001Call to order the May 27th, 2026 meeting of the San Jose City School Board. Currently at public comment on closed session agenda items. Are there any public comments? President Gaston, there are no public comments. Seeing no public comments, we're going to recess to close session to consider item B1, student readmissions, cases as listed. Item B2, public employee discipline dismissal release. Item B3, conference with labor negotiator, Dr. Vicki Zanz for organization, Centers of Teachers Association, CSCA, Santa Rosa 75, and Teepsters Union 665. Item B4, Conference with Legal Counsel for Anticipated Litigation. And Item B5, Public Employee Performance Evaluation for the titles as listed. We are now recessed to closed session. We'll reconvene to open study session on fiscal services. This study session is solely focused on the third interim financial report and information on the governor's
002May revision. So the 26-27 proposed state budget. We'll start with item C1, which is public comment on the study session calendar. Is there any public comment? President Kasten, I do not have any blue cards for this item. All right, seeing no public comment on this item, we'll move to C2, which is the study session. And we'll start with Luz Cazares presenting. Good evening. Is that working? Good evening, everyone. Lovely to see you. We've got three items we're going to review, and we're going to go a little out of what might be normal order. Just because I know, folks, there's a lot out there with the May revise, and so I thought let's just start with the big thing that probably has most folks interested and excited about what it could mean for the school district.
003And so Joel will be pulling that up in a moment. Much, I guess I would say this, for May Revise, there was a lot of a continuation of what we saw, both in the governor's proposed budget, as well as what we've seen sort of historically coming for us at May Revise. So there was quite a bit of adding to existing programs as opposed to creating brand new ones. feel differently about those. Sometimes we appreciate that. Sometimes we'd like to see new dollars coming in. There's quite a bit of one-time funding that's making its way through, and they do look like there's some pretty notable increases from the governor's proposed budget. An appreciation I have for the one-time dollars, while they're one-time, I prefer ongoing, but they are flexible. And so we appreciate that flexibility that
004comes along with them. And then the really big highlight, and we'll go over some actual figures. is the investment that the governor has included for special education. It is significant. Really, truly, it's the sort of dollar amount that can make a world of difference for an organization. Whether we are under fiscal distress or not, it's going to be one of those things that can really help move us along and give us a different way to just prioritize how we spend our dollars, give us a chance to just sort of pause and think. what of what we've done for kids so far is working, where are we seeing outcomes, and where are there some opportunities for adjustments so that we get the outcomes that we're looking for students. And so that's exciting to see the investment
005that's being made for a special education. If you want to move over just a couple of slides. That's all right. The May revise, I think a significant plus that I would note. Go to the me revise portion. Is that it does manage to achieve a balanced budget for the next two out years. That's helpful. And we also appreciate the fact that they're able to do that and maintain their reserves. And so those are two big pluses because for us, we sort of see, okay, that's some of the risk that gets removed. So what they're saying they can fund. We then can reasonably expect that they will actually fund. Want to go to the next slide? Do you want to talk a little bit about the big three, Joel? So our state budget is based on.
006tax revenues, state tax revenues, and the three main tax revenue sources are personal income tax, corporate tax, and sales tax. In California, we highly rely on personal income tax, largely from capital gains. One of the current market sectors is technology, including artificial intelligence. It's experiencing a fairly increased revenue that's adding revenues to the state budget. And you'll see as we move through the education budget, we do see an increase to Prop 98. The current budget, I think, is up about $6 billion, as opposed to January, May revise. So that's kind of the big impact of tax revenues. I'll add to that a driver here that we want to keep our eye on is the fact that it is technology driven. And so there are references being made about the way our economy looks right now,
007where it seems to be AI, technology, aerospace. And then everything else kind of gets lumped into one because that's just becoming the place of dependency for us. And so where we see some risk for that, while we are enjoying the revenue increases in a downturn. downturn that could lead to some pretty steep losses pretty quickly. And it just adds a level of volatility that's already there. And it just increases that volatility at the state level. And so it's something that we're mindful of and keeping our eye on as we analyze and think about the dollars that they're including in the May revision. Next slide. So here I know is an item of interest, not just for us, but for most school districts across the state. And that's the continuation of essentially holding up some of
008our minimum guarantee. The dollar amount, if the state would actually just allocate Prop 98 as originally intended. For us alone, it would mean an additional $7 million of ongoing unrestricted dollars. And that's if they just followed their own rules, we would receive that funding. So I'm going to leave it at that because I don't want to put a... I don't want to put an asterisk on it or anything shiny on it. That is a significant holdback that they've put in place. And it's real money. It's real dollars. It's real cash, right? So why, in part, do we have some of the fiscal distress that we've had? It's in part because they do these sorts of, I'll call them shenanigans, to be able to balance their own budget. Next slide, Jill. So here we have what...
009We saw at second interim, based on the governor's proposed budget. So that's that, those white layers there. Since then. With the release of the May revise, we know that the COLA projected for next year, our statutory COLA, is actually taking a nice little uptick. So we've gone from 2.41 to 2.87. Those are those middle layers there in gold. For us alone, for next year, that would be an additional $800,000 almost, and about 1.2 the year after. And so that is just from the increase of the statutory COLA. Within the May revise, the governor proposed what is getting called an augmentation or a super COLA. It references the same thing, and that's an additional 1.44% added to the COLA for next year. So that's our statutory COLA of 2.87 plus an additional 1.44% to get to
010a 4.31%. statutory plus augmented COLA. For us, that would be a total of 3.22 next year. So that's the increase of the statutory COLA plus the augmentation that we're looking for. A key thing to remember on that augmented COLA is the primary reason they're providing it is because they're also increasing an expenditure for us. So we get the benefit of the revenue. Because they're adding an expense, right? So this is different from our regular statutory COLA in that when we get that, we know that's what we're going to use to pay for step and column. It's what we're going to use for the increase in utilities. It's what we're going to use for the additional cost of utilities that we're going to have, right? Or did I say utilities twice? Utilities, insurance, right? All those
011things that go up on the natural is how we use that statutory COLA. The augmentation is to help us fund an additional requirement, a new requirement they're placing on us, and that's to provide employees with paid pregnancy disability leave. So new cost requirement and then the dollars associated with helping us pay for it. I'm going to go to the next one. Do you want to take this one, Joel? This is lots of happy news here. So yeah, the governor continues to fund in his proposal to one time. the student support and professional development discretionary block grant, that estimates are raised up to a proposed about $937 per ADA, which equals approximately 10 million in one time to our district in discretionary revenues for next year, 2026, 27. That's of note. That is an area where
012the increase to the Prop 98 was invested in this one-time money. So it is one-time money for our district. The thought process is behind the governor funding that increase in Prop 98 into this one-time revenue is to prepare us for maybe a rainy day in the future. Putting that in one time as opposed to ongoing. to protect the state and the budget from future rainy days. Then the learning recovery emergency block grant funding is another area. This was actually in the 2023 budget act. In the 2024 budget, the remaining revenues were reduced to be able to afford that budget. Last year, the budget increased the, I think they, Repaid about a third of it. This budget repays the remaining amount. What we have included in our estimate is $1.3 million in one-time funding for Learning
013and Recovery Emergency Block Grant. It still has the same uses with it as it did in 2023, and the estimate is about double what we got this year. So at that $1.3 million in one-time funding for next year. And then... something an additional investment in this governor's budget is a What they're calling a historic what is a historic investment into special education so a 46% increase We were very excited. I know our Sonoma SELPA was very excited. They saw this and they shared a updated 2026-27 member district revenue assumption and it showed that we would could look at about a 4.6 million dollars in revenue for our district. Now with the special education funding being funded by state and federal sources that don't fully fund the special education program costs, we provide an additional about
01463 percent. I think we'll get to another slide showing those figures of a general fund unrestricted contribution towards those programs. So this 4.6 million in revenue towards those restricted programs would help relieve the general fund of that amount in the contribution. Here, a key distinction is the ongoing versus the one time. The special education dollars are ongoing, right? That is, that's critical. That's really important. And we want to, I know for one, I'm That's the first one I'm looking for when it comes time for the Budget Act. I want to know that that actually comes true. It would be a game changer for the organization. The other items, they're one time. We still want them, but we recognize they're one-time, and so we want to make sure that as we're spending down those dollars, we're
