same training that occurred at the school site. So we'll be developing that. The work will go through our area superintendents and our principals. And it is again supported by our principal institutes, the learning cycles that have been presented and talked about before, and again our work with the National Equity Project in being agents of change that interrupt inequities. This idea, it says draft on it because there are some more pieces that need to be developed and the arrows up and down indicate that this is not a top-down effort with the Office of Youth Advocacy mandating some trainings. These trainings will be receiving feedback. We can be revising trainings. We can do... A number of

090things as we progress along, it's to indicate that there will be input and feedback as we go. The next slide, and again I'll be circling back to the list, indicates a timeline for some immediate actions. Next month, this is the end of July, so next month, principals and district leaders will be presented with the LGBTQ training and protocols and platform. And we will be identifying and organizing our district support personnel. I'll speak about that in a moment. Step two in September, we'll be beginning our initial site trainings and we'll also be implementing our survey administration, which I will speak to in a moment. And then by October, we want to have developed our new employee training module so that that can begin to take place. And really, really looking at that deeper culture changing work

091so that those those that work can continue because we know that a single training on LGBTQ issues is not going to be the lever that makes our schools more inclusive and environments where all our students can thrive. This is something that we're going to have to continue throughout. So as I circle back to our list here. The next item is, and I mentioned this in step two, was a survey administration. We do a lot. We do do surveys. We do a California Healthy Kids Survey, a Risky Behavior Survey, and a number of other surveys. But this GLSEN school climate survey that we will be rolling out to our secondary schools is important. indicator, it's a 54-item survey that really, really speaks to not just issues and concerns from our LGBTQ community, but also issues around

092overall equity and as Mr. Shahid indicated, racialized outcomes and student perceptions of racism and such. So it's A survey that has been used throughout the nation. There is a national survey and a local version of it. We will be using the local version to assess our secondary school students and get some information so that we can better plan and... and identify where those supports can go, where we see high incidences of bullying or high incidences of folks saying that they're seeing very negative and derogatory things said. But the survey is an important feature of our work because it will give us that baseline information. The support personnel required to really focus on LGBTQ training and supports is something that I personally take near and dear. You heard Mr. Shahid indicate that there was a time

093when there were people advocates that were identified for work specifically with African American males. That was in the late 90s, or excuse me, in the early 90s, and a previous superintendent. Dr. Bertha Pendleton, who interestingly enough I had the opportunity to speak with over the weekend, had a family reunion, just came back actually in Las Vegas. And Dr. Pendleton is not a family member of mine, but my aunt who lives in Las Vegas and coordinated the reunion happens to be Dr. Pendleton's hairdresser. And so she invited her to the dinner that we had on Saturday night and I was thrilled to see her and you know I had the opportunity to to talk with her about that the people advocacy that that she and Dr. Paysant before her had initiated and she was very She

094was very pleased to know that three of the advocates that she had hired were still in our district. Mr. Ajine Shahid being one of them, he was hired as a pupil advocate. So the notion that we need support, targeted specific support, is not new to our district. We will be organizing and looking as the Office of Youth Advocacy is formalized tonight in our organization. We will be looking at our resources to see exactly what positions and personnel we can dedicate to this effort. The other piece of the training, and you heard me mention this earlier, is the Fair Education Act, incorporating the contribution and study of all in the curricula, including men and women, the LGBTQ community, ethnic and cultural groups, and persons with disabilities. This is our collaborative work with leadership and learning, and

095our collaborative work with our instructional office and curriculum. Again, our focus is to ensure that our teachers and educational leaders have the resources necessary to incorporate the work in our history and our English language arts classes, but also throughout our curriculum. The Fair Education Act... is a great starting point, but obviously the best practice is to ensure that the contributions of all are represented throughout our curriculum. The Out for Safe Schools badges, and there's an example of one on the PowerPoint at the top, it's the top graphic, is an effort that we will be kicking off in alignment with the Safe School, with October being Safe Schools Month. And there will be trainings for staff to receive the badge. And what it does is it identifies staff at our schools as safe members for students

096and others to go to to discuss these issues. And in order for staff to get the badge and wear it, they'll attend a training. On the badge, you see the front of it, but on the back of it, there will be listed resources that are local to our community for folks to, as folks come and meet with the staff wearing the badge, they can offer the concerned listening ear, but they can also refer students to appropriate resources. And our support for school GSAs, we in our Office of Youth Advocacy, specifically through our Race Human Relations Department, are going to look to ensure that GSAs exist on all of our secondary schools. One of our charges is to make sure that students have multiple opportunities to... to be leaders. And the GSA, the Gay Straight Alliance,

097and groups like that are, again, other opportunities outside of the elected ASB where our students can be leaders. And finally, our Safe Schools Task Force meetings. They were quarterly, I think, in previous iterations. And right now we've got six Safe Schools Task Force meetings listed to occur once every other month to ensure that we are reporting out on these actions and that we... it's an opportunity to receive that community input and the ongoing dialogue as we go through this effort to, again, the bottom line is ensure safety and ensure that we create inclusive environments for our students to thrive. As I said at the top of this, community engagement is a huge piece of what we do, and so the Safe Schools Task Force meetings are one mechanism that we are looking forward to to

098continue that community engagement. I'm gonna jump. Dr. Moore, can I just ask you one quick question? With the out for Safe School badges, does that include the signage and 1-800 line and posters as well? Is that separate? Well, there was a separate effort in previous years, a Safe Spaces effort that was sponsored by GLSEN and some trainings with posters and stickers that folks put up. in their rooms. This is a corresponding effort to those safe spaces. Okay. And we are doing that as well? Yeah, we're continuing with the safe spaces and... And so the Safe Schools badges, I just want to say, is corresponding. It's a different effort, but it corresponds with creating Safe Spaces. But it's more of a personalized way to identify staff members. Let me just jump ahead. This is a our

099next topic is important because you heard the students at in the opening speak about the restorative practices specifically our students at Crawford and joining me at the dais is our program manager for our placement and appeal and SARB office Miss Felicia Singleton and this This is some very, very important work that I think we have indicated we will, we've clearly indicated that we will be continuing. Before Ms. Singleton speaks, I want to ensure that I have an opportunity to acknowledge the work of Dr. Joe Fulcher, who was really a champion for this work and introducing it to our district. This time last year, actually, Dr. Fulcher gave a presentation on becoming a restorative district and really outlined... the pieces that have put in play where we are today. So I'm happy to bring Ms. Singleton

100up to the dais and have her speak because she has really been directly involved in the work in our district. Thank you, Dr. Moore. I thought maybe you read my notes. I was going to open up again as well with thanking Dr. Fulcher and Superintendent Martin and Ashley, the board, for believing in the important work that we've been doing in regards to restorative justice with our pilot schools. They've really championed the movement. But more than just our pilot schools, I want to pause to just acknowledge even our administrators, our teachers, our school counselors, school police and community members, and our partners such as NCRC for just the collective work that we all have done. So tonight we know that the positive impact of restorative practices has been well documented and we've heard about the many

101benefits of implementing restorative measures in our schools to build community, civic engagement, and relationships as well as an alternative to exclusionary practices such as suspensions and expulsions. So as Vernon said this time last year almost to the date, it was July 29th last year. This board moved in a very visionary direction and that was to abolish zero tolerance as we knew it in our district. And we decided, or the board approved, that we would become a restorative district. Well, at that time, I was in my position for just a couple of months and I was pretty naive on what that looked like. I just thought, okay, we're a restorative district and here we go. uh... however and that was not the case at this work is a shift in how we did business armor how

102educators did business in the past so we had to really look at what we were doing and figure out a way that we could become a resort of district honor our California Education Code, support our schools and our teachers who are on the front lines doing the work, and implement this work. So this is just a quick snapshot of the things that have taken place this year. We've done some adult trainings with our pilot schools, and those pilot schools are Crawford, Hoover, Lincoln, San Diego High, Madison, Morris, CPMA Middle, and Wilson. They received one day of restorative circle training just so we could introduce what circles were like for those schools. We've also done some additional training with those schools and what that was was really teaching those schools how to do a conference because

103a circle really builds community but a conference is a way for schools to address harm that may have been caused. We also did counselor circle training where a large number of our school counselors and mental health staff participated in an experiential one-day training so that they can become more knowledge of the practical way that we could implement restorative practices. And then our NCRC restorative coordinator, Justine Darling, worked closely with San Diego State to create a restorative practices certificate program through San Diego State University's College of Extended Studies. So that is happening this summer and we do have some of our school personnel taking those trainings so that they can become certified in restorative practices. Aside from the adults, we also focused on our students in a large capacity. That was done at Crawford with the

104student community building circle training and really focusing on those students, teaching them how to do circles and how to do conferences and spending really the first semester really ensuring that they understood that work and then allowing them an opportunity in the spring semester. to train adults. So as it was mentioned, we had a conference at USD where those students really shared their work in team court, peer mediation, conferences and circles, and then in the afternoon we as adults were able to participate in that work. Some of the action items that came out of our restorative journey were monthly collaboration meetings. So those pilot schools that self-selected to take this restorative work on, we met monthly to just hear stories, to... figure out as a team how we can help each other with challenges that may

105be coming up on the campuses. We also did some restorative community presentations in District E and the Point Loma cluster, as well as our school police office. We did an informational session with the entire school police department. Let's see. And we also have continued to work with Crawford. We were able to create a restorative district video, which we are very proud of, with the assistance of Cheryl Hiblin put us in connection with the students at Kearney DMD. And together we put together a really, really powerful and valuable video on the work that we've done thus far with restorative practices. We have a restorative website. We have a restorative website that has some information on the restorative hub as well as other resources in connection with our partners with NCRC. And then we've created some restorative

106documents. One thing that we did not foresee is how we were going to honor the California Air Code in relation to some infractions as well as incorporate restorative work. So we traded some documents and merged them into our practices and placement and appeal office. In placement and appeal, we were able to incorporate conferences for some of our pilot schools. So when there was an opportunity to give a restorative conference in lieu of proceeding to a hearing, we were able to do that work. And while those numbers are not dynamic, we were able to provide that direct service with current staff. And that was myself, Justine Darling. and Mariana from Race and Human Relations. So we are talking countless hours of pre-conferences and post-conferences and the actual conference where participants range between 7 and 18 people

107at that conference. But we were able to really do some good work, create action plans at the end of those conferences that hold students accountable. Because in order to do a restorative conference... A, the person who caused harm has to be able to accept responsibility for their actions. And when they are there, then we can move forward into restoring that harm, but then holding them accountable with an action plan to provide support. Our feedback, just to give you a quick snapshot, 100% of the participants felt that the process helped them feel more connected and valuable to their school community. 100% of the participants felt that the process helped bring closure to the situation. And 100% of the participants were satisfied with the way the discipline process was handled. 100% of the participants felt that they

108were included in the decision making and 100% of the participants felt that the process included a discussion of personal values and ethical responsibilities. And finally, 92% of the participants felt comfortable seeing the other people involved in the incident or school community. So those are some really, those are great numbers and good feedback as we move forward into next year. So as we transition into the new school year, we do recognize that there's still many skills that we need to learn and questions that need to be answered. But we are so encouraged by the powerful restorative experiences that are happening across our campuses. But we want to continue to feel that momentum. So rather than just work with those pilot schools, We are striving to create a restorative practices toolkit, have ongoing trainings and workshops throughout

109the school year, and continue our monthly collaborative meetings. We also want to continue to support those students at Crawford, but we also are looking at... recreating or looking at that model and implementing it at Lincoln High School. We've already identified a staff member who is eager to do this work, Lori, and work with her students. So we are going to work with her so that those students can really spread the message. We know the student voice is the best voice. And just lastly, I just want to give a little bit of data. In the 13-14 school year, we had 138 students that had been recommended, or I'm sorry, that had been actually expelled from our district. And this year, we had 66. So, of course, we'd love to see that number be as low as

110possible, but I think that deserves some real celebration because as we initially embarked on this restorative work, people have really taken the courage to take this on. So I would just like for us to take a moment to just celebrate the work that we have done. And thank you, Felicia, for giving us that. And I would also like to really recognize, and first of all, Trustee Barrera, you mentioned that, you know, when are we going to see the video? We will ensure that the video has a chance because it is a wonderful video. It highlights really the work going on at Crawford and at Hoover High School. And there's two representatives here from Hoover High School, Principal Joe Austin and the Dean of Students, Syria Brewer. And I think they've signed up for public comment,

111so they will have some things to say about. how they've embraced this restorative work and how it has changed the dynamics on their campus. And so I just wanted to make sure we acknowledge that because in the spirit of appreciative inquiry, we need to find places where things are working so that we can make it scalable and bring it to our whole system. Thank you. Our next topic is ethnic studies. And I will be briefly speaking about that. Assembly Bill 101 very clearly indicated and outlined that we need to build an ethnic studies program that is part of our work in our district. Actually, we're a little bit ahead of timeline because the bill actually says that the work needs to be reported back to some state entities by 2017. And so in 2015, we've

112been engaging. We have an ethnic studies advisory committee of a lot of our community members and such. The picture that you see here is... when we had a board resolution regarding the support for the Ethnic Studies Initiative and the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition came and they have been an active part of this work. We are, the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee will be really focused on really three topics. One topic is the building of an ethnic studies course that aligns with our LCAP around meeting the A through G requirement for history. And the committee will zero in on that and create some proposals for our ICC work with our leadership and learning department. secondary schools office and other departments to create a really robust course that can satisfy that requirement and get A through G approved.

113Another aspect, there's two more committees, they're both regarding curriculum review and making some recommendations. and those two committees, one is looking at elementary curriculum pieces and the other is looking at secondary and high school curriculum pieces to say how can we make sure that it's ensuring the diversity that we see as part of the FAIR Act, that we see as part of this Ethnic Studies Assembly Bill and mandate that... that we are working under. But in the interim, especially at our high schools, we will be offering through our partnerships with the San Diego Community College District, we will be offering college level ethnic studies courses to our students. And some schools have existing partnerships with our community colleges, with Mesa, with Miramar, and San Diego Community College. And so those dynamic partnerships that have been

114existing, for instance, at Kearney, for instance, at Lincoln High School. will continue and the ethnic studies courses are readily available. But even where maybe the partnership hasn't been fully solidified, we're looking to offer online courses and other mechanisms for students to have in this 2015-16 school year access to a college level ethnic studies course as we uh... build are our capacity for our own internal district program house wanna recognize that it's odd any can't loss here from the ethnic studies now coalition who i think it's signed up to speak to public comment for this what next i want to bring up uh... our program manager for dropout prevention, Miss Becky Philpott, and she's gonna talk about, and I do want to point out that I just have three more slides, I think, or two more

115slides. Three. But she's gonna talk about our Pathways Initiative, which is an extraordinarily unique collaboration with some civic partners, and really, again, when we talk about equity, We really need to make sure we expand that definition to include what are we doing as a system for our students that are struggling in our program and our students that are either at risk, on the verge of, or have dropped out. And so this initiative, this Pathways Initiative is exciting, dynamic, and it really offers a viable way to re-engage our opportunity youth. So without further ado, I'll have Becky speak to that. Great. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Moore. The Pathways Initiative, some of you are very familiar with it. Some of you at least are somewhat familiar with the work of the Office of Dropout

116Prevention to continually this is a continuing evolution of our work to engage and connect high school youth who need extra support to graduate from high school and also to recover re-engage and reconnect students who are not currently attending school students who we have identified as being living in our neighborhoods in san diego unified students who are not currently connected to school or work We're utilizing the nationally recognized strategy and the structure of the Check and Connect program. And again, this is a continuation of our Check and Connect program that just ended with approximately 300 students in the class of 2014. Pathways is a partnership with the San Diego Youth Development Office and our partner Ian Gordon is here and I believe he's going to speak during public hearings on this item. Ray King would have

117been here from the Urban Lake. He's at a national conference. He is our partner with the Urban League of San Diego County and the San Diego Workforce Partnership, which has invested a million dollars in this three-year project to support our students with case management services. Pathways serves approximately 250 opportunity youth, both in and out of school, in selected inner-city neighborhoods, including City Heights, Lincoln Park, and Stockton Logan. We are serving approximately 150 current San Diego Unified in-school students. Those are students who were most recently enrolled in our high schools in these neighborhoods and approximately 100 recent dropouts or disengaged youth of a certain age. All students in the program receive Check and Connect mentoring services from the San Diego Unified School District Check and Connect mentors and community-based case management services provided by... the Urban

118League of San Diego County and their partners, Harmonium, UPAC, Somali Family Services, and Manpower is providing internships and classes for work readiness classes for these students as well. The program goals are for each student to achieve an academic credential. A high school diploma is what we're going for. If there are students who are so far disconnected that that's not possible, we are looking for other educational options and develop a path to employment that includes post-secondary education and training. And I'm happy to tell you all right now that we have already identified in this cohort maybe about a third of the students who are enrolled in the San Diego Community College District. And so we will be looking at what specifically what transitional programs we can connect with those students who are currently. in the out

119of school but attending the San Diego Community College District. San Diego is one of six sites in California and 21 sites nationwide participating in the Aspen Institute's Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund. So this program is part of the Aspen Institute's Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund and I'm sure Mr. Gordon will speak to that. Insight Analytics, which is a group out of UC San Diego, is conducting an external program evaluation, which will be shared nationally as part of the Aspen Institute Opportunity Youth Network. And so lastly, I want to also thank... Superintendent Martin, all of you members of the Board of Education for quite some time now, Dr. Fulcher, Dr. Moore, all of our members of our team, and our greater San Diego Unified team of principals and teachers and parents and staff who have been champions for

120youth who need extra support to graduate from school. And we are very excited about this opportunity with the Office of Youth Advocacy and look forward to the work that we're going to do. Thank you very much. As I transition to our work on substance use intervention, again, this was work that was started prior to the formation of the Office of Youth Advocacy, but this is work that we will be championing and continuing. The catalyst of this work was there was a... an issue at San Diego High earlier this school year where a lot of community were concerned with our school police acquiring and using a drug detection dog to, as a deterrent for substance use. So there was a large community meeting at San Diego High and one of the suggestions from Trustee Barrera at

121that meeting was let's that group, that San Diego High, create a task force to really look into substance use and other interventions that we as a district are using and what recommendations could this task force make. And so I took the lead. on working with that task force and I want to just very quickly call out the names of the folks who were involved. Will Garano who's here and he will speak in a moment in a few minutes when there's public comment. Ernie Villafranca, Jane Sullivan, Maria Rodriguez, Monica Rodriguez her daughter, Christina Casillas, former principal at San Diego High, Gretchen Rhodes, former principal at San Diego High. Diane Cordero and Carmen Garcia, the interim principal. Also on the committee was Melissa Janik, our director of counseling and guidance. And we had presentations by Ms. Janik,

122by Shirley Culver, our outgoing program manager of our mental health resource center, and by Sergeant Carlos Vargas of our school police. And we really combed over data, combed over our procedure, and as a result, you'll see that there's a revision to our district procedure 6298, which involves what our personnel are to do when students are found to be using substances. And it's really in alignment with some of our restorative work. One of the key findings of this task force was that we need to be very timely in our interventions. That our interventions can't wait for three and four months to occur while students wait for an insight group or wait for an external agent. to offer some treatment options. And so it was during these task force meetings that Shirley Culver and the partnership with

123San Diego County Health and Human Services identified the teen recovery center work that will be beginning in 2015-16 where we'll be able to have onsite support for our students timely. immediate referrals at some of our campuses for our students to get that support. And so this Substance Use Intervention Task Force was a great experience in this work of youth advocacy because again... As we talk about equity, we need to make sure we're addressing our students that could be struggling with substance use and addiction. Their population according, our suspensions, we had last year, rough data, 638 suspensions regarding substance use on our campuses. And so some of those are repeat. offenders but what what we're as we come through that data what we're going to be looking for are um did some of those offenders were

124they ever referred to our community agencies are you know our soon-to-be internal agencies and so um this uh this intervention work as part of our youth advocacy we look forward to continuing lastly and this is um a combined presentation because we are very fortunate to have the services of a principal and special assignment that was recently assigned to the Office of Youth Advocacy, Gretchen Rhodes. And she comes to us, I just mentioned her name as part of our substance use task force. at San Diego High, but she comes to us with a counseling background and a plethora of experience around working with youth, around creating mentoring opportunities and just great opportunities for youth to be successful. So it's with pleasure that I... uh... introduced gretchen roads to the team she's our principal on special assignment

125attached to you that because he and she's gonna speak on uh... uh... our work with school police our attendance challenge in mentoring efforts thank you uh... as the newest member of the u that is advocacy department i want to thank the board and superintendent martin forgiving me this opportunity to serve children in this capacity The duties and responsibilities around youth advocacy has always been my heart work and it's an honor and a privilege to be part of this team. I've worked with, I mean I've been in the district about 25 years and I've worked with all of them in different capacities so being a part of this team is a dream come true for me. So thank you. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about mentoring and I'm gonna begin with briefly telling you

126about a mentor program that we had at San Diego High Business and Leadership which was in partnership with the AAAE. And we had approximately 30 mentors from the community working with... 50 students and they were primarily African-American students and and I say 50 students, but that's got plus others because Every time we had an event more students would show up. How do I get one of these? Where where's mine and each of the mentors began taking on one two three and and four students because the Students were so interested in it So I want to focus a little bit on the seniors that were in that program. I had 18 seniors, 18 African American seniors, and they're all graduating or graduated with two pending summer school grades. So all of my seniors made it through.

127Seven of them were credit deficient or had below a 2.0 GPA at the start of this mentoring program. Twelve of them are reporting that they will be attending a two-year or four-year college and university. Two of the seniors are reporting that they will be attending military service. Several of the seniors were recognized at the Senior Awards Program with certificates of achievement and scholarships to attend the colleges of their choice. Each of the mentors and the students reported that they had a very positive experience with the program. They made stronger connections with adults. They made stronger connections in school. They had a stronger voice and stronger agency. And again, the students just kept coming. They just kept coming. They would see us with mentors coming in and students would say, hey, what are you here for?

128Are you here to be a mentor? Can you be mine? So the value of that was just unbelievable. We're looking at expanding a similar program, and we're looking right now at Lincoln and Bell. And there's lots of other... mentoring programs and mentoring things going on in the district. I certainly don't mean that this is the only thing going on, but I'd like to expand this version and collect data on other mentoring possibilities that are going on throughout the district. When we look at Lincoln and Bow, we'd like to look at about 10% of their student body at each of those places and see if we can meet those numbers. And also engage central office folks as mentors and see how we can engage the people that work here at the Ed Center, the people that

129work maybe in transportation or any of our other district areas that would like to mentor students because it's... It's just a tremendous experience. So that's our plan for the mentor program. Collaboration between youth advocacy and school police. This is another piece that's very dear to my heart and connected to engaging students and helping them... navigate a really difficult system sometimes when you're involved with police officers, when you're involved in discipline, when you're involved in that. How do we work as a restorative district to make those transitions happen in an appropriate way? Sometimes... arrests are necessary, but how do we welcome back students that have been incarcerated? How do we welcome back students who have had an issue with law enforcement? How do we help students see law enforcement in a more positive light as mentors?