015looking for some of those one-time investments that we know we need to make, things like refreshing our technology. We know we want to set aside a higher dollar amount for our reserves, so that if we hit another financial rough patch, we've got some dollars set aside for it. We've talked about wanting to make contributions toward OPEB to get that funded liability or have it become a funded liability instead of it being unfunded strictly. And so we've got opportunities to think about how to make use of those one-time dollars. The May revise also continues to fund some of those pieces that we're familiar with. So community schools are going to continue to be funded, which we appreciate. The Prop 28 ELOP, we all make good use of those dollars, and to see them continue to be
016invested in is appreciated. And I'm also looking forward to see what those are going to look like come the final budget act. Let's take questions in study session format. So questions and or comments on state budget. And both Trustee Kirby and I were actually able to attend the presentation at SCO from school services on the Prop 98 budget. So we can add some additional context as well. I'll start with Trustee De La Torre. Thank you very much for the presentation. So I want to dive a little deeper into understanding the special education. 4.6 number because it's it's really close to what was taken away at the beginning of this year um as we try to get through budget concerns this time last year we thought we were in a good place and then federally we
017got a four million dollar rug ripped out from underneath our feet um being ongoing what is tied to these funds so that we are envisioning the appropriate use for our students and families with this funding. At this point, just a good reminder for us all is that it's not real until it's a part of the Budget Act. At this point, what we know about it is that there are special education dollars based on the AB 602 funding, which means it's the way we think about all of our other special education dollars that come from the state. So the same ideas of like they're for students on IEPs. We get to determine what those services look like based on what their needs are. So that same, I hesitate to call it flexibility because it's not really
018flexibility, but the same rules and parameters and guidelines that exist for our current special education funding is what we're thinking is going to come along with those based on the current funding model. So we're not expecting additional rules or different rules to come along with them. Thank you. Trustee Jenkins? Can you, I have two questions. The first one is, can you remind us when that budget act actually happens? It should happen by June 30th. That's not that far. Yes. And then the follow-up question to that, which is not my second question, by the way, is when do we approve the budget? We have it on the, at the first board meeting in June, we'll have the proposed budget, including the hearing at the second board meeting in June. We'll actually have all the big stuff
019happening. And then my actual question, which is more of a comment, but needing confirmation. So this sounds like a lot of money and it sounds like all great things. And we are still coming out of a huge fiscal crisis. And our budget is pretty big. So this isn't technically a ton of money. Like we can't just go purchase everything with the money that is possibly going to come to us. We still need to be conservative. Yes, it would be, I would submit to you, it would be poor planning and thinking on our part if we just started running the credit card with this. I see it as an opportunity to be strategic and thoughtful about if these dollars really do come in. What are those one-time investments that we know we need? We talked about
020a lot of them over this past year. And it's an opportunity to get some of those funded, right? We want the additional reserve for the financial rough patches. We want to fund our OPEB liability. And we want to be able to take care of those things. We want to be able to buy technology for the classroom when we need technology for the classroom. And these are the sources of dollars that can help us put those dollars away to ensure we have what we need for deferred maintenance. Thank you very much. I just want to share a little bit that we got from the session and context on it. While they're calling it a super COLA, we should recognize that top-line inflation was 3.8%, and the 4.1% COLA is coming with a mandate for a new
021benefit that statewide they were estimating at a $200 million expense. I think the super part of it is that it might actually cover our inflationary costs, not that it's going to give us extra money. Unlike past years where COLA usually comes in below inflation. So we're actually losing the spending power of the funds that are provided. Also, there's currently a proposal in the Senate to incorporate all preschool programs funded by the state into Prop 98, which would further dilute the amount of Prop 98 dollars for the K-14 system and the ELOP. the community schools and several of those things on that list are all actually appropriations out of the Prop 98 guarantee that otherwise should actually be going into our LCFF funding that would then be available for us to use for education activities. So
022I just want to emphasize all of that to say it's good because there's more money, but it's in no way, shape, or form. changing the fact that we need to be very cautious in how we rebuild on our positive certification to not repeat the very mistakes that led us into these last two years. Other trustees' questions or comments? Trustee DeFosse? Yeah, on the special ed money in the SELPA, I noticed you were talking about that money coming from us, but that money is allocated from the SELPA, and if they change their formula, we wouldn't necessarily get that amount, correct? That's under the current formula that they did change here in the last year or so? Is that accurate or not accurate? It is accurate. It is accurate. One thing that I'd like to see come
023back is a new analysis of the potential funds based on our approved progress towards our own SELPA in the out years. And I don't know if that'd be appropriate for the MYP, but it should at least be an alternative MYP option when we see it. So we understand that because that's an adopted direction. Trustee Kirby? Well. That was literally my question that I wrote down here. Good minds think alike. I guess I had a couple of comments from our, again, our meeting yesterday that we attended. I'll just note that they said that they were also, sorry. Part of the proposal was they were going to add $4.5 billion to the Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties. They were going to deposit $9.7 billion in the temporary surplus holding account. The governor is proposing adding all these
024funds into the rainy day fund reserve funds, yet he's still, for some unknown reason, manipulating the Prop 98. I mean, is that an accurate? Yeah, go for it. I think because he's using that money to fund other organizations in the state budget, which is concerning. Yes, I agree. I know we passed our... resolution during the last meeting asking them not to do that. One other comment that came up was that again, just some concern was that the, while the budget is currently balanced, it said that structural deficits. persist because ongoing revenues are outpaced by ongoing expenditures. So like you said, you know, we shouldn't, these one-time funds, I know we've all said this already, but you see where it got us into trouble before. So we need to use caution for sure. Right. That's all
025I had really. Trustee Pratt. Thank you again. I'm no mathematician, and I don't want to ever do a math problem. But I was just, because I still struggle to understand the budget, you can, but where would I see the cost savings from the schools closures and the staff that's been terminated, or what's a nicer word to say that? Let go. Reduction in force. From the budget solutions that were recommended and approved. We'll see that as part of the third interim when we look at the MYP. Okay. Thank you. Let's go ahead and use that as our dovetail into the third interim. So third interim, just as a reminder. Districts are required to do a third interim when we certify ourselves as qualified or negative. We're positive, but we agreed to do this because for us,
026it just establishes a good practice. It's an opportunity just to tighten the budget one more time before we get to closing. A reason that I actually just recommend the school districts always to do a third interim, even if you don't make it public and you do it for internal purposes only. Oftentimes, we will use these projections right now at this point in time as the basis for next year. So we'll look to see how much have we spent in utilities, and then we assume it's going to go up 5%, 6%, 7%, whatever our best information is. If at this point in time, We haven't tightened the budget. And the last time was, say, as of January 30 actuals when we did second interim. That's five months that lapse where we might not have caught an
027uptick or we might not have caught something that was happening. And so I often recommend let's just do the third interim, even if it's for internal purposes only, because it helps us tighten our own budget. Do you want to move on? So just at the highest level, there wasn't a lot of change from second interim to third interim. We did do some moving around of expenditures that we're going to highlight. It was for a very particular purpose. So we did do a little bit of cleaning up and adjustments that way. Bottom line, there weren't a lot of changes from second interim to third interim. Even as we tightened up utilities, there was an increase there. We were able to tighten up supplies and make a reduction there. So we were able to adjust that way
028so that net impact, we didn't see much of a change from second interim to third interim. If you want to... Actually, so one, just because I know this is on folks' mind, the services and operating expenses, you see an increase there of $882,000. Can you sort of just look at that so people can see what it is? Yeah, that $882,000, that was an adjustment of the way we were coding some dollars. Do you want to talk to folks about the credit that we were counting on? Yeah, so this is, I'm sorry. So in our special education budget, we have our students that we send to SCO as a fee for service. We pay for those through a $5,000 service account. Part of our Sonoma SELPA funding model is that we get $50,000. Each member district