130And how do we... bridge that with students. So we've been meeting with Chief Little John and Captains Marquez and Florentino and Sergeant Holiday over the last few days. I've only had this job since July 1st, so I'm meeting with everybody and listening to things. Anyway, we've been talking about how to take a diversion program that the police... our school police already has that's functioning, but how do we create it to be an in-house program? How do we look at the particular needs of our students and the resources that we have in our district with people to give us an opportunity to tailor it to our students' needs, provide opportunities to track and monitor our own data? follow up on students in order to continue to provide supports for the students and their families because sometimes

131when we refer to outside agencies, we don't follow up as well as we could to find out if students have completed or what steps they've actually taken. So the goal is to break cycles and mitigate arrests when possible and divert to restorative and therapeutic programs in lieu of sending cases to criminal court. So I have a couple of statistics for you from the police department. In 2013-2014 there were 577 arrests. In 2014-15 there were 473 arrests, which is a decrease of 22%. Of those 473 arrests, 50% were sent to a diversion program rather than a traditional criminal court prosecution. And in talking with Chief Littlejohn, our goal is to increase that to 90% diverted. in this year and 77 cases went to teen court and we'd like to double the number of cases that go

132to teen court and we would also like to make sure that we're working together with all of our resources in the district to make this a reality. And the last piece that I have is the attendance challenge. Last year, Lincoln Business and Leadership Crawford, Johnson, Porter, and Knox participated in Assemblywoman Dr. Shirley Weber of the 79th District Attendance Challenge. And what we did was we recognized students with perfect attendance. They got to receive a medallion and a trip to SeaWorld. And that was perfect attendance and excellent attendance received certificates and a lovely letter from Dr. Weber about the importance of attending school. So there were celebrations periodically through the year for those students. So this year the goal is to, and I think this is exactly what it said on my email, to be the

133best in the state in our attendance challenge. When I got an email that said, hey Gretchen, you get to run with this. And I said, okay, I can do that. That's only because the superintendent's competitive and I found that other districts beat our districts and that's not gonna happen. Oh no, we're not. Okay, you've got the right person on your team then because we'll win this. So this year we're going to include all of the schools that are in the 79th district. I looked at the list today, there's a lot of them. And it touches a school or a number of schools in every one of our areas. Area five just has the language academy. That's the only one in area five, but all of the other ones have five, six, seven. schools, elementary, middle,

134K-8s. So watch for more information about that because I like to win prizes too. Thank you. Thank you, Gretchen. Our school police chief is coming up a point of order. And I won't take no for an answer. I don't say much. I was honored to be here, Superintendent Martin and board members, but two slides ago, Dr. Moore didn't have this information to present about how we're addressing drug activity on our campuses, and I'm happy to report that this year in school police, our total number of calls for service related to our narcotics is down a stunning 40% district-wide. In addition to that, I did say my goal is 90%, but I didn't promise it. Somebody said, Chief, shouldn't that be an 80-20 to be more in alignment with reality? And I thought, you know what,

135we've got to have goals that sometimes seem unachievable to do the best for our kids. Thank you. Thank you, Chief Littlejohn. I want to thank, right now you'll see the two names. I want to thank all of our presenters though, Ajin, Shahid, Becky Philpott, Felicia Singleton, and Gretchen Rhodes. As tonight you will be looking at an org chart that will formalize and the Office of Youth Advocacy, so there will be more names added to that office. But I want to thank you for this opportunity. I know it was a little lengthy. I know that we went through a lot of topics, but this work is extraordinarily important. When I was doing my doctoral research, one of the pieces I looked at was persistent failure in urban school districts. It seemed to come up that every

136time urban school districts looked at initiatives to improve achievement, they were overlooking equity. And the Office of Youth Advocacy under the leadership of Superintendent Martin is a direct effort to zero in and focus on the equity issue. And I think that is the lever that is going to turn. what we may consider as a lack of achievement into extraordinary achievement for students. And so again, I appreciate this opportunity and I look forward to many, many more reports where we can zero in on this ton of topics that we presented this evening, where we can zero in on those. Thank you. So we have a number of public comments on this item. Don't move. I'm just kidding. I don't know. But we do have some speakers. We have Colin Pierce, William G., Blue Montana, Ian Gordon,

137Joe Austin, and Savia Brenner. and also Michelle Bolton and Danny Blass and Dominique Walthour. And you can come in any order. You'll have two minutes each. Board of Trustees, Superintendent Martin and Dr. Moore, my name is Colin Pierce. I'm the co-chair of GLSEN San Diego, which is a local chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network. First of all, I just want to thank you for incorporating LGBT affairs and safety within the Office of Youth Advocacy. GLSEN has had the fortune of working with Race Human Relations Department, and then also my experience of partnering with Dr. Moore over the recent months have been very positive, so we're looking forward to continuing that partnership. Regarding the items that were presented today, we're encouraged by the inclusion of so many previously identified areas of importance.

138Personally, I'm looking forward to helping the Office of Youth Advocacy to develop a partnership with the GLSEN Research Department so that you can implement the local school climate survey within the high schools. Obviously, we'd like to see that extended into middle schools and eventually also to find a tool to survey elementary schools because we're well aware that the behaviors and traits that our children learn are learned in elementary school. And so we need to survey there and also do training there. We do have some concerns regarding the timeline, of course, because we'd like things to be moving quicker and more comprehensively. We certainly identify the need for a very highly skilled and experienced LGBTQ affairs officer to be put in place as soon as possible. I think it's noteworthy that Dr. Moore was presenting the

139slides on this area himself. We wish that there were a staff person. And again, I think that it's important that that person be highly trained in this area, have experience of training groups on LGBT affairs, also on LGBT inclusive curriculum and GSA support. That person may be... currently in existence within the office but it may well be that you need to look outside to find somebody with that skill set. Also with regards to training, we would encourage the board to direct the superintendent and the office that there be a specific timeline where you expect that all sites and all staff have been trained and have received the training in terms of what you think is realistic. And then finally that we would encourage that any of the trainings that are associated with the badge that

140was discussed, that those trainings be in alignment with the comprehensive training plan that you're developing. the curriculums are in alignment. But thank you very much. Thank you. Good evening board. Good evening superintendent. My name is Danny Bloss and I am the media outreach coordinator for Ethnic Studies Now. In addition to being a teacher here in the district, the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition is so thankful and want to say we are proud of this board for supporting ethnic studies and your resolution in support of AB 101. So thank you for your courage in that. Our coalition is a broad collective of community-based organizations and cultural workers. We are organized democratically, consensus-seeking body, and we have committees that are looking into curriculum. We have committees that are looking into outreaching to the students and to the parents

141who ethnic studies would have the most impactful impact on. most impactful with that audience and we also have a media outreach we meet bi-weekly even in the summer times we have a meeting tonight that I'm missing so I have the opportunity to present our Ethnic Studies Now position and regarding the youth advocacy program And we meet in City Heights at the San Diego Youth Services, and that's at 3660 Fairmont. Our next meeting is August 11th, and I would like to invite you to join our coalition of Ethnic Studies Now. Our committees work, we're organized to analyze and develop responses to reviewing the curriculum, that's what's available out there, teacher training, and ethnic studies as a graduation requirement. We believe that this Ethnic Studies Now Coalition will strengthen the work of the Ethnic Studies Advisory Committee

142through the Youth Advocacy Office. And we believe that implementation with fidelity, ethnic studies implementation with fidelity, ensures that the historic resolutions that you have created to allow our students to have, to hear their stories, is going to allow... our San Diego communities and this district that it serves to fully realize who we can be. So the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition stands as a partner to help make the work impactful to our students, our communities in which they work and live in now and which they'll work and live in the future. So thank you for all your efforts for ethnic studies. Thank you. IAN GORDON, GOOD EVENING, SUPERINTENDENT MARTIN AND SCHOOL BOARD. MY NAME IS IAN GORDON. I'M WITH THE SAN DIEGO YOUTH DEVELOPMENT OFFICE. I'M THE DIRECTOR THERE. AND I JUST WANTED TO TALK TO

143YOU A LITTLE BIT ABOUT PATHWAYS, WHICH YOU HEARD A LOT ABOUT. IT'S THE SAN DIEGO YOUTH OPPORTUNITY PATHWAYS INITIATIVE. AND OPPORTUNITY YOUTH IN TERMS OF A TERM WAS COINED BY A WHITE HOUSE COUNCIL THAT WAS CONVENED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA TO LOOK AT YOUNG PEOPLE 16 TO 24 WHO ARE NOT CONNECTED TO EDUCATION OR INSUFFICIENTLY CONNECTED OR TRAINING OR WORK. and there's an estimated 19,000 in San Diego County. So I commend this body for taking this on. When we were invited, and you had to be invited as a region, we were very bold in accepting that invitation because we knew that we would need to have the major systems that affect young people on board. And so we're one of 21 cities that are a part of this initiative. on national is collaborative and so we

144have our own learning community and not many of them have their school districts on board and so it's really a testament to San Diego to be able to have a school district working in conjunction with our workforce board and community-based organizations in this way and so as the Youth Development Office we're not city or county we were really born out of community outreach and community grassroots organizing and so for us it's really heartening to be able to to represent San Diego among 21 cities around the country and being able to say that we have our school district on board as a major player, not only concerned about young people that are within your charge, but those who are out of school and reengaging them back to school. So just wanted to be able to thank

145you for that. And it really does bode well for San Diego. Thanks. Thank you. Good evening, Superintendent Martin and the board. My name is Dominique Waltower, and I am one of the mentors that Becky Vernon and Ian mentioned, and I just want to give you a brief synopsis of what the mentoring program for Pathways looks like. I service Lincoln High School, Patrick Henry High School, Twain High School, Garfield High School, and Morris High School. I currently service 31 students. What that looks like is we meet with our students weekly or bi-weekly to develop relationships with them. Once we're able to develop relationships with them, we're able to speak to the different issues and barriers that are holding them back from graduation. Most of our students are students who are those who are left behind, those

146who fall through the cracks, those who will just sit silently and when graduation time comes they just won't graduate. those are the ones that we work with. So our role is to partner with these students and to figure out their different options. As Vernon spoke about earlier, there are different ways to graduation, different ways to success for these students. And so we partner with them and help them to realize these different ways. Some students may take the GED. Some students may get an option two diploma. Some students may go the traditional route. Some students may... graduate through the college systems. Our role is to just help them to figure out which one of these paths is going to be beneficial to them. And it's a very difficult process because these are students that are cast

147to the side, so to speak. They're not traditionally the students who are going to sit in the front of the class. They're going to sit in the back. They're going to be quiet. They're not going to say anything. So we help them to learn to advocate for themselves. We do that through problem solving. We teach them to problem solve about their issues. Most of them just shut down when they're... an issue. So we teach them to not only self-advocate for themselves, but to learn to problem solve about these issues. So that's very important for them because in this world, as we all know, we definitely need to know how to do that. So we also work with them on their motivation because that's a key factor in their educational process. If a student's not motivated,

148they're not going to show up. But we have to make our students, we have to make education relevant for them. And so one way that we make it relevant is we connect the dots to their goals. We set goals with them and connect the dots. One student wanted to go to the military and he didn't understand why he needed to take this silly geometry class. So we connected the dots. You can't go to the military unless you have a high school diploma. The light came on, okay, he started to do better, so to speak. The red light came on about 30 seconds ago. But I'm just saying. I just want to close. There's a lot more to this and I just wanted to again give you a brief synopsis of this but like I said

149I just wanted to let you guys know that this work is extremely important. I am very thankful and proud to actually do this work and I look forward to continuing this work with your support. Thank you. Thank you. Hi guys, this is Superintendent Morgan from the Board. Thank you for having us. I'm Joe Austin, the principal at Hoover, and this is Cydia Brewer, one of two deans that has really worked hard this year to put a lot of pieces at Hoover together. As Dr. Moore and several speakers pointed out, this is not new stuff. There's been a lot of elements that have historically predated this restorative practices movement, but I really feel like the district has... Turned all of these into one direction and they really worked at Hoover. I think our staff was ready

150for this tool We got with the city has helped 50 staff members to go through the restorative practices training the Felicia mentioned earlier and It made a huge difference in our school really a climate changing piece and Cindy won't say this, she doesn't want to say anything, but she definitely wouldn't say this, that nobody's really more singularly responsible for those results at our school than Cydia because in addition to as a dean taking on a lot of that first level service provision for students who are not meeting expectations, whatever they are. She's also led an action group that every teacher that was stalled at Hoover this year had a menu. And one of those menu items was an action group around trauma-informed care and restored practices. And Cydia led that artfully. So I don't know

151if there's anything she wants to add in the last 15 seconds or not. I just want to say thank you for bringing this to us and supporting it. Not only am I ready and willing and excited to work with you all on training our staff, but our students. We have about 20 kids that are ready to get working with us to... move this to the next level at Hoover. So thank you. Thank you. Good day. First of all, I wanted to thank you for having me and for your work. And I wanted to start with Richard Barrera for having us. I'm actually Wilbur Reno. I coach at the University of San Diego. But nevertheless, I was asked to be on a task force. Again, the task force in summary was in reflection to what happened

152with the dog sniffing. And it's a great practice up to a certain extent. I'm speaking on behalf of the parents and I ask, first of all, my physician asked me not to come in because I had some metal in my eyes that was removed earlier, but I really felt compelled to come here to tell you this story. And this story is very straightforward since I have very little time. I'm speaking for those kids that can't be here. And there are many kids. One of the hardest battles for us to tackle is drug and alcohol. and severe drugs. I see this at the college level obviously as well. But I think what's important is that we highlight a few key components. First of all, I really believe in care versus scare. I think that the, and

153it isn't just my view, it's actually the view of actually most people actually, most educators believe that. But it's really hard. It's really hard because financially it's a very, very tough process and it also takes a tremendous amount of time. But I feel that that time must be invested by motivating. We just heard coaching at its best from one of the presenters. But motivating young people, they will drive to our aspirations as leaders, if you will. The most important thing that I could actually say is that we have to look at district policy. Our policy has not been revised, and this is one of the findings, not only of myself, but of my entire team. It has not been revised since 7-13, 2001, so that's quite a bit. There's been technology changes and we need

154to actually dive into that. The second component, which is actually increased funding. which we must do. Again, it takes a tremendous amount of courage to tackle this and to motivate young people to walk away from drugs. But I do feel compelled to tell you that it is worth fighting, because if we don't fight it, we're going to lose them forever. And incarceration, as you well know, is not the answer. The last thing that I wanted to talk, so I could stay on topic, is actually I request one additional meeting with the entire team. And the reason why I ask that is because I feel that I can't do it justice. We've covered a lot of ground. We covered a lot of miles, and for me to come in and actually present just a ruler, it's

155not enough for them. But once again, I thank you, and I really encourage you to actually look at this and dive in deeply into it and to get the oyster out. Thank you. Have a great day. Thank you. Good evening. I take it I'm the last one. So thank you once again for hearing me. State your name again. Michelle Bolton. I have... I had my son bounce around in San Diego school system since 2002. Cabrillo, Dewey, military life, I moved around, even Webster. And he graduated from San Diego High School and is now attending San Diego Community College. And he's going into his second semester. But what I've heard here today has been a whole world of change for me. So to each and every one of you, thank you very much for everything that

156you're doing. And it really means a lot. I don't think that I could sit in your seat as long as you are just for today. But I definitely want to thank you very much for everything that you're doing. I am a... I FORGOT THE WORD I WAS GOING TO USE. I LOVE TO VOLUNTEER. SO PLEASE, IF YOU NEED ME, SEEK ME OUT. I AM A DISABLED VETERAN. I AM A STAY AT HOME MOM. I DO VOLUNTEER WITH SAFE PASSAGE AT IBARA IN THE PARKING LOT. PARENTS DON'T LIKE TO LISTEN. Driving their cars anyways. But I'm here. Volunteer, that's what I do. I am also a member of the Order of the Eastern Star, which is also a volunteer nonprofit organization. That's just a little small history. I can't give you my full resume because I

157don't want the red light to go on. So good night and thank you once again. Just so you know, sometimes we go to 12 midnight. I don't want to be here. No. there's going to be, I'm like, an after party. So I think that concludes public comment. Trustees, do you have any questions or comments about the informational item? No? Okay. Yeah, I do have a couple comments. First of all, I'd like to thank staff, Vernon Moore, and everybody in the Department of Youth Advocacy for your guys' work. I know it's your new department. There's a lot of new focuses. And I want to thank Superintendent Cindy Martin and Board President Marnie Foster for agendizing this report to the board. And I also would like to thank the board for their strong commitment to supporting our

158LGBTQ students. Our gay and lesbian students in our school district are fundamental to our mission to make sure that they're safe and that they can thrive and succeed. And when this board voted 5-0 a few months ago to go ahead and make the decision to implement mandatory LGBTQ training for all staff, that was that was groundbreaking. That was a huge paradigm shift in how this district and other districts operate. Where it's an opt-in program. Where we miss so many staff that hopefully through training and encouragement and understanding of the laws and ways to deal with difficult situations, ways to refer students to the resources that are available to help them if they're kicked out of their house because their parents don't understand you know, that they're gay or lesbian or transgender. And then the other

159kinds of support services that we all know are available to our children to help them so that they don't feel like they have to kill themselves, like two children in San Diego have done in the last four months. So that underscores, I think, the reality, the wake-up call. Kids are dying. This has been going on for years. I remember here in San Diego Unified, we had a candlelight vigil in 2010, just outside the school district here, because every week another child was killing themselves because they were gay, lesbian, or transgender, because they just couldn't take the bullying anymore. They couldn't take adults telling them that they were wrong. They couldn't take the social pressures to conform. The system that we have. You know, we talk about racialized outcome. Well, we have other kinds of outcomes

160in our society that are killing our kids. And I really am thrilled and look forward to the implementation of some of these dramatic things that we're doing to help support our gay and lesbian students in San Diego. including the mandatory LGBTQ training for all staff, the electronic verification of receipt of the anti-bullying and intimidation policy, the improved anti-bullying reporting procedures, the increased visibility of a bullying hotline or an email so that when kids observe other kids being bullied they can speak up and there will be reaction by administrators and adults in our school district to step in to interrupt that homophobia. and to try to make that a teachable moment using our restorative justice practices to help people to understand the repercussions of their actions and how hateful and hurtful they can be. The implementation

161of the GLSEN climate survey in middle schools in September is phenomenal. And as Colin Pierce, who works with GLSEN and has worked with our department to try to help us to continue to move forward, I look forward to the day when we can expand that, perhaps later on in the second semester or next year at the beginning, expand the GLSEN climate survey to the high schools and the elementary schools. Because a lot of the learned behaviors do start in the elementary schools. And obviously the surveys can be tailored to make them grade appropriate, which is our charge. Additionally, we have seen and heard and I look forward to the implementation of the Fair Education Act, which is California state law that basically says that we must include LGBT curriculum in our classrooms. When we teach

162the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s with Cesar Chavez, with Harvey Milk, With Martin Luther King Jr. Those three all are tandem cries of oppressed groups fighting for equal rights and justice under the law and the ERA movement. So those are all equal in a history class in high school. And I know that we've done good work around that, and I look forward to full fidelity on the implementation there. I think that also other people from the audience and the community have talked about the idea of the badges, that that needs to be integrated into the LGBT training program and not a secondary tandem training program. You shouldn't just show up for a couple of hours and get a badge, you know, because that badge will say to LGBT students, I'm safe.

163But how do we know that person really is out? for students. There's so many other things. But one of the things that I did want to focus in on was your powerful slide on the triangle of staff development. The concrete plan of beginning with the leadership of the district and then rolling that out to the school sites and then moving on. But one thing that I did notice that I think maybe we ought to have an honest conversation about was at the bottom of that triangle was the National Equity Project. Now, I attended the full two-day training with the National Equity Project, along with all the other board members, the superintendent, our principals, our district leadership and staff. There were over 200 people there at De Portola Middle School in Tierra Santa, and it was

164a phenomenal training. It was wonderful. I'm a changed person because of it. It helped even me move my dial to have a better understanding about the racial inequity in our society and in our system, our subconscious biases that do exist in everybody. That training, that two-day training, all day, one day, all day, second day, every single time there was reference made to LGBT people, I wrote it down. And I wrote down what time and how many seconds that conversation lasted. And it did not exceed a minute and 14 seconds. This underscores the reality that the mission of the National Equity Project is really pure and good, but we have to understand that their focus is primarily on racialized outcomes, on white privilege, on subconscious bias, on systemic racism that exists in our society and in

165our district and in the way that we function as a society. and that I'm concerned. that the National Equity Project curriculum material, having gone through that two full day training, doesn't speak to LGBT issues. Or as a staff member, if I'm a teacher, what do I do if I observe another kid bullying somebody else because they're gay or lesbian? It didn't give me any resources. It didn't talk to me about my perhaps subconscious homophobia or transphobia. As a gay man, I've gone through an evolution in the last 20 years as my perception of trans, transgendered individuals in our society has evolved and become much, much more positive. And so I think that we want to make sure that as we look very thoroughly to make sure that what we're implementing is going to be a

166game changer, going to be systemic and systematic so that when we're gone, the system that's in place to ensure that LGBTQ students are safe, welcomed, and the staff are supported, I think we need to make sure that that is a part of the conversation. And then finally, I just want to say that, you know, I was, I know that there was an expectations gap tonight. Back when the board voted 5-0 on three different action items that I had brought forward, it was my understanding that this would be a presentation whereby there would be some more specifics, more timelines, more details of the plan and what's going to happen and what specifically is going to be implemented in September. And I have to be honest with you, my expectations were not met with this specific presentation.

167The first draft of this presentation I saw last night, it was 11 pages and one page was about LGBT, the eight bullet points. Well, one page was this. So I guess really there were only 10 pages. And one out of ten was about the LGBT8 bullet points. And I was hoping there would be a little bit more detail about each one for implementation purposes, timelines. For example, the GLSEN survey. It was vocalized or verbally mentioned that we're going to implement that in middle schools first. And that's a great first step. But I would have really appreciated that in writing. So that because the people in the community and the board members sometimes we like to see something written down because therefore there is a record, electronic record. There's a higher level of transparency with the

168public such that some of the specific things that we're working on or that are going to be implemented can be made available on the website. And that would be, I think, a really great positive step to make it more transparent and more open, some of the more of the specifics of commitment to an LGBT specific staff member or affairs officer with expertise around counseling. student development, staff training, LGBTQ issues. I think that that's a critical opportunity. And it was an interesting observation from a member of the community that it's interesting that as different pieces of the great work that you were doing was presented, there was a different staff member to present and focus on that area minus... LGBTQ issues. And so I think that I welcome the opportunity to move forward and present that

169and whether or not that exists within our current staff or we're looking around or what I just think that that would be really, really, really a very strong positive step to embolden the department and make sure that the expertise on LGBTQ issues is in the department. I think that that would be a great gesture and a great move. and it would be wonderful to protect kids. And when I was thinking about how one slide out of ten focused on LGBT action plans for implementation, it was just kind of interesting because that is the generally accepted representation in all society of the number of LGBT people. Ten percent. One in ten people are, it's understood through a lot of analysis and surveys and stuff, but one in ten people are gay. or lesbian or transgender and

170so I just thought that was kind of interesting that one in ten and think about that if we have a hundred and thirty thousand students and it's generally accepted that 10 percent of the population is LGBT That means we are dealing with the potential of 13,000 LGBT students that we need to make sure that they feel safe so that they'll come to school, so that they'll learn more, they'll succeed, so that they'll graduate and thrive and be a contributing member of our society and not another statistic. So once again, I want to commend Superintendent Cindy Martin. Mr. Dr. Moore and all the staff on the work around LGBT students and the implementation of that going forward beginning in September. And with regard to all the other work with restorative justice practices and all the other

171amazing work we're doing for kids, I just want to say thank you. Well, thank you, but I just have to pause and say thank you because that was very thorough and very well said. Thank you. Yeah. Fellow trustees, do you have any comments before we move on? Yeah, it was. Yeah, very comprehensive report. I understand the Office of Youth Advocacy much better, and thank you for bringing it forward. I totally understand the challenge that is ahead of us. We can pass policy. We're elected officials. We're here to present our constituents and on the dives. There are a number of things we want to bring forward. There are a number of things that we want to continue. We speak for our communities, but above all, we speak for children. and we're advocating for children and youth.

172What you bring to this office is incredible. I think the energy and the talent that you're sharing here, and I'm looking forward to the part which is the hard part. We can do policy. We can make statements. We can advocate, but it needs to be carried out and implemented, and that is the job of the superintendent and the staff, and we're behind you and we're with you, and you totally have our support. Thank you. Thank you. Richard said. I agree. End quote. That's right. So thank you once again for your leadership and the amazing job that you're doing. And we have a lot to look forward to. And I'm very glad that we're at the point we are finally now. And we can move forward with warp speed. Okay. Thank you very much. President Foster,

173could we actually move item E2 next on the agenda? Second. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I think we need to vote on that since we're taking it out of order. Right, to move it to be next. Okay, can we please vote? No, it's an information item. You too next. Okay, that passes unanimously. Okay, so E2 is the information update on 2014-15 Lincoln High School, Steen Middle College. Superintendent Martin, did you want to introduce this item? Thank you, President Foster. This is another information item that you requested, the board requested, that we bring forward this evening. It's an informational update on the 1415 Lincoln High School STEAM Middle College program, and I would like to invite Principal John Ross, Mildred Phillips, Cheryl Hiblin to coordinate and present the update on Lincoln High School.