029gets $50,000 for a... I'm not 100% sure what the correct term is, but it's referred to as a medically fragile student. And we had equivalent, I think, again, Trustee Breck, I don't want to do math either. I think it was 11 students times 50,000, so that's $550,000 worth of those students. When we created the budget, we were under the impression that... That was going to be credited towards the 5,000 account. But we got new revenue updates from SELPA that included that as a $550,000 revenue. So you can see in remaining revenues, there's some increase up there that offsets a large portion of that service and operating expenditure increase, the majority, the major impact and factor to what's causing those services to increase by that amount. So essentially where we thought as of second interim, we
030believed that we were going to see this $50,000 benefit. We thought it was going to come to us on the... On the 5,000 side, where the county would pay for $50,000 per student. And so our costs in the 5,000 object code was going to be $50,000 less than it otherwise would be. And so we'd accounted for it in the 5,000s. Since then, we've adjusted for it on the revenue side. So instead, we're going to see it as revenue, but we have, and we'll have the cost there for $50,000 on that. $5,000. There's too many fives there. We'll have the $50,000 tossed in the 5,000 object code series instead of on the revenue side. There we go. A lot of fives. And so, high level here, not a lot of change. Do you want to go
031to the next one? Key takeaway point here is we are primarily reliant on the state. So the state has a good year. We have a good year. State has a bad year. We have a bad year. State has a cash flow problem. They solve it by making it our problem. So that LCFF plus the state portion of the revenue of our revenues is the overwhelming majority of the dollars that we receive as a school district. If we were to. Pass a parcel tax, our local revenue would increase as a slice of the pie. The federal revenue, it's a small sliver. It's probably always going to be a small sliver, right? For as much attention as education receives when we have a presidential election as part of the debate process, it's really not reflected in the
032dollars that we receive from the federal government. Next slide over. As always, we spend most of our dollars on people. It takes people to educate kids, and that's where we see most of our spending. That doesn't change. Next slide over. And then our contribution for special education. So this is a portion of the pie that... Might look different if the state comes through with additional dollars, right? Like this pie generally looks the same at every reporting period, but if we were to get more dollars from the state and manage to control our costs over the years, we would see the state portion of the pie grow. Next slide over. So assumptions for our MYP, this is a part where I say like as a board, like these are some of the key assumptions we want
033to keep our eyes on and ask questions about. Here you have our enrollment. You see ADA show up twice and you might wonder why. That top line reflects the... attendance, the average daily attendance we're expecting based on the actual kids we're serving this year. So that's the, for the, in FY 25-26, for the 12,188 kids we have enrolled in our school system, we expect them to come to school and give us ADA of 11,219. What the state has done, because so many school districts are declining in enrollment, is it's softened the impact of that by giving us some options on how we're funded. And so we have our projected ADA, which is tied to the number of kids we're serving this year. And then we have the funded ADA, which takes into account what does
034our average look like over the past years. And there's some options in place and we get the benefit of the higher of those options. And so for us, you'll notice our funded ADA is greater than our actual ADA, right? That's how we see the benefit of that soft landing. We get a little bit of extra time to prepare ourselves for eventually the fact that. we have a decreasing population of students that we're serving. Our underserved pupils, I don't love the, it's unduplicated is the phrase that the state uses. I don't like it, so I call them underserved or underestimated. We have pretty notable uptick in the count from the prior year to the current year. Just best thinking for us is that doesn't really reflect a change in the population. It's more reflective of our
035ability to count them and actually confirm that we have unduplicated or underserved students. And so that bump up reflects the fact that we've been able to better count them this year than we have in the past. Our attendance rate, you see there, it's steady at that 92%. As I'm looking at it, I'm thinking one thing we might do going forward is separate the attendance rate so that we can see elementary versus secondary. Elementary, we usually get a higher percentage rate than secondary, so it gives us something to focus on. And so we'll look to make that adjustment for us at adopted budget. Do you want to go to the next one? Here we have the COLAs. I'm going to note the, so this is the third interim, which is actuals as of April 30th. And
036so for the only COLA we've taken advantage of so far is that 2.87. So for the new year, we knew that that COLA was going to be at 2.87 based on the best information. And so we've assumed that in our MYP. Since the May revise has been released, that third year is actually greater than the 3.06. I'm forgetting off the top of my head what it is. 3.30. 3.30. And so that'll be another adjustment upwards. We'll get to see as part of the governor's proposed budget, as part of our proposed budget. So when we're repairing the MYP, we will include the full, all of the information from the May revise. Federal COLA, just here, we always assume it at zero. Sometimes that feels like it's the worst case scenario, and sometimes it feels like it's
037the best case scenario. And so we're pretty steady on assuming it at zero. And then on the expenditure side, we always budget for a step and column. It's an automatic increase that we see based on the salary schedules that we've adopted and agreed to. And so we will always include that step and column as an increase in our costs. So something like when we see the impact of the reductions of the budget solutions being implemented and the impact of the savings from the RIFs, they're offset. by this automatic increase that we have from step and column. And so it's net of those changes. And we'll see that in a moment when we look at the MYP. Special education, we're going to continue assuming it's going to increase until we can show otherwise. And what that
038will look like for us in the future is when that average, that rolling average will start to decrease, and then we'll know we're doing some work that's actually working and helping us contain those costs. Indirect costs, the inflationary increase, CalPERS and CalSTRS are standard. We don't make those numbers up. They're provided to us by the Department of Finance. And so we insert those numbers and we assume them in all of the out years. Next one over. When we put all of those things together, this is what we see for our MYP. One of the adjustments we made this year was we're looking at the three years for the MYP, but we added one year of actuals. So we've got one year of reality that sort of just helps us see what the changes are from.
039Last year that was done, those numbers aren't going to change to the current year and the two out years. And so there you can see for since 24-25 for salaries and benefits, and that's all employees funded out of the general fund. We've gone from $194.7 million last year to about $182 million in the current year. And then we're projected to go all the way down to $170.6 million next year, right? So that's where we see the impact of those reductions of solutions that were recommended by staff and approved by the board. Let's see. I'll just point out in the transfers in and out, there's in 25-26, there's the big number that 5.9 is inclusive of the $5.4 million budget solution that was recommended by staff and approved by the board to move dollars from Fund
04040. over to the general fund. And so that's why we have that big dollar amount there that looks a little odd. It's odd. It's one time. It was a one time solution. And this is the item where it's there's the benefit of the current year and then the nine hundred thousand dollars for the next two. That goal is still the same of it's just for three years. So when we have the governor, then. I keep calling it the governor's proposed budget. When we have our proposed budget presented to you, what we'll see in the new third year, which will be 2028, 2029, the new third year, that $920,000 should go down to zero because we're going to stop taking those RDA dollars from Fund 40 and instead start to collect them again so we have
041them available for deferred maintenance and other facility needs that we have. Go to the next one. We put all of that together, and I'm just going to draw our attention to that very last line. So we make the assumption for our components of the ending fund balance. So we have our ending fund balance. We set aside what is legally restricted, and that's the restricted ending fund balance you see there. If you could do the little arrows to show the line. And then we have our 3% reserve for economic uncertainty also calculated in there. And it's at the 3%, even though we were trying to get to a 10% eventually. And then the unassigned portion is what happens after all of that math. So in the prior year, we ended the year in the red, 8.2
042million, right? brought that down pretty significantly, down to minus 4 million. And in the next year, without any of the assumptions in the May revise, the only one we reflected is the increase in the statutory COLA for next year. That's the only one we've assumed. And with that, we can now meet our 3% reserve next year. And we have some cushion there of that 1.6. That is tremendous work for an organization to have been able to accomplish in the time frame that you did it. And I recognize how painful it was, but you did it. You did it. And I tell everyone about the work that you were able to do here. what this MYP looks like now, again, without all those extras that we're crossing our fingers come through with the May revise. Excellent.
043You want to talk a little bit about cash? Yeah, so with the third interim, we updated the cash flow based on the updated projections that we just went over. And second interim, I think we were about four point. ending cash balance at June 30, 2026. Our updated cash balance ending at June 30 is about $5.7 million. That's with no inter-fund borrowing and no special financing. Then next year, I think at second interim, we're a little over like $2.5 million in ending cash on June 30. Here with... The updated third interim on June 30, 2027, we're about 3.5 million in cash. And so cash is different from ending fund balance. You can remember, I think the actual ending, total ending reserve was about 11.6 million or 14.5 million. That includes the restricted reserve. So that's not
044the reserve towards our physical health. reserved for economic uncertainty or unassigned and appropriate. That's all of our reserves that can be used for towards cash flow. So what our third interim includes is a positive cash flow. But you can see in both years, we do show periods of negative cash. Now, We do have a line of credit with the county treasurer that allows us to have cash on hand when we don't have cash, but we do pay interest for that cash. Now, when we have periods of positive cash, in the amounts you can see, we do get paid interest by the county for that too. So you can see the overall interest is somewhat neutral, but... When we have the more cash on hand, we have the higher reserve, the more cash flow we have,
045the less interest we have to pay. So I think that's just one more highlight here. Back at second interim, I had shared that the state as part of the budget for the current year. essentially defers our June apportionment, right? So every month we get an apportionment from the state. Think about it as the paycheck to us from the state. The paycheck we were supposed to get in June, they were going to, the plan was to withhold it until sometime in July. The state understands that would cause some school districts some problems. And so there's a process by which we can apply for a waiver to the deferral. And back at second interim, I shared with you, we were planning to apply for the waiver for the deferral, but our best thinking was our cash position
046had improved so much that I didn't think we were going to actually be eligible for it. We did, we were notified that we were denied the waiver for the deferral. And that's good news, right? Sounds like bad news, but it's good news because it means we're solid in our cash. We have what we need to be able to end with positive cash. And so it's good news for the district and again, reflects the result of all of that hard work. Here are a list of things that we're continuing to keep our eyes on and ears open to because we know that it can be impactful for what we might see. I'm going to note one of the items for the charter schools. One of the outstanding items that we listed off as a budget solution
047that was speculative. too speculative to include as a solution, but we were going to continue working on it to see what we could bring to the board. We have actually identified some expenditures totaling about $300,000 for the past several years of expenses that we covered for charter schools in the general fund. that could have, should have been charged to the charter schools. And so we've identified those expenses as a first step. As the second, third, and fourth steps, we'll be working with all the right people to talk about the moves that need to happen. And our plan is to be able to do that as part of the closing process. So that's an additional $300,000 that wasn't listed on the budget solutions, but was a speculative item that we'll be able to include as well.
048So next steps, as Liz mentioned, we'll come back in June with the public hearings for the local control accountability plan and the budget. And the budget will include the 2025-26 estimated actuals. That'll be an update from the numbers we just looked at in this third interim. don't anticipate changes. I think with the third interim, a positive outcome of that is we have really, really pretty, what's the right word, precise third interim numbers for those 25, 26 estimated actuals. And then again, as Trustee Jenkins mentioned about the state enacted budget will be approved by June 30. So then... Well, as it shows here in August, another step after the budget, because our budget is adopted based on the May revise. Then when we adopt our budget and the state adopts their budget in June, we'll be
049back in August with a 45-day budget update to see if any of our budgeted revenues or expenditures are updated with any changes between the governor's May revise and the state enacted budget. And in July, we'll be continuing to close the 25-26 books again. And those will come. It doesn't show here, but in September, we'll bring the unaudited actuals for this current year with the final numbers. Questions? All right. So first, I just want to contextualize this calendar because I think a lot of times people are like, why do you do things that way? And I asked the same question of you, and I appreciate you guys answering it. What Trustee Jenkins was alluding to is we have to approve our budget before the state approves the budget that tells us how much money we have.
050We have to approve our largest expenses before we even have the May revise to tell us how much money we're going to have. And we have to do that because that's our people. And we have to do that in the February and March period. And we will actually, because we're funded based on average daily attendance, not know how much money we receive for the year until September of the next year. So we don't actually know how much money we were going to have until three months after the year ends, which is not actually a healthy way to run an organization, but it is what is mandated by law, and we have no ability to change that. So I just really want to emphasize that this is what we have to do, not how we would
051do it if we were choosing a functional system for making decisions that provided certainty and transparency. Because FCMAT identified the number one concern for us and us having the number one concern in the state around cash flow, I'm specifically interested in the projection. As we're advancing on rebuilding reserves as to when we would not foresee needing to utilize the county line of credit. I think that had been an assumed practice, but in the context that I've learned and we've learned from FICMAT and throughout the state, it is not a common practice in the way it's been assumed and used here. And so if you could address that and really. you know, where we can expect to see that not be a tool that's used in the dysfunctional way it has been. So there's a couple
052of pieces there. So one, go to the MYP for me. Actually, that's the one I want to show. Right there. So the challenge for us is we know that salaries and benefits, they go out steady, right? They always do it the wrong way. They go out steady, right? From July all the way to June, it's a steady payroll that we run. July is always a little bit low. August might be a smidge low, but we know that it's very, very steady. On the revenue side. it's very volatile. Volatile is probably an overstatement, but we have spikes, right? So we get a small dollar amount in state aid and then property taxes come in. And so there's a big spike, right? So until and unless. the state changes the way that funding happens, we're probably always
053going to have some need to figure out cash solutions. And cash solutions might be a county line of credit. It might mean a county loan. That's a much more standard way of borrowing from the county as a loan. A TRAN is another example of how we might borrow. Borrowing from ourselves is always an option for inter-fund borrowing. But for the dollar amounts we're talking, it's usually borrowing externally from ourselves. So the need to borrow externally, that in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing because of the way we're funded, right? So unless the property taxes process changes and we start getting it on a monthly basis. If those spikes are going to continue the way they are, we're probably going to have some need. Where, like my little asterisk on that is when we
054had the COVID relief dollars. COVID relief dollars happened. And for most school districts, if we were doing a TRAN, we got to stop doing the TRAN. If we were doing borrowing from the county on a loan, we were able to stop doing that. So we were able to stop because those COVID relief dollars were so significant. So something short of that. I don't see how we would, but lessening it, right? That's key. If you go back to the cash flow, you can see the size of those deficits, right? So to make it so that we don't need to worry about borrowing up to $51 million from the county treasurer on a line of credit or a county loan, which what I would submit to you is probably the preferred way to do it. To get
055that down to half of that, I think that's reasonable. And just quickly, what's a TRAN and why is a county loan preferable? A TRAN is a tax revenue anticipation note, and it is a short-term loan borrowing vehicle that we essentially say, we know we're going to get our property taxes in December and April. Will you let us borrow enough cash so that we can make payroll until... we received the dollars in the property taxes in December and April. Reasonable, common, perfectly appropriate. I would say a county loan is, it matches up to what's just a little bit more standard where we're going to set the amount in advance. We're going to set the payment plan in advance. We're going to agree upon an interest rate. With a line of credit, it's a line of credit,