174I think Cheryl Hiblin didn't know we just put it out of order. And John Ross probably had to make sure daycare was taken care of for your son. I saw you get up. This is going later than I thought. Current principal of Lincoln High School and accompanied by Mildred Phillips. And so she will start off and do slides, and then I will take over from there. I failed to introduce Mildred Phillips as our director of high school redesign. I didn't say your title when I invited you up here. Thank you for joining us. Hello. It's been a long evening. I just want to thank the Board of Education and Cindy Martin. On April 29, 2014, you made a huge decision to start a Lincoln High School steam metal college, so thank you for that. So

175tonight we're going to give you a brief update, and it has been an exciting journey for me, and I am excited that Principal John Ross... and his staff and the students in the Lincoln High School community will take this journey further. I look forward to collaborating with them, giving them some suggestions and working with them. We have fully implemented the program that you asked us to do April 29, 2014 and we're at the point now where John Ross, his team and his staff can take this program forward. So once again, on April 29th, 2014, the Board of Education approved the Lincoln High School's Dean Meadow College. What that meant is that we formed a partnership with San Diego Unified, the Community College District, and Lincoln High School. And during that one year period, we had

176goals set forth, and those goals for 2014 was to establish a college-going culture, which we did do, to establish an internship, mentorship, and field trip program, and we implemented that. And also to establish a student support system, which we did do with the academic labs and all of the pieces that we implemented and anchored for Lincoln High School. Tonight I am most proud to talk about the community college enrollment piece. And as you can see in front of you, fall of 2014 we began to enroll students in college courses. We enrolled 39 students, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade students enrolled in Person of Growth. And by the end of that semester, 97% of those students had passed their first college classes. So I want to say kudos to the Lincoln High School students and also

177to the teachers. Spring of 2015, we enrolled an additional 81 students, 10th, 11th, and 12th graders in personal growth. 97.5% of those students passed their college class. Also in the spring of 2015, we enrolled seven students in sociology 101. 100% of those students passed that college class. Spring of 2015, 11 students enrolled in Psychology 101. 100 students passed their second college class. Once again, I think that's a major tribute to the Lincoln High School students, to the staff, and to the Lincoln High School community. Fall of 2014 and spring of 2015, we had 65 students to take the ACCUPLACER test placement in English. 97% of the students at Lincoln High School passed their first ACCUPLACER test. So once again, I cannot say enough for the amazing students at Lincoln High School. And they took a

178journey with us and they delivered on this journey. So I think we should just give those students a round of applause. And Mildred, I just think it's important to point out on the 97% pass rate in English on the ACCUPLACER test, when we had our joint meeting with the community college board, I believe the number for students coming out of our district was around 36%. So that's extraordinary that we're seeing that passage rate from the students participating. Thank you so much and I think one factor with that was that all of the students who were enrolled in a college class, I also put them in an AVID class. So Monday, Wednesdays they were in their college classes. Tuesday, Thursday, Fridays, since they didn't have a high school class, we implemented an AVID class for them.

179And I think with the support of the AVID teachers and the support of the community and just the ability of the students who wanted to show the world that Lincoln High School is an amazing school and I concur with them. So therefore in one year we had a hundred and twenty students at Lincoln High School to take one or two college classes and the average pass rate had to be ninety nine percent so kudos to those students and the Lincoln High School staff. The other charge that the Board of Education gave us was to establish an internship, mentorship, STEAM-related field trips. Fall of 2014, with the two internship providers, we trained 450 11th and 12th grade students at Lincoln High School in a college career technical ed workshop. Spring of 2015, we trained 250 10th

180grade students to participate in the college career technical ed workshop. That was over 80% of the student population at Lincoln High School that was trained to take internships. As you are aware, we did not believe that we should put students in internships and they had not been trained. They all produced resumes, cover letters, interviewing skills, phone skills, how to dress for success. So kudos to those students once again. Spring of 2015, with the help of the Lincoln High School community, we placed over 100 children interviewed for non-paid internships with the San Diego Workforce Partnership Connect to Success. And we do have Terrell Simmons here tonight who has signed up to speak from the Workforce Partnership who worked diligently with us to train our students and also to get partnerships. We also have Tayati Howard here

181today representing KKSD radio station and the Urban League who took our first students as interns and has also hired some of those students. And Mr. Howard has also signed up to speak tonight. I would be amiss if I didn't mention this person's name who is a mentor to the Lincoln High School community and that's Phillip Liebert who is the president of the Lincoln Cluster who was instrumental in helping us get internships and business partners for our students. Spring of 2015 we placed our first 20 students in internships and these are non-paid internships where they went on Tuesdays and Thursdays and many of these students who were also in internships were also enrolled in college classes. So they did well in their internships as well as in their college classes. Fall of 2014-2015 over 40 students

182in the engineering program participated in STEAM related internships. Fall of 2014 and spring of 2015, 30 students enrolled in the internship program in engineering, started the first organic garden at Lincoln High School. Fall of 2014-2015, over 50 students participated in STEAM-related field trips and mentorships to UCSD, the medical program, San Diego Gas and Electric, and also Solar Turbine. So once again, the students at Lincoln High School are gifted, talented, wonderful, and bright. And with the support of the Lincoln High School staff and the Lincoln High School community, Lincoln High School began to anchor the Lincoln High School's Dean's Middle College program. The Board of Education also asked us to set up some support programs. So we established academic labs in English and math. 2014-2015 academic labs provided over 60% support to the Lincoln High School

183student body. The academic lab coordinator for math service over 500 students enrolled in math. And the academic lab coordinator for English service over 350 students. So kudos to those academic lab teachers. 2014-2015, the academic lab teachers also collaborated with the teachers. They worked with the students and the teachers to prepare students not only for Common Core Standards, but for the high school exit exam, PSAT, SAT, ACT, and as I mentioned earlier, for the ACCUPLACER exam. They also coordinated a partnership with the UCSD tutors. UCSD, I really want to thank them. They sent over 30 tutors to Lincoln High School during the 2014-2015 school year to work with students in English and also in math. September of 2014, I began to research the Edgenuity program for assessment pieces. Principal Ross and other partners was able to

184help us to find the funding for Edgenuity, which is an assessment tool that all of the English, math, special ed, second language teachers at Lincoln High School was trained to utilize this instrument. 2014-2015 we provided tutors and academic support through the ARC program at Lincoln High School. So once again, the Lincoln High School students stepped up to the plate. They showed their brilliancy. The parents were very supportive as well as the staff and the community. Like I said, April 29, 2014 the Board of Education approved the Lincoln High School STEAM Middle College program. And I remember Richard Barrera asking me if we were gonna run a summer bridge program. Within two months, we ran a summer bridge program. So July of 2014, we had 100 incoming ninth grade students from Knox Middle School, Millennium Tech,

185and Bell Middle School who came to Lincoln High School for a 10-week summer school program. Students participated in activities that was organized around personalization, school culture, how to access the system, and really just to be introduced to the high school culture before they started their ninth grade year. Summer Bridge was designed to roll out the Steen Metal College and internship focus. Summer Bridge introduced Lincoln's campus, staff, and a college-going culture to the first cohort to the Lincoln High School incoming Steen Middle College students. Additional focus during Summer Bridge was school culture, personalization, goal setting, time management, and a huge piece with project-based learning and college career and technical education. We also hired 16 resource teachers to assist Principal Ross and his staff, and they did an amazing job. So I just want to say kudos,

186first of all, to the students, to the Lincoln High School staff. to the parents and the Lincoln High School community. The Board of Education gave us a charge, April 29, 2014, and for the first year to implement this program and to anchor this program, I think they've been extremely successful. So thank you. So next steps. So back in the spring of this school year, I sat down with my team and district staff and we looked at our data and we asked ourselves, how can we organize ourselves so that we are providing the best instructional or academic component for all of our students? And so we looked at three different components, three key areas that we looked at. We looked at the organizational structure, the master schedule, and we looked at the PD plan. So in

187terms of our organizational structure, one of the things that we looked at was that our admin team were sharing a lot of common duties or responsibilities, and they were overlapping. So we said we wanted to organize ourselves so that we are providing an effective and strategic plan for all of our students. And so in doing so... The slide here that you have, I have three vice principals, and so I'm going to organize my vice principals so that two of the vice principals will oversee two different grade levels. And in terms of the grade levels, they're going to also oversee the instructional component as well, assisting me going to do classroom observations. One of the vice principals will look at grades 9 and 10, and the other will look at grades 10 and 12. And so

188again, assisting me going into classrooms, observing instruction, providing feedback to teachers, meeting with teachers during their professional learning communities, providing feedback, ensuring that the common core standards are being met and aligned or there while they're planning, looking at student data. The BPs are, those two BPs are going to assist me doing that work. Also, my third VP was going to be the operational or organizational VP. that person is going to handle the discipline and attendance issues and any other urgent matters that may arise during the school day. This slide here is a work in progress and I call this slide the post-graduation pathway. And so every year we have a number of students who graduate from Lincoln High School who go on to a four-year college or a community college of that matter. We spend

189a lot of our time and resources giving these students scholarship information and taking them to the annual college fair at the Scottish Rite in the fall. We ask them to come out in the spring to the FAFSA night that we do for parents. And so I see all that to say our students who are on track to go to whether a four year or two year community college, we provide a lot of resources and a lot of time and energy goes into those students. However, I have a number of students who say that, Mr. Ross, I don't want to go to college. I want to graduate and I want to go to work. And so that kind of resonated with me this school year. And then I finally got convicted in the spring and said,

190you know what? There's no really equity in that. provide all these resources and opportunities for our students who want to go to college or community college, but we don't offer those same opportunities and resources for the students who don't want to go to college. And so one of the things, and I thank Board President Foster for reaching out and providing a contact to one of the trades, the vocational trades, the Sheep Meadow and the electricians. And so we, mid-year, came out and we met with them and they said that they would be willing to partner with us. and look at seniors who are not interested in going to college but who graduate from high school, meet the basic criteria of passing a basic math test, and go through the application interview process, they guarantee that

191they'll hire our students and put them through the trade and go through the apprenticeship program. So those are two of the different trades that we're looking at. We've also reached out to the plumbers and the ironworkers who also want to partner with us. So we have a meeting scheduled for August 13th where we're going to sit down with those four different trades. We're going to create a plan, and we're going to pilot it this school year. One of the things that I've expressed to them is I want them to become mentors of those students that we've identified that want to take this route. And so they'll come out periodically throughout the school year, mentor our students, talk to them about what the trade entails, salaries, of course, what our students will be interested in, and

192then also have opportunities for our students to do some job. on-site job shadowing so that they can see what these different guys do during the day for a living. In addition, I lost my train of thought. Can you just give us an idea of how much a student could possibly make for any one of those trades? So starting out, they can start making it at... at the most, I think it was like $18 an hour. And then they can kind of work their way up. And then after a three-year period, they can be making like $65,000, $70,000 a year. And so... Cheap metal workers, I think they're talking about $85,000. But I'm just saying. Correct. That's not bad. Correct. And so for me, this, you know, it's... I had one particular student this school year

193who was mid-year, he was interested. One of my seniors, African-American male. He had a 3.2 grade point average, but he had committed to going into the electricians industry. And so, you know, the guys had come out and met with him throughout the school year, and he was pretty much on track. Well, at the last minute in May, he decided he wanted to take a college acceptance that he had received from Morehouse College. And so I was somewhat disappointed that he... decided to go that route. I didn't let him know, but I wanted to have at least one student that we could say went through the program who could come back and talk to this year's seniors. But I say that to say I'm excited because I think that's what it's all about. Our students have

194the opportunities. Graduate from high school, I have these opportunities, these pathways. Which one do I want to pursue? He was college and career ready. That's a celebration. That's what we want. So I say all that to say these are just the pathways that I'm looking at implementing and piloting this school year. The military is another one. We have students who... come to us in ninth grade and they know they want to follow their parents' footsteps in going into the military, whether it be Army, Marines, or whatsoever. But I don't think we do a really good job of really providing those students with the resources to make sure that that happens. We give them ROTC, enroll them in ROTC, but I think we could take it a step further and provide them with the ASVAB prep

195assessment throughout the school year to ensure that they're ready to take the ASVAB when they graduate. And so those are just kind of some of my thinking in terms of... offering opportunities for all of our students making it more equitable for everybody not the students that just are interested in going into college and so i see this as you know long term i see this as being part of their four-year plan um i can see incoming ninth graders like i said sitting down with a parent a student which pathway do you want to take and it could change over a period of time they don't have to be locked in to military four-year college it could change My goal is to get everybody to graduate and be ready to go to a four-year college or