056right? So it just has a different level of... What's the word? Volatility? Responsibility. Like if I have to take a loan, I'm going to figure out what's the amount I need. How am I going to repay it? What are the terms that I'm going to agree to? With the line of credit, I'm sort of agreeing on that, but there's this volatility to the way we spend dollars that just feels like there's a little bit less. ownership over how much I'm going to need and when I'm going to need it. And I think doing that due diligence of this is what I'm going to need. This is what I'm going to need it. This is why I need it. I think it's just worthwhile. My colleagues for questions. We did start a few minutes late on
057the study session. I anticipate we'll move to regular session around 610. I'm going to start with trustee Kirby, who's our finance committee chair, and I'll move around the dais. Just to follow up, I believe on. Trustee Kasten's question, because the PCMAT had said, obviously, that he stated that he wasn't unsure about this from Sonoma County taxes. Like, I've never seen. He was concerned with the way we were getting cash in and out. And so these things that you're talking about, the loans, the trans, line of credits. If we're doing that, we're doing that to alleviate some of their concerns into the way that we're getting the cash from the county. Is that correct? Yes. It's the way the line of credit works that raised just some question marks of this is different from what we
058see in other places. In other places, it's much more common to see a loan from the county treasurer than it is to see a line of credit the way we see the line of credit. Thanks. Trustee De La Torre. First, I just want to say thank you. This is a lot of hard work. This isn't us. This isn't you. This was a we, solutions that took a long road to get here. Unfortunately, all this good work is never going to be acceptable to arrive at a thunderous applause because of all the pain and turmoil that it took to get there. the reduction in force, the reorganization or removal of programs. A lot of pain was felt to get here. When we look at these one-time funds, are there opportunities when we're looking at our balance
059sheets and what needs to be borrowed and how to be borrowed? for one-time funds to be used for any of those paybacks? Or do we need to be better prepared on how we're using those one-time funds for one-time resources? I can only speak for myself, but I know that we've learned some really valuable lessons on how... Those one-time funds were previously used by this district for things that just were not sustainable because we did not have the attendance and the revenue to sustain those. So I really want to ensure that all this hard work does not go awry, that we stay focused and stay prudent to the course put in front of us so that we're appropriately seeing these one-time funds, assuming they do actually show up. Trustee Jenkins? I had two clarifying questions on
060one of the slides regarding the NYP and underserved. I think it was like the first NYP one. The assumptions. That one. Yeah, that one. Why does it bump back up next year to 69.6? Is it like an average situation? That's a, it's a great question. We actually have that conversation planned for the study session of how we built out those assumptions and what we see, where we see some risk and where we see some opportunity to improve upon that so that the 72.4 and then becomes our standard and then we shoot up from there. Okay. Thank you. And then the other one was related to services and operating. Increase on one of the other ones. Maybe there. Wait. Yeah, there. So it goes, actually, it was the longer one. It was the one with, it
061was an MYP. Yes. So it does continue to increase. And I'm thinking like, since we have fewer buildings with closures and consolidations, why, what are the things that make this go up? And this is like the 5,000s-ish, right? Yes, the 5,000s. So some of the things that just are automatic increases on the natural are going to be things like property and liability insurance. We have NPA and NPS contracts, non-public agency and non-public school contracts. Those rates go up every year. They don't go down. As a district, we have a higher than average percentage of students on IEPs. And so that just means that increase is steeper than it otherwise would be. We use a standard CPI, Consumer Price Index factor, to just assume those increases are going to go up. Utilities is the other big
062one there. Just as our home bills keep going up, these do as well. Trustee DeFossey? Thank you. Just a couple of questions. You talked about that it isn't required to do the third interim, and I'm guessing we in the past didn't do that very often here, but what reasons do districts not do it? It seems like best practice you would do it, whether you have to or not. You should be educating not only us, but the public, right? So that's one question. The other one isn't related to that. Okay. So for that one, the most commonly is the, this is the same time we're doing the third interim is the same time we're working on budget development. And there's just a time crunch, right? So while we're working on third interim, it meant we're not
063working on the proposed budget. We can make that tie of why it's important, but that's essentially what it comes down to is, is if we don't have to, we don't because we want to be working. We want to spend that time and energy working on the proposed budget. I still recommend it. Thank you. The other question on the MYP, your step-in column, we're making assumptions on increases, and I'm wondering what assumptions you're using to determine that percentage. Are we using actual center of the city school demographics and employees individually, so we're moving all of these people up? That's how we're doing it? That's correct. The financial information system that we have is a good one. It's a solid one. And one of the reports we're able to generate is called the step and column increase.
064And so it takes our base population from the current year and moves everybody up a step for the subsequent year and makes an assumption about what happens on the column side. And so we're able to take those averages where I have a wondering. of what will happen now that we've had the significant reduction in force that we've had, is that going to change the 1.3%? I don't know the answer yet, right? We're working through all of those pieces and we'll be able to see, will that ultimately make an adjustment to it or not? It's usually the fractional portions of a percentage. And just to clarify, our step-in column isn't automatically every year increase for every employee every year because of how it's structured. So that's why I'd want to see how the new averages land.
065Yes. It may not necessarily be every employee, but it's just based on the salary schedule and which cell in the salary schedule you are on. And that's what determines it. Okay. And I just want to also note that the adoption of... ensuring that we do a third interim next year as a part of our item 3B, or sorry, not 3B, H3B, where we will be codifying that we'd be doing a third interim if we adopt that proposed meeting calendar. Just to practice all my questions. So I also want to express my thanks. I want to emphasize that our next meeting will have the proposed budget, which will include your much-anticipated review of the 5000s. If you want to provide some commentary on that now. We've actually got some updates that are part of the study
066session. Then let's take the time and have that happen. Perfect. How fast do we need to go? For this item, we have time. Okay. So let's see. So we put together some items just based on the conversations we've had this year, some items of interest that have been expressed. And so we've put together some information for you. So if you want to, let's start off with this one. This is. It's an intriguing item for me professionally, right? So I know this tends to get a lot of interest from folks of where we are relative to this requirement. It's known as the current expense formula. Depending on the type of district you are, there's a requirement of the minimum amount we're expected to spend in the classroom. And for us, we count as a unified school
067district, even though we're not technically unified. That's the way we get measured against that 55%. One thing that has been happening over time, I don't know how old this requirement is, but it is old. It's been in Ed Code a long time, is we have over the years more and more school districts that are not meeting the minimum requirement. Primary reason for it is the way the funding flows, right? So if we receive lottery dollars that are for instructional materials. We can't spend those in the classroom on salaries and benefits, and so they're external. There were a lot of dollars that we received over the years that are of interest because they're things that are just automatically outside of the classroom. So we think about the social-emotional learning support that we would receive. Those are
068out of the classroom, so they don't count toward that 55% requirement. The, I guess for me, it's an item of interest that it's so interesting to others in that when I've looked to see what is the meaning behind the 50% for high school, the 55% for unified, the 60% for elementary, like why does that matter? Does anyone know what the research says on those benchmarks? No? Okay. If you find it, let me know because I can't find anything. So it's not meaningful that way. It's just a benchmark that's established. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm just saying we should have reasons for what we do what we do. And I can't find the reason that sort of describes why that 55% is the mark as opposed to 60 or 45. So with that.
069We've been doing the work to understand why we didn't meet the benchmark in this prior year. Is it the prior year? It's the prior year, right? Or in the current year. It's the current year, sorry. So we did not meet it in 24, 25. So we've been, I'm saying we, Joel has been doing a tremendous amount of work to sort of work through that and figure it out and see how we. how we need to adjust what we're accounting for and where to see where do we truly land against this benchmark. The county has been a great partner. They've actually, they did a mini training for us not too long ago on this topic. And school services has also been providing some resources on this just because there are so many school districts that are
070not meeting that minimum requirement. So hand off to Joel. Yeah, thank you. So as Liz mentioned, Recently, fairly recently, SCO provided a training on some areas of the Forum CEA. And additionally, in the School Service California May Revision Workshop, they also provided this to school districts in attendance. And the Forum CEA has, it's a... It's a sax form and it's got instructions on how it operates. So these are some of the instructions. I guess this is one of the slides that School Services California provided us. And I think the thing to take away from this slide and what we learned from School Services California and what we learned from SCO is really the third item here, resources to consider manually excluding. Resource 1400, Resource 2600, Resource 1619. And based on that, we did modify our
071accounts. to have these resources comply with this column B for manually excluding these. Now I can show you, so here's the, so again SCO, part of their training, they provided this document. It is a, it's because one thing about the Form CEA is inside the state software, which is SACS, the only budget reports that include this form are the unaudited actuals, which are at the year end, and the budget, when you open up the budget. So at interim reports, this was not a tool that we could use through that SACS. SCO has created this document now for school districts to use at interim reports. And I think we did talk about this over the first second interim that we wanted to start seeing, having this included in our report. So this is a third interim
072update. for the estimated actuals 25-26. And what we did was we only included the items that we learned from SCO and School Service California on these resources. And we did the same thing we've done in the past that's been audited by our external auditors in SCO. And this will be audited by external auditors in SCO. We can track the form here. And I wish I would have had a history of the numbers that we've had over the years. It has been right on that 55%. So you're going to see that right now our estimated actuals with these transfers and nothing else, it is currently landing at 55.01%, which... when we when we when we plugged in and we've done that before just showing that we were at 55 percent and I think it's fair to
073say that when we looked at when we were given these trainings from SCO and School of Scouts Cornea we had similar circumstances last year in 2024-25 if we would have known and had these trainings and this information I would think that we would be close to that 55% right there if we could redo it. So again, right now the deficiency amount is, there is no deficiency amount. So we do currently meet the form CEA with those updates to our accounts. And I think that's really the... It's that simple and complicated, I'm sure. Is this the full slide presentation? On the Form CEA? On this part, yes. But there is more? Yes. Let me have you advance and go through the next part, and we can ask all the questions at once. Perfect. Do you want
074to start this? Yeah, so this is a slide on our student data. And what we see here is pre-pandemic. enrollment and attendance numbers. And what stands out here is our current attendance rates after the pandemic and our pre-pandemic attendance rates. Because one thing that we did do in our third interim is update our student data. And we did show a decrease in attendance with third interim from second interim with P2 and some other, and in our future years as well. We have been tracking every, again, every interim report, we update all the projections from enrollment and ADA. And every year post pandemic, we want to show an increased average daily attendance percentage, but it just hasn't, it hasn't. Transpired? Is that transpired yet? So that's something we just, you know, as we work through the
075study session, that's something that we would want to be, you know, cognizant of. Again, and then we go back to the underserved students. Again, you can see our enrollment. You know, we can see the drop in enrollment from 2016-17. to 2,027, 28 projections, and then, you know, through 24, 25, we have actuals. We can see our average daily attendance has gone down not only relative to our enrollment, but also, no, I'm sorry, yeah, not only relative to our enrollment decrease, but also relative to our historical average and percentage of attendance. And then you can see, again, I think it was Trustee Jenkins mentioned, this is the slide that we were going to look at our underserved students. Do you want to take that one? Yeah, absolutely. So for... As we thought about the adjustments in
076the numbers, right? So we were at pre-pandemic, right? 8,086, 54, 7728. Like those are some pretty notable fluctuations over time. When we see that, usually the wondering we have is, is our population really changing that much every year? Or is there something about the way we're counting? the students that's varying every year. And I think for us, it's a question of the variance piece. So something I found interesting and heartening is looking from 22-23, our underserved count from 7,100 to 7,700 to 8,300 to 8,800, right? That's a steady increase. And so I imagine like when I saw that, I was like, oh, that means we're doing some really intentional work to be able to ensure that we're counting all of our students properly. And sure enough, when I asked the question, yes, you know, I
077got lots of information about the work that we're doing. to the question about like, then why is, why are we assuming that downturn for the next two years? So one, I just, I recognize that there is risk when we have the, the level of transition and change in an organization. And so we wanted to be careful about what assumptions we made. And so that's where we landed. And the push then internally is let's figure out how we solidify the work, how we standardize it, getting it in writing. I'm a big fan of getting it in writing so that everybody knows what it is they're going to do. So those steady increases that we saw stick. and can be maintained and maybe even grown over the next couple of years. I did pose a couple of
078questions to the champion that we had over the most recent few years on this, and that was Sarah. I asked her two questions. So one, can we get this in writing so that we can see and have something to hand off? And she said, yes, she can take care of it before June 30th. And then the second piece is if we could assign that. the button that somebody would get, a button that says champion for this effort, who would it be? Because that was part of the feeling is like, we need someone who's going to carry the torch on this and do the encouragement, make the phone calls to the principals, do all of that work to ensure that the progress that has been made sticks and continues over the next few years. Now, I'm
079hopeful once we get to CBEDS next year and we see that, okay, yes, indeed, we maintained it, then that would be an increase you would see there that would impact your funding as well. Here's just our favorite slide on ADA and attendance, right? So the reminder here is always we spend money based on enrollment. That's that top blue line. And we generate revenue based on that bottom line. That's average daily attendance. And so the work we can do to close that gap. means we have kids in class where the teaching and learning is happening. We'll get the return on investment, right? For everything we invest in teachers in the classroom, we need the kids in the classroom to get that return on that investment. Can you go back one slide for me real quick? The
080attendance rate is the other one. So another way we'll adjust this is to do the elementary versus secondary. But do note, like we are still, now that we're post-pandemic multiple years, we're still less than where we were in terms of attendance back then, right? So we were at almost 94-ish on average for attendance before the pandemic, before shelter in place, and we're still hovering at 92% now. So there's something we can do there to continue improving on that attendance rate. Okay, perfect. And then, actually before this one, can you share the Google spreadsheet so we can do the 5,000s? As Joel is pulling up the spreadsheet on the 5,000, so it's going to look a little different from when we saw it last during the Saturday session. Just based on some of the questions and
081the findings, I reformatted a little bit. because I thought it would be easier to see some of the spaces where we really just, the flexibility to adjust for things just isn't as clear as we'd want it to be, isn't really as open as we'd want it to be. So on the far left-hand side are all of the object codes and descriptions that go along with them. Okay, is that big enough for everybody? Okay, I think that's good. And can you make sure it's at the top? Yeah, so the revised budget. Can I, I cannot, okay, scroll down to so you can see the total. So for the revised budget, we see, thank you. Here we go. So $62.45 million. That's everything in the $5,000s. And the $5,000s is extensive. Sometimes we do the translation in
082our head of $5,000s equals consultants. That is inaccurate. It's not consultants. It's utilities. It's property and liability insurance. It's a whole lot of things that get reflected in there. So here we have... all of the budget for the third interim on the 5,000s. And here's what I just want to try to highlight. Is that me? There we go. Let's try that again. Here we go. So here we have, I can't, I'm in your mouse. Here we go. So of that 62.45 million, the first exercise we've gone through is to go in and see of all of that 62 million, how much of it is related to special education, right? The way we pull out that data. is we know that any cost related to special education has a particular goal attached to it. A goal
083is one of the accounting terms that we have as part of our accounting string. So we look at goal that starts with a five, and then I automatically know that's special education, right? So that's some of that shorthand. I often describe a chart of accounts is like a cipher. It helps you decipher the budget. And so that's what we go looking to. And we can realize as I'm talking, I'm going into my teacher mode. So I'll try to back up a little bit. But the, so here we have everything in the special education. They're not small amounts, right? They're not small amounts. The non-public school, non-public agencies, those are significant dollar amounts on our students with IEPs. And so we can see here 58% or $36 million of that 62 that we think about as
084being part of the 5,000s is for our students on IEPs. This often feels like it's not a place where we can go in and make really notable cuts. We really look to try to find a way to better serve surgeons and control costs. But so here in this space in particular, that anything you see in blue. has been an area of focus for us in the past year, where we've been thinking about how do we control costs, how do we reduce costs, and might have even been a part of one of the budget solutions we were looking at specifically. For the non-public school and the non-public agencies, those are rates specifically that our special education director was looking at how do we negotiate better rates for our school system. This was another area of those.