196go into one of the different other pathways. In terms of our master schedule, currently our master schedule is organized by common preps. And so what that looks like is every department, English, math, and so forth, they all share a common prep. And so the rationale behind this... was these teachers would meet together throughout the week, plan, look at student data, look at student work, look at the standards, and just kind of plan and organize around that. Well, this year we decided we wanted to take it a step further. We wanted to organize in terms of teams. I believe the more eyes that you have on students, the better outcome and better success students are going to be. And so when I say organize in terms of teams, Every team will be made up of four

197different teachers. So one team will consist of an English, a science, a math, and a social studies teacher. They will share a cohort of students. And so when they, they will also share a common prep. And so when these teachers get together and they meet in their department or their common prep, they'll talk about specific students. Why a student is maybe doing really well in the math class, but why he's struggling in English. Those two teachers will sit down and they'll look at the different student work and they'll talk. have valid conversations about how can we support this student so he's being successful in all of his classes. So that's one of the benefits of organizers and teams. Also the benefit in organizers and teams is they'll be organized according to grade level. So in

198team one, which is ninth grade team one, that would be ninth grade, which is grade level, but it also will have those four different content areas and so those teachers can really look at kids and then look at data and then look at their curriculum. Also this allows us to implement some of the interventions to support some of our kids. When we looked at our data, we noticed that our EL population, we needed to really implement some things to support those students, as well as our students who have special needs. And so we're implementing specific courses to address some of those different needs for our students. Ninth grade student supports. So we know that the transition from middle school to high school is sometimes challenging and difficult for some of our students. And so these

199are some of the supports and interventions that we want to put in place to support and make sure that our ninth graders are successful. So again, supporting our long-term English language learners, we're going to implement the academic language development class specifically so we can support our second language students in terms of learning English. We also want to implement a literacy advancement course to support our students who are struggling with literacy or reading. We are implementing, we have AVID, so we're going to continue that. We're going to offer a advanced world history class at the ninth grade level. So we have some students coming from our feeder schools who have demonstrated that they can handle the academic rigor. And so some of these students are gate or seminar. And so those students are going to go

200immediately into our advanced world history class. And then also in order to support our students who have the special needs, we have a multi-skill support class for those students who have IEPs. That's when our case managers specifically narrow down and focus on what those students' needs are, whether it be literacy or math. My last couple slides, I'm not going to go through each of the goals, but we looked at our professional development plan and we also talked about, okay, what can we implement or what can we change or tweak in order to strengthen our academic or our professional development plan? So goal number one, the development of school-wide instructional expectations. So our teachers are going to get together. They're going to select five common... research-based instructional strategies and they're going to focus on those five

201that they decide that they want to focus on and then school-wide we're going to ensure that those five strategies we're going to build upon this school year so when I go into classrooms I know I should see those five strategies being implemented and taught throughout the throughout the different campus and so that's one of the strategies goal two not sure why goal two is the development of department specific lesson structures. And so this is going to be where our teachers have common things throughout their classroom. So for instance, in every classroom that you go in, whether it's a math, a language arts or a science, there's a learning objective or a learning target that's posted not only for our students to know what they're learning and what they're gonna be expected to know by the

202time that period ends. But it's also for admins. So when we go in and we're observing, we know what we're looking for. We know what the lesson should be aligned to what's on the board. And then also for guests as well. We believe, again, students should know what they're learning, when they're learning it that particular day. Goal three, the development of common formative assessments and summative assessments. We're going to continue to use those. The district has a number of common assessments that they... give us each school year so we're going to continue to offer those and then some of our teachers have begun to develop their own summative assessment The last two, goal four, staff will participate in literacy and numeracy common core and line professional development. And so basically what that means is my

203math teachers will get together and they will specifically focus on the sequence, the math sequence of courses and focus on math. On the other hand, my science, my history, my social studies, and my language arts teachers will all come together and they're specifically focused on literacy. I strongly believe that. literacy or reading is a means to teach the content. And so I expect all my teachers, whether you're PE, whether you're a science, whether you're history, you're teaching reading. And so you're using that vehicle as a means to teach your content. And then goal five, again, to support our second language learners. That's my goal. That's my vision. That's my plan in terms of turning Lincoln High School around. Thank you very much for that presentation. I'm wider awake now. Because I know it's pretty late

204when you got up here, but I just really liked what you're looking at as far as the post-graduation pathways. For too long, there's been this segmenting of students in terms of you're not college material, and so we're constantly focused on college-bound focus. But at the same time, there are excellent opportunities for students in trades and other areas. And so I think to make everybody aware of that is really important. And I just think that also, besides the content that you've delivered, it's really clear the passion and interest that you have in making this happen. I think that's going to make a big difference at Lincoln. So thanks a lot. Thank you. Yeah, I want to thank you for this presentation. Of course, thank President Foster and Superintendent Martin for your leadership in bringing us to

205this, having this vision of what Lincoln could be. You know, we spent years with people tearing Lincoln down and I think doing it for political purposes. And now what we see is an incredibly exciting vision coming to life about what Lincoln can be. And based on some of the really exciting work that we've seen in this district for some time, we talked for years about taking the work that Mildred was leading at the Met and taking that to scale across the district in some way or another, and we're seeing that come to life. We've talked for years about... A partnership with the community and in particular a partnership with the building trades around creating real career opportunities for our young people and an investment that we made in that partnership years ago by making sure

206that we had project labor agreements in place for our bond measures that would create opportunities in the trades and now seeing that come to life. is incredibly exciting. And I think maybe more than anything what we see is a sense that People using Lincoln to divide the community, including to divide students on the campus, to divide staff on the campus from each other. I think what we're seeing now is a community coming together around a positive vision and making things happen for young people. And that's very much what our vision is of how we reform public education. So it's just exciting to see this work and I thank you for the leadership you're taking. I know it's a, it's a, it's, we're not going to see the kind of results that we're hoping to see.

207It's not going to happen overnight, but some of it's happening overnight. And we've gotten to some real results in a very short period of time, and it's something that we know that we can build on. And so what I hope is that all of us take the responsibility to get out and tell the story of what's happening at Lincoln because, again, it's a narrative that I think was a negative narrative for a long, long time, and we've got a positive story to tell, and we need to get out and tell that story. Thank you to both of you, and thank you to both of you. Thank you. Okay, no more comments? Well, you know that I'm pleased. You know, there's cartwheels going on in my heart right now. Because, I mean, a year ago, around

208this time, you know, we declared Lincoln a state of emergency and really wanted to offer some intensive support to the instructional program and to really honor the community and the students and the teachers and, you know, who have really worked. with that institution and our students for so long. And I think that it's very clear that we're reaping the benefits of some hard work and some dedication and some rallying around students. And I mean, when you talk about 120 students have gone through these college courses with a 97% pass rate. Oh my goodness. I mean, they already have college credit and they're just building on that each year. When you talk about the academic labs and providing support to make sure that students that enter those courses are successful, when you're spreading it across the

209campus and making sure that 80% of the students or 60% of the students have access. to this tutoring and this additional support, we know that that's absolutely, absolutely needed. When we talk about mentorships, when students have the ability and the opportunity to leave to learn, these STEM field trips, so they can touch and feel the jobs of the future and make it relevant, teachers are making it relevant to what they're learning in the classroom, students are inspired and they're able to see their future. So, I mean, that's what we're talking about. That's what we want. And when you talk about the professional development and the way that you're restructuring the school and having these cohorts, or you're calling them teams, where they share a cohort of students and it's cross-disciplinary so you can negotiate meeting

210around and that personalization piece, that's powerful. because each student matters and when there's such a great need we have to provide additional support and I really see that happening at Lincoln and so I just, you know, I'm really excited and I'm very encouraged by this and I have to ask because I just want to make sure. So next year while we're having the cohorts we're also having the ninth graders that are able to realize an academy type of experience housed in one building and the tenth graders in another. Is that correct or has that changed a little bit? You're correct on that sort of thing. the ninth grade will primarily be housed in one building, take most of their classes in one building. There may be exceptions depending on electives, but they will primarily be

211housed in individual buildings. And again, that will ensure that we have, you know, the supports there. We have, you know, in proximity, those teachers who are working in the different cohorts or teams. They're right next to each other to really collaborate and support the school. Good, good, good. Because that's kind of like the, I know we started and we're finally realizing the whole vision of the academies, of the teams and the cohorts and the academic support. So I'm very, very pleased with that. I guess I would ask, not to put you on the spot, but is there anything else that you see that you need? I think one thing that jumped out was the edgenuity assessment tool, which I guess, Mildred, that was a really good choice because I noticed that the district has adopted

212that district-wide. Correct. Yeah, so I don't know if there's... a way to further support or reimburse for the edgenuity if we're taking care of it for district-wide you can't answer that question that's a superintendent question I'm just throwing that out there but you don't have to respond you just get me you have to respond you just we're just going to do the right thing so I mean that's that's basically it I can't think of any questions I do think that and goal to the development of department-specific lesson structures and that students as well as instructors are very clear on the student learning outcomes on a daily basis. So that's where you're putting the agenda and what the goals are in the lesson plan daily on the board or where have you. I think that's very

213empowering. And then I guess the other question, when you mentioned that the teams will decide which strategies that they'd like to further strengthen and kind of focus on those five for the year. How much of that is optional? Because I know that they have to probably align themselves with the cycles of learning too. Right, so these are outside of the cycle of learning. We're going to do those as well. But these are research-based. instructional strategies and working with Sherrill in the district office. So these are things that have already been proven, time tested, and worked. And so in terms of building some collaboration with our staff, I'm allowing them to go through the list and select maybe five. And of course, like I said, I'm going to, myself and staff, my team will be there

214to kind of guide the discussion, but I'm trying to allow them to have some input. And so are they, is there someone else who's coming in for that professional development, or is this a study team that's decided we're going to dive into this particular? Working with Cheryl's office and then also the admin team, we're going to pretty much put this on ourselves. I lost my turn. With my instructional leadership team in the student office, we're going to sit down and we're going to put the professional development together ourselves and, again, allow the teachers to have some input into what they want to roll out. I don't have any further questions. I just thank you for your leadership and your collaboration and partnership with our community. And I also think that we have speakers. So we

215did this a little bit in reverse, but we have speakers. And I'm going to call up... Tyari Howard, Lori Williams, Phillip LeBurg, and Tariel Simmons. And you can come up in any order and you have the full two minutes. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the board and superintendent Martin, Mr. Ross, Ms. Phillips. My name is Lori Williams and I am a teacher at Lincoln High School, proud to be teaching criminal justice there. And I wanted to also give you the update on our restorative practices and what we're doing. At Lincoln, we believe in, as you've heard, we believe in educating the whole child. And so that also includes the restorative practices. Some of these began last spring where we started to include alternatives to suspension like our Now What program where we're teaching kids

216about anger management skills, conflict resolution skills. The addition supports with the substance abuse programs on campus will also be another alternative to suspending kids that we're excited about having as a resource. As a former juvenile probation officer from a county in another state where we practiced restorative practices. I'm really excited to see graduated and targeted interventions come to be a part of our school system as well. As a teacher for criminal justice, I'm going to be teaching peer mediation. I'm going to be teaching the restorative circles. We're going to be starting teen court at Lincoln as well in October and our students will be trained to be a part of that and then we'll be putting together a restorative team to include the students that are being developed as leaders to come up with the

217inflammation. implementation plan for Lincoln high schools restorative practices. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a long night. Good evening Superintendent Martin and board members and principal Ross and Miss Phillips and I want to thank the board for voting last year to support the concept of Lincoln being a middle steam college. I hope I'm saying that correct. I think this is something that really goes to the heart, the core of who we have representing us in San Diego Unified as our board members. I think they're all, they're looking out for our kids. I can honestly say that every board member is looking out for us, for our kids. One of the courageous decisions you made was to... Hire Miss Martin, who the concept was to continue the work that was already done. That was a very

218bold decision. And what we have going on at Lincoln High School, which is something that's being replicated at other high schools in the unified school district, is the kind of programs that are going to help students narrow that journey to get from high school to college to be ready for their career. And it takes a whole load off the parents' wallets that they can finish high school and have some amount, some number of college credits. And then the whole concept of giving multiple pathways, I think that's just a brilliant idea. And we have a great number of community members. I've met some of the parents of Lincoln High School students. Some of the students, I've heard them speak. uh... mister taiyaki he's doing a great job with the internship program so i think lincoln is