085It was a focus area for us. I think one of the agenda items for tonight is the listing of the NPA and NPS contracts, right? And that was to help us just have that constant view of how much we were spending so that we wouldn't have surprises at the end of the year. The next column over, and this is different from the last version you saw, was our RMA. That's our Routine Restricted Maintenance Account. This is a required accounting. We have to contribute 3% of our general fund expenditures to our RMA. So just as we have to have a 3% reserve for economic uncertainties, we have to take 3%, that same 3%, and contribute to this RRMA resource 8150. So I... Chose to show this one separately because often with RMA that the bulk of
086that spending does happen on the non-personnel side. We definitely have maintenance workers and folks charged to it, but there's a lot of it that is charged to the 5,000s and even the 4,000s. And so I highlighted this one in part because I know that even if we didn't spend it here in the 5,000s, we'd still have to spend it somewhere. All right, so that's a distinction that I think is worth hearing, right? So if we didn't spend this RRMA because Eric was able to figure out a way to not spend $1.3 million here, it doesn't save anything to the bottom line. He still gets that $1.3 million to spend somewhere else. That make sense? Okay. All right, next one over. And this one, summer school and after school, I chose to highlight this one because
087this is where we do our after school programs and it's, they're on contracts. And so that is just, that's the way we've. chosen to do it. We do after-school contracts where we don't have the employees, our own employees providing those services. And so because of that, I thought I would highlight, you know, this is after-school programs is something we value. Summer school is something we value. And this is the way we spend those dollars. And so again, it's just a way of highlighting, yes, 5,000s can feel like something we want to reduce and get rid of. Here's an example of how we spend 2. $5 million in the $5,000 that's specifically for summer school and after school. Prop 28, Proposition 28, that's our arts dollars that we receive, is another one. This year was an
088exception for us in the way we got to use some of those dollars because we had the amount of carryover that we had. And so we can see that we were spending close to half a million dollars in Prop 28 on contracted services. And so, again, this is another area where the idea of just cutting it isn't really what we want to do, right? It's about sort of identifying what some of those funding sources are. And so that's one more. Another one that we started that's new, different from the last version you saw, is the one-time and the pass-through. So we do have some dollars that we have that are expiring either in the current year or the next year. And so we've highlighted these because these are going to be mostly expenses that aren't
089going to show up again. The big ones in here are like educator effectiveness grants. Those that paid for quite a bit of professional development. And I blanked on some of the other ones. Educator effectiveness. We have a teacher capacity grant in there as well. Golden State Pathways. Golden State Pathways, yeah. A few implementation grants where they give us money to get things. Like a universal transition kindergarten grant, implementation grant. Ed Stuff. Kit. Yeah. Yeah. What does kit stand for? Kitchen infrastructure and training, I think, is what kit stands for. So some of our CNS, our Child Nutrition Services grants for those purposes that we received in the general fund. And so those are some one-time dollars that I know people want to see this go down. This is one of those ways it's going to
090go down. We have these one-time expenses in here. The grants will expire. And so we'll see those decreasing. unavoidable. We do have unavoidable costs, right? So I don't want to, I don't want for anyone to leave with the idea that like the five thousands is just automatically wrong and bad, and we should be aiming to get it to zero because we can't do that, right? That's just, it's not possible. So I'm going to show some of the unavoidable costs that are real for us and we're probably not going to ever be in a position of eliminating them for one reason or the other. When I say not eliminating them, that doesn't mean we don't work to manage the cost, right? We can still work to manage the cost so that it's not increasing or if
091we can decrease it. So one, transportation, right? We provide transportation to students. That's a real cost. It's a significant cost that's going to stay there. Crossing guards. We pay for them, over half a million. We're not going to be eliminating those. I cannot see as well without my glasses. Here's the big ones. Insurance. This is our property and liability insurance, so not health and welfare insurance like benefits for folks. This is property and liability insurance, $3.1 million. So that's real. We're not going to eliminate it. We need to be insured. Utilities is a big chunk, right? The same way at home, those increases keep happening. They keep happening here as well. One of the changes we made in the current year was we have this now assigned to Eric and his team. So they're going
092through the process of making sure that our water bill isn't accidentally going up different from what is expected. Eric and I have been in conversations and thinking about what opportunities do we have to really dig into those. invoices to ensure that we're not paying more than what we should. In the past, the district actually had, I don't know if it was somebody on contract or somebody as an employee whose job that was, right, to look at every monthly invoice to ensure that where we can save, where we can turn things off, all of those pieces were getting managed by an individual. And essentially their position was funded by the savings generated from managing those invoices. Let's see, is there any other one? Legal. So I'm going to step in here just because we are running
093low on time. So I'm going to move to the board members. What I'd like us to do is focus on questions that will be what come back to us for the budget hearings at our June 10th meeting. So let's just identify anything that we want to have more details or answers on for that meeting. I'm not necessarily getting into it tonight. Trustee Kirby. So 1961. That's when that 55% was. So you're correct. It's been a long time. Is this slideshow going to be made available, like posted to the? Okay. And I really appreciate all the work. I know I was really pushing to have this done, and I just really appreciate all the work that went into this. I know it was you and Joel and the team. done a great job on this i
094appreciate it you know just the transparency is is uh really important i think for the community to see all this thank you trustee jenkins Yes, for the future. The summer school, summer and after school in the 5000s, in my brain, I had that somewhere else completely. I thought it was more of a restricted thing where money came in and money had to go out for that specific program. So just some additional information on that would be really helpful. Thank you. Trustee Pratt, Trustee DeFosse. Thank you. And thank you for the work. This is great. Come back. You further break down the student data assumptions, especially on the unduplicated or the underserved population. I see, you know, we talked about how we're capturing them better. We've gone to a seven through 12 model, which could have
095some impact on where people go. But I think you said you were going to like codify some processes for that. So I'd have, I have a lot of interest in. knowing how that's going to happen and whatnot. It's a big number. Trustee De La Torre? So I don't know if it was understood as a question enough, but I want to know more specifics on what we can do with the one-time funding. So if we can get any more specifics on how we're able to appropriately spend that so we don't spend it the ways that we had in the past. And I'd like similar breakdowns for this within our charter account. Understand which of our charters actually have reserves versus not, how their multi-year attendance projections, because they don't have the three-year averaging, how those are
096going to look for their health. So just more detail similar to this, but separately, maybe a slide in each category for the charter fund health. And then... On the 5,000s, when it comes back, I appreciate how this is getting broken down, but an articulation of what we're actually going to be able to discontinue doing and a recognition that when we discontinue doing something, it means we're not doing it anymore. We're not just asking for others to do more with less. So, you know, a similar celebration of those things that we are able to move off of this. With that, I'm going to thank you both for all of your work and Lucy, your tremendous work over this year. I mean, it's hard to celebrate what we've had to do to get here, but I look
097at what's happening in Sacramento and in Oakland and other places in the state and the potential of them literally not being able to make payroll in the spring of next year. And we're not in that place today in large part because what... both of you and many, many others have done in this district. So on behalf of the board, my sincere thank you for your work. And I'm going to let you step away from the dais right now. We do have an action item on the third interim. You're correct. Can I get a motion on, sorry, study session, so I didn't have action in my mind. Trustee Jenkins? I move to approve third interim. And do I have a second? I move by Trustee Jenkins, seconded by Trustee Pratt. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Jenkins.
098Aye. Trustee Pratt. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee De Fossey. Aye. President Kasten. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. We're now going to reconvene to the general open session. I'm going to ask everyone to please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and then stay standing for the Territorial Land Acknowledgement, which will be presented by Luz Cazares. I acknowledge that Santa Rosa City Schools is on the... It's warm-up time. I acknowledge that Santa Rosa City Schools is on the traditional territory and homelands of the Pomo people, traditional territory and homelands of the Coast Miwok people, and honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it throughout the generations. This land acknowledgement calls us to commit to continuing to learn how to be better stewards of the land we inhabit.