219just on his it's gonna just get better thank you board members and we've got i'm gonna do what i can to support and i know there's a lot of people who are going to do the same thing thank you Hi, my name is Terrell Simmons from the San Diego Workforce Partnership with the Connected Careers Programs. I want to thank Mildred for having me out today. What can I say about Mildred and this wonderful woman? When I first came to you, I told you the mayor had... put together this collaborative that he wanted to get more youth hired in San Diego because a lot of people don't know this but the unemployment rate for 16 to 24 year olds here in San Diego is higher than the national average. So we put together this initiative with

220the mayor's office, the city of San Diego and the San Diego workforce partnership to bring more employment opportunities and I came to Mildred and I said, Mildred, I want to bring this big job fair to Lincoln High. that's normally north of the 8 over here. And I'm glad she didn't look at me crazy. She's like, okay, let's do it. I'm gonna get everybody I can get on the line. And we was able to bring a couple of different higher events and job fairs to District 4 and to the students of Lincoln. I'm proud to say today with the students in our program, we've been able to get 190 students paid internships and jobs here in San Diego. And that's a large part to your collaborative effort and I want to make sure that we do

221more collaborative efforts like that. But it just doesn't stop with just the job. We do the whole workforce piece development because a lot of people on our board that we work with, we say, what do you employers need? We need soft skills. So we said, all right, we're going to do a soft skills workshop where we teach these kids. Now, just... Give them a job, but teach them how to get a job. Why not to use your cell phone on the sales floor? Why, you think it's funny, but a lot of them have that issue. And, you know, how to manage your emotions at the workplace. How to interview, resume, building skills. And not only that, getting them to learn about themselves. Who are you as a person? What are those things that speak to

222you? So if you're a person that's... math inclined, maybe you shouldn't be pursuing a career in customer service. Let's find the correct career pathway for you. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening Superintendent Martin and Board. My name is Tyati Howard. We run two radio stations currently in San Diego. We took over the licensed music rights from Smooth Jazz 98.1. We're now running KKSDJazz.com and KBLK Radio. I'm extremely excited with the Lincoln High STEAM students because we partner with a couple of other high schools in San Diego and it takes at least two semesters for the students to go through twelve weeks of training. Lincoln High has gone through one semester of training. We've graduated eight students and one of those was so phenomenal we had them on the spot as a part-timer once he graduated

223from senior high. So we're very proud and we feel that we're blessed to be able to get the opportunity to come into Lincoln to take students into a broadcast level and then the phase three of that would be to take the best of those students to be supervised by their peers and then go to another level and take some of those students into actual commercial grade radio and television stations right here in San Diego. Thank you, God bless. Thank you. President Foster, I'd like to move that we move the board reports and superintendent's report to the end of the agenda in case anybody dares speak then. Okay, can we vote? Thank you for that. But before you leave, seriously, Mildred Phillips, Director of Secondary School Redesign. Principal Ross, you have done a fabulous job and

224arguably probably one of the most challenging situations and transitions in the district. And for that, you should be commended and saluted. And you've done so well by our students and communities. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. I just wanted to comment. I've been to several events at Lincoln where you've reached out as well as brought people in. Was that the... The building trade event that we had at Jacobs Center. Our students coming in and learning about the trades and talked about internships and the opportunities there, and you're absolutely right on. There was an incredible opportunity for students to have multiple pathways, and you're making that one available. It was also at the college fair that you held at Lincoln with great turnout, and people were there from all over the district. In addition,

225you had the vice chancellor from UC San Diego there in an evening. He gave an excellent presentation. Parents were there to ask questions. What it did, it made college a reality. And both of those programs did that. In addition, I attended the... the criminal justice class and had an opportunity to hear students do their monologue. Where they talked about the challenges that they faced and how they overcame those and they were reaching deep inside to come up with that courage, be able to tell their story and out of that they will be the leaders of your restorative circles within your school, within your community. I see a lot of great things happening. I'm pleased to be able to be there to see it. Thank you. Okay, so now we're going to start the agenda. Nine

226o'clock. Okay. We're back at D1, administrative assignments. Thank you for folks at home that may have been waiting to hear their management appointments. We'll do that now. Management appointments. Three vice principals at San Diego High School. Denise Montero, Paul Nunez, and Megan Volkner. Principal at Carson Elementary School, Courtney Young. Principal at Juarez Elementary School, Skye Oluwa. Principal at Vista Grande Elementary, Nikki Mitchell. Manager for Budget Development, Shirley Calhoun. Program Manager for Biliteracy and English Learner Support, Teresa Laskowski. Director Teaching and Learning Support, Wendy Rank-Burr. Director Special Education, Lorelei Olson. Executive Director Information Technology, Greg Odinger. Executive Director Online Learning, David Van de Poel. Okay. Moving right along to E4, which is an action item. I move approval. Do I have a second? Second. Okay. Thank you, President Foster. We're engaging some work right now as

227we continue our efforts, of course, around our district and commitment to broad and challenging curriculum, closing the achievement gap with high expectations for all with an equity lens. We have resources and solutions internally, but we also know that there are some strategies, some skills, some protocols, and some resources that we don't know as a system yet. And so sometimes we turn to outside partners to help us, and this item tonight is... to talk about the equal opportunity schools partnership that we would like to engage in and start some preliminary work this summer in August of 2015 and this preliminary work is being provided at no cost so we can get started and I would come forward with a formal professional services contract in September. But really the focus of the work is the Equal Opportunity

228Schools project I found out about through some of my superintendent colleagues in Vista, Devin Vidička is using this, working with Equal Opportunity Schools and several other districts that I've collaborated with around finding nationally 100,000 low-income students who are being overlooked for access to high-level rigorous coursework, specifically AP and IB programs. And what we're learning through the Equal Opportunity Schools Project is actually 640,000 students are historically underrepresented or missing from the challenging classes. And what we know is 93% of students want to complete college. 31% actually will and 71% were not challenged by their high school coursework. So our partnership with Equal Opportunity Schools is a very specific approach and protocols that they use to identify nationally the 10,000, they're helping to identify the students that are missing and they've identified in San Diego County a

229certain number of students that we're calling, whether missing is the right word, or overlooked. protocols to be able to identify students who are ready for success in AP or IB and are often in a classroom across the hall. And it just is a matter of the system being able to no longer overlook them and using some of the strategies through equal opportunity schools to identify them. We think they have great tools. And what we appreciate about the approach of Equal Opportunity Schools is it actually teaches the system to learn to do it itself. It's something, a partnership that we engage in and we then learn to find out what are we missing, where are our blind spots, why do we have potentially 1,400 students currently right now identified in San Diego Unified who are being

230overlooked. for who are ready for success in AP and IB programs. So what tonight's item is is to begin the partnership with them, start some preliminary work. We have many conversations we need to have with our. our employees and our leadership team, but we want to start the work this summer so that we can have equitable outcomes for access for students who are ready for success in these classes. And the results would be a year from now when we start enrolling kids that we would see a significant change. VISTA Unified has gone through the process this year and has already seen a change. I've worked with Devin Bodichkin. He's reported a change that they've seen in their district and some similar demographics in VISTA, but we think it's a partnership with tools and strategy. that

231would be helpful for our students that would get us to equitable enrollment in our AP and IB classes within one year. Yeah, I fully support this approach to ensure that we focus on integration of our accelerated classes and not segregation of classes within schools and within the district. And that's, I think, very important step in the right direction. The other thing that I do want to point out and that I think is great is that we're spending money because this matters. We're spending $250,000 on this. because it's going to benefit over a thousand students. And so spending money on things that matter to this board and this district are important. And it's been the work of the board and it's been the direction of the board to put money towards our priorities for kids. Thank

232you. Any other comments? If there are none, please vote. Okay, that passes unanimously. Can I have a motion for F1 through F3, please? So moved. Can I have a second? Second. Okay, can we please vote? All right. Moving on to G2. Move G2. Second. All right. Do I have to open that up? Mm-mm. Okay. Mm-mm. All right. Okay, can we please vote? Okay. I'll move H1. Okay. Do I have a second? I'll second, but I think we want to hear the... Right. Okay. So H1, Youth Opportunity Program, your one report. Superintendent Martin, did you want to? Thank you. I think we have Bill Oswald here from UCSD to present the year one findings. Poor gentleman has been waiting for a long time to present this evening. This is the year one findings for the Youth

233Opportunity Program. And we've been talking about the work of this program, but wanting to make sure that we have data and metrics that go with this approach. Because we know that if we want to extend and leverage further support beyond the support the district's able to provide. and help other agencies understand the moral imperative. We want to have data behind it. So we've been anxiously awaiting the year one report to see how implementation to date has been going. I have a PowerPoint here that highlights some of the results. You want me to just give you a highlight so you have questions? Yes, please. Let me start off by saying, first of all, to recognize that the study actually was not a full year. By the time the bus passes got passed out, students had them.

234We're really talking about this was really a six to seven month study. And so as we look at the findings here, we have to think about them as emerging trends. And they're positive. But the one thing I want to point out is the parents and the grandparents that created this, the energy for this program. understood that the bus passes were not a silver bullet, that you give a kid a bus ticket, he's not going to all of a sudden be going to Harvard. And that they sort of see their kids as going through a competitive sort of obstacle course, and that every kid with the goal of graduation and going on to post-secondary or technical training, right? And every child, every youth has a backpack. that they carry through this obstacle course. What they know

235is that their kids' backpacks are a bit heavier than some of their counterparts, particularly when we look at schools in wealthier communities. And again, this is not a silver bullet, but what they saw this as was a way of sort of taking at least one of the bricks out of their backpacks. And so looking at this, we have to keep in context that this is a small intervention in the lives of these youth. But the analysis looks at... The impact of the pass is on safety, on mobility, on attendance, on participation in extracurricular activities, and then the impact on the families. And by and large, most of these variables, the treatment group remains about the same or improves a little, while the control group gets worse, and sometimes they get substantially worse. And I'll just

236go over some of this data quickly. I'm sure people would be happy to go home. But in terms of safety, we asked the students to tell us whether they had witnessed or experienced crime, bullying, or sexual harassment in several different occasions. And overall, again, the pattern, and you have this in front of you, but the pattern generally, again, is that for the youth who had bus passes, had to confront these three things, crime, bullying, and sexual harassment, less than the students without bus passes. And that pattern holds true pretty much through the entire thing when you look at the safety. Sexual harassment's a little bit different in that there was some rise even for the treatment group, but again, less than for the... for the control group. And so in safety I think is probably

237the one thing. And none of the previous studies that I've seen on an impact of bus passes, they all talk about safety, but as far as I can see, this is the only one that really looked at the impact of safety. And if you think about the parents thinking about this, increasing safety was an important step in increasing their child's academic achievement. In mobility, the mobility one is a little bit less clear, but it's the same pattern. The most important part on the mobility is how the bus passes were used. after school. The data again across the other few studies that have been done indicate that bus passes don't necessarily impact going to school, but they have a big impact on coming home from school. And if you look at that data, what we see

238again is the students with bus passes saw a slightly increase in the use of public transit to get around while the control groups saw a significant drop. Probably the most significant one is depending on their parents for rides. there's a significant drop in the treatment group on their dependence on parents for rides and this was also validated in the um the travel journals we did and the interviews we did with students where they talked about the fact that now they have a job they go to mcdonald's they go to burger king they get off at five o'clock unfortunately their parents work till eight so they're hanging out there until they get now they can get home from school get home from their job and do their homework and so i think one of the biggest

239things which also also interestingly would support any kinds of climate change things because the cars these folks are driving generally are not, are producing a fair amount of greenhouse gases. And on attendance, attendance was a little difficult because the school district had changed systems in between and so the numbers on attendance were hard to look at from year to year. So what we did in this was instead of looking at how students' rate of attendance changed, we looked at how they sat in the distribution. So if you can imagine taking all of the... 1100 students in the study lining them up based on rank order of their attendance, you would find students with control and treatment would be mixed in equally. At the end of the school year, the students who had bus passes sort

240of bunched up with higher attendance while the control group sort of slipped down. And so what we saw in this was that students with the passes, attendance improved relative to the students without them. that makes sense so I'm now the one area we where the results was not clear was around the use of extracurricular activities interestingly we found some evidence on on attendance that nobody else has but everyone else reported increase in on extracurricular activities we what we found was an overall increase in extracurricular activities but that the control group and the treatment the cheap there was no benefit from having the bus passes. We think some of that has to do with, one, the age of the students. be using this for after school stuff older students 69 percent of the students were under

24116 so they're not using this for jobs because they don't most of them don't have jobs so we think that that the older students were the ones that kind of skewed this also some we have some anecdotal evidence to indicate that about maybe as many as 25 percent of the students in the control group bought bus passes i also know from some of the students because i work with of the youth in the district that some of the kids had passes didn't use them so there is some a lack of clarity so even with these results even with the weak control group the fact that we're finding these differences i think speak well for the use of the bus passes so Lastly, let me talk about the travel diaries and interviews because I thought these

242were really the most powerful. The two most common things, again, came up was getting home from school and getting home early enough to do their homework and also feeling safe getting home, particularly if they were doing activities after dark. The other was helping the family. I think the biggest thing was how much these bus passes helped the family. Because these youth were now able to take their younger siblings to school. They took them to doctor's appointments. They were able to go shopping. I think one of the most heart-rendering stories is the young girl who comes home from visiting her mother in Tijuana because she can do that now. Her mother can't come across the border, but she can now visit her when she wants to because she has a pass. She comes home from the

243pass, and her father asks her to go grocery shopping for her and her two... other siblings because he doesn't have a car, she's the only one that has transportation in the family. And so you really see how much the youth with PASS has used these to support their families. And the consequence of that, when they talk about that, they talk about it in a way that... is really, again, it's really quite touching because it increases their confidence. Rather than feeling burdened by having to help their family, they feel really good about it and it increases their confidence. And so I think it's one of those things that support them all the way around. And so that's basically the findings. Our recommendations are obviously that... that this is helpful particularly around safety we are now in

244the process of analyzing the data from the second year survey and and the school district so by the end of august we'll have a report on the second and hopefully we'll see the trends particularly around safety and mobility continue to move in the same direction so um yeah i don't know if there's any questions thank you very much does anybody on the board have questions for our presenter Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. So we see on the conclusion recommendations it seems that it's overall slight improvement. There's a trend and the idea of continuing it and getting firmer data as we're moving along. And do we have another public speaker on this item? Ms. Ward? He's with the city cam. Is that okay? Thank you. Very briefly, Shawnee will be on behalf of Mid-City

245Can. Diana couldn't be here. Her son took his first steps over the weekend, so she's probably frantically chasing him around the house this evening. So rather than being here to rally folks against you guys or do what we usually do, which is cause trouble, we're just here to say thank you. We really appreciate your continued support of the program, the continued support of our advocacy. Ms. Martin, you made a comment earlier about supporting students' ability to pursue their strengths so they can be... contributing members of their community. And we think that these passes do that. So again, with your continued support, rather than having to focus our attention here, we're gonna be focusing all of that attention from us and the community toward the other members of the community and bodies of government who should

246be supporting this program because as you all know, this is not just about improving attendance or school outcomes. This is about providing an opportunity to achieve in all aspects of life. And so we're gathering that support now, we're building support, and we just want to say thank you again, because this means a lot to the students. So thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. So we have a motion to receive the report and accept the report. And there's some more recommendations that come with this item besides receiving the information report. And it's a little bit detailed, so I'm going to read it only so we're clear because there was confusion about the $200,000 and $150,000 and what did we do. But to be clear that we will, going forward, need to make a

247decision for the 15-16 school year. Over a three year period, the district has committed a total of $550,000 to this program from the GFU. I want to be clear about that. But what this recommendation is going forward after receiving this report, we're planning to continue to provide the bus passes to students that receive them already during the previous school year. if they're still enrolled at the four participating high schools, Crawford, Hoover, Lincoln, San Diego high schools. We have existing funds in the district's account at MTS to allow for the provision of the passes that will take the students through July, August, September 2015 to those 443 students who are still enrolled. So the idea is if they come back in September and they're not enrolled, we just want to make sure we're going to continue

248the kids that are still here. So then in the fall of 2015, we'll bring forward an amendment to the district's existing existing agreement with MTS so that we, so the board can approve the purchase of additional passes for the remaining qualified students for the months of October 2015 through June 2016. So there's some money left to continue that will take us up through September and then we'll bring another resolution or amendment forward in October to see who's left that we could continue to make sure we have a continuous year of support. Funding in the amount of $200,000 for that program was including the cost of the bus passes is included in the district's adopted 2015-16 budget. Part of this recommendation also includes in that $200,000 funding for the four sites to have critical clerical support

249for the program. We did not build that in the first year. We want to be... clear and transparent about that. We need clerical support at the four sites to be able to continue that. So that's part of the recommendation and it is included in the $200,000 budget. We are also, part of the action we're looking for is to authorize us as a district to participate in a proposed study on transit equity that's being conducted by UC Davis and endorsed by the California Endowment. that would, in which the district's going to provide attendance and achievement data so we can continue the study. And this action is also asking for you to support Mid-City CAN's continued advocacy in state and local level policy changes that call for making public transit available at no cost for youth. Okay,

250so I'm assuming that the motion is to receive a report and approve the recommendations. Okay. Have a second? Okay. So please vote. Okay. And pass it back. All right. They took care of business while you were gone. That's what the guys do. All right. I'll move that we receive the report H3. Okay. Okay. Can we? Oh, we just know there's. Ms. Elkel? Oh, we're just receiving the report. We're receiving the report. Okay. Okay, so that's the information only. I'll move item H4. I think we've got a speaker on H3. Oh, I apologize. Oh, we do have a speaker on H3. Okay, public speaker. you started to go to sleep good morning just for clarification before i speak uh it does state that i'm gonna oppose i had to flip a quarter it's not really that

251i'm opposed or in support i just needed to put something otherwise it wouldn't let me continue um anyways enough so now i'll start hey this is montana president of the poa uh in the spring you uh approved the lcap in the lcap uh goal 4.8 states that you would support schools in completing their comprehensive school safety plans through school police. We were doing that in the form of the Safe Schools Unit, which has been suspended due to a lack of staffing that we needed officers in the field versus in the unit. It was understood it was going to be a temporary thing. Well, now we're into August. March 1st is the state mandated deadline to have all schools have their safety plans done, submitted and approved in preparation for the upcoming school year. As of

252March 1st of 2015, there is no documented school that is compliant with their safety plan. because we do not have those officers back in those offices. Why are we doing that? As of now, we have been informed that it is indefinitely suspended, mostly for the purpose of fulfilling the superintendent's goal of having cluster campus officers. We have 18 campus officers. We have 16, excuse me, 17 clusters. Let me back up. We have 17 campus officers, 16 clusters, one officer is also assigned to SEPA. I was correct the first time. We have 18 officers, one is a K-9 officer. That means there's no officers available to continue on the Safe Schools Plan or Safe Schools Unit to fulfill and support our schools. Additionally, you approve with direction to the superintendent and staff that school police will

253also provide training to administrators to make sure those plans are complete and will meet the criteria set by the state to meet those deadlines. We are not there. No school or maybe very few schools may be compliant, but there's no one there to check them. It's going to be a huge violation. It's a huge liability on us. Why are we, the POA, speaking on this on an operational district department event? Our concern is every officer here, including the three gentlemen are here to protect you from the public, which I think is all district staff right now. We have a goal to make sure that our students are safe, to make sure that our students go home at the end of the day to their parents. My job as their president is to make sure that

254those officers go home to their families. Your responsibility is to make sure that we have the resources available to make sure we keep our students safe. I need your support in making sure that you fulfill the LCAP by making sure the Safe Schools Unit is there, get the officers, additional officers that we were told we were going to get in the earlier discussions of the budget talks when I spoke with the superintendent, but never got them. And now we are going to have no schools compliant. We're going to be in violation of state law and a huge liability if and when something happens in this district. I want to make sure our students are safe. We want to make sure our officers go home safely. Thank you. Thank you. Can we direct the... Did you

255want to say something? Oh, okay. Go ahead. Were you going to say something else? No, I just wanted to make sure that we get feedback on this. that it is the full expectation of the board that we're in compliance and that everyone's safe. So the expectation is that we do what's necessary to make sure that that gets done and you'll inform us. Okay, I just want to be very brief on the item on the budget. Just one of the items that's included in here is the three-year budget. And I also noticed in this wonderful... Excuse me, reading packet that we got. It talks in here about to the financial people and so forth that we are operating with three-year budget plans. In years past, people wonder why we start with a deficit every year, but

256basically... because before we were selling property and other one-time funds to keep us going, our costs keep going up, and so it's a matter of the revenues from the state keeping up with that. So, for example, this year we're having a $34 million deficit that we are solving by increasing some enrollment. We have several goals that are supposed to meet that $34 million, so that's what we're working on for this year. For next year, it lists... the deficit at 94 million at this point but obviously if we achieve that 34 million this year which we've set up that already reduces to 60 million plus whatever else we get additionally from the state so i just wanted to point out that we're we're continuing to look at that when we make the plan for this year

257and we're looking at what's happening the the two years going forward even though we have to approve our budget each year that's all thank you okay so And we have received it. Okay. And wait. Do we have to vote to receive it? No. Okay. No action. Okay, no action. I'll move items H4 and H6. Okay, thank you. Do I have a second? One is a public hearing. Okay. H4 and H6. Oh, I'm sorry. H4 and H6. Okay, can we, and it's been moved and seconded, can we vote? Yes. Okay, perfect. And then, yes. Was that H6 that you just voted on? Yes. What's that? I have an announcement to make with the approval of H6. H6 was the item where we were, due to Dr. Joe Fulcher taking a position in Sweetwater Unified School District,

258we made some modifications to our organizational structure and chart that I had brought forward a couple weeks ago. And so the new organizational design is included in this item, H6, that you just approved. and we've established this Executive Director of Student Services with this past action that you just took this evening, and Executive Director of Youth Advocacy. Rather than a Chief Student Services Officer, we have an Executive Director of Student Services that we will now be recruiting for. Dr. Vernon Moore's official title, we had Dr. Joe Fulcher as Chief Student Services Officer, and we had Vernon Moore as Executive Director of Student Services. Tonight we've established the official title. Executive Director of Youth Advocacy and appointing Dr. Vernon Moore to that position. and the vacancy of Executive Director of Student Services is now present and

259we will be recruiting for that position. The Executive Director of Student Services, the org chart shows clearly what that person will be overseeing and the Executive Director of Youth Advocacy, Dr. Moore presented on Race, Human Relations and Advocacy, Dropout Prevention, Placement and Appeals and SARB particular divisions plus everything you heard him present about tonight and we moved some other divisions, for example, the Mental Health Resource Center, What had been previously under Chief Student Services Officer, that's moving under Special Education Executive Director, Sonia Picos. Adult Education is moving under the Executive Director of Secondary Schools, Cheryl Hiblin, and GATE and Extended Learning Opportunities and Supplemental Education Services will be moving under the leadership of Jim Solo in Leadership and Learning. And then you'll see on the org chart that Executive Director of Student Services will be

260overseeing ADA 504, Title IX, Children and Youth... transition, elementary counselor support and crisis response, NCLB Title I services, nursing, wellness, SANDEP, and special education ombudsman. That's where it's restructuring and putting in alignment and the overall picture of this restructuring as you heard in presentation earlier is youth advocacy and student services are now inside the instructional branch of the district and the instructional branch is now made up of the area superintendents, leadership and learning, secondary school, special education, student services and youth advocacy is leading the instructional vision of a district that's. continue to be singularly focused on learning because that's the main mission of our organization. And so with that I'll announce the executive director officially of youth advocacy, Dr. Vernon Moore. Would you place the new organizational chart on the wall in the board office?

261You're going to study it while you're on recess and I'll give you a quiz when you get back. Congratulations, Dr. Moore. It's official. Especially after the presentation. Especially after the presentation. That did it. Okay. Do I have a motion for? Open the hearing. Goodness. Open the hearing. Okay. Can we please vote? I move the item. Second. Okay. Can I get a third? Okay, no, I'm just kidding. Okay, here we go. Can we vote? Yes, we can vote. Okay. And close. Second. Okay. Can we please vote? All right. All right. Being that there, and I'm missing something, being that there are no... Superordinate report. Okay. Really? I thought we skipped those. Me too. You can choose to do your report really fast. I have a wonderful report that I'll find other ways to communicate. Okay. Being

262that there are no non-agenda public comments at the end of this meeting, we are adjourned. Until September. September 15th. Okay.