099By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and we'll work to hold Santa Rosa City Schools more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. and I honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have taken care of and administered it throughout the generations. Thank you very much. We're now going to move to item D3, reports of action taken in closed session. On a unanimous vote, 6-0 with Trustee Medina absent, we approve the insurance superintendent evaluation. On readmission cases 2023-24-03, 2024- 25-25 and 2024-25-27. We unanimously approved on a vote of 6-0. Trustee Medina absent the readmissions as presented and recommended. There are no items that were considered in closed session for action in open session. We're now going to move to items D5, statements of abstention. I'll be abstaining from
100item G8. Trustee Pratt. I will as well. All right, so we have two abstentions on G8. Any other abstentions? All right, seeing no other abstentions, we're going to move to adjustments to the agenda. Item D7, Trustee Fitzsimmons and Trustee Carrillo both have graduation-related activities this evening, and so I'll be recognizing them at a later meeting. Are there any other adjustments to the agenda? Trustee Jenkins? I'd like to... G-1. All righty. And we'll also be considering G-1 and G-8 separately when we get to consent. Any other items? Trustee Kirby, did you have an item? No. All right. Trustee DeFosse? I just had some questions on G-5. So can we pull that one as well? Yep, we'll pull G-5. Thank you. All right, seeing no other adjustments to the agenda, we'll move to item E reports. E1,
101our California School Employee Association Centers of 75 report. And while you're actually right before you start, I do want to recognize that Interim Superintendent August is participating remotely due to illness. So she is present, just did not want to be coughing on all of us. And Trustee Medina is scheduled to attend virtually. Sorry for the recognition. Now for the CSEA report. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Good evening. Good evening, President Kasten. board members, interim superintendent Lisa August Hume, student board members, which are not here, cabinet and everyone joining us in person and on Zoom. Tonight is just seven days before the end of the school year. It is a time for thank yous, farewells, reflection and gratitude. We would like to honor the many coworkers leaving through retirement, layoff, and resignation. You have been
102part of public education and helped prepare the next generation to think, speak, and lead in our democracy. You helped students learn and grow. Your work mattered. Your presence mattered. We appreciate the time you spent with us. While tonight is a night of recognition, we also need to speak about the coming months. The third interim report shows the district has stabilized cash flow enough to avoid immediate state receivership this year. However, SCO oversight and grave concerns remain justified. The report reflects major reductions in spending and savings that may not be sustainable long-term. Many classified employees are struggling to understand tonight's agenda. item increasing the interim CBO's compensation retroactive to July 1st. We recognize the difficult work involved in helping stabilize the district's finances and avoiding receivership. However, classified employees have also carried this crisis on their
103backs. We have been laid off, reassigned, transferred, and told to wait. Fewer workers are doing more work. Vacancies remain unfilled. Services are stretched across, thin across the district. At the same time, classified employees are still waiting for a settlement of the 25-26 salary compensation, while every other bargaining group received theirs. The message employees hear is that there is money available for retroactive executive compensation, but not enough urgency to resolve classified employee compensation. That creates frustration, discouragement, and a growing feeling that classified work continues to be undervalued. If savings were created through vacancies within fiscal services, Then classified employees would rather see positions such as payroll technicians or HR technicians restored to support the daily operational needs of staff and schools. We were also told that school closures would eliminate the need for custodial and ground
104worker positions. Yet we now see certificated, classified. staff outside those classifications, and volunteers performing work that belongs to our groundskeepers and custodians. Those hours belong to those classified employees whose positions were eliminated. We are concerned the closed schools are being vandalized weekly. What can we do as a community to stop that? We ask the board to remember that stabilization should not be on the backs of the classified employees. We are not second-class citizens. With compassion and respect, thank you. Thank you very much for your report. We'll now move to item E2, Teamster Local 665 report. Hello Board of Trustees, I'm Mike Stanford. These are my associates, Mr. Hall and Mr. Dallaire, French American and Hidden Valley. We, the leaders of our Teamsters Local 665 chapter at Santa Rosa City Schools, are here to talk about
105our staffing crisis. At the last board meeting, our upper management and Rafael Sanabria and Eric Oden came here and told you very late at night that it was a mistake to cut custodial and maintenance staff last year. Both sides of our department are stretched thin by the unthought-out and unplanned need to keep the old middle school campuses open for athletics. In order to have staff on-site at the old campuses for athletic practices, sometimes custodial staff have had to leave their sites and their responsibilities to go to the old campuses. This leads to a loss of production back at the jumbo schools. further putting a burden on the already stretched in custodial ranks due to not having enough staffing to service the campuses as is. We have more students and in some cases more square footage,
106but the same amount of staff, which is less staff than in the 1990s when these campuses had the same amount of students due to the historical layoffs over the past 30 years. This increased ratio has led to burnout, fatigue, and injuries. Custodian-wide, we average eight to nine call-outs a day. That is about 13 to 15% of our custodians are not present each day. This is unsustainable. Mr. Sanabria especially said at the last meeting that we need more staff and we are here to echo his call. We need more staff. We need more district-wide custodians. We need more night custodians. We need the return of daytime custodians. For example, if we had more district-wide custodians, we could use them on the weekends to give respite to our secondary custodians. And to be even more efficient, we
107need to incorporate new technology, such as advanced robotics, into our schools. Our industry is a high-tech industry. You just have to invest in us like school districts bigger and smaller around the country are. We had one last thing over communication with facilities, but we discussed with them that issue about contractors coming on site without us knowing. And sometimes some of our members thought that was a bit of a security issue. So they're going to look into that and get back to us on that. We also know we have the sunshine on the agenda later today. So we look forward to negotiations with the district so that we can work to make our district a healthier and safer workplace and environment for our fellow staff members and especially our students. So thank you. Good night. Thank
108you very much for your report. Well, now I'll move to item E3, the San Jose Teachers Association SRTA report. Good evening, President Kasten, Interim Superintendent August, members of the board, members of the community. I've been spending a lot of time this last couple of weeks working with human resources and dozens of members who are being moved to new positions next year. The educators of Steel Lane Elementary School chose new positions last Friday. The educators of Comstock selected yesterday. These choices were not a joyful celebration. They were, in fact, met with tears and consternation and the destruction of the communities of these two schools, a direct result of closing Comstock and Steel Lane. Their teachers are scattered. throughout the district, losing decades in some situations of camaraderie and team teaching and building great educational systems for
109their students. Tomorrow, the counselors are meeting to select new positions, elementary counselors, MTSS counselors, and college and career counselors, all of them leaving behind them gaps. In service, gaps in care for the children of their schools they're leaving, and gaps in the job that they've been doing. Who's going to do it? We don't know. Next week, dozens more teachers will be meeting to select new positions because of the huge class sizes and the drastic slashing of sections at our secondary schools. Next week, Thursday, the second to last day of school, is when they get to pick. All of these teachers have been working at 110% this year, facing... New jobs next year, new students, new communities, not even to mention the fact that they have to pack their entire classrooms and unpack when they get
110to their new place. All of this is done without a salary increase this year. And the looming threat since last October of, in fact, a possible 2% reduction in the salary we're currently earning. None of them have been offered more for doing what they were contracted to do. None of us are being offered retroactive raises for our overtime and the extensive amount of work that we do for free every day. The district is barely meeting after some. interesting accounting and blaming it on the fact that the ed code is from 1961. Thank you, Mr. Kirby for that date. Barely meeting the 55% threshold of. spending money on our students. That's where that money should go, right? It's interesting to me that Ms. Cazares, who every response to any concern from the teachers about these cuts
111that were proposed was the absolute need to implement with fidelity. It seems that the only exception to that implementation is in fact more money for her. This board may have done the work of voting for the damaging cuts to our students. The real work is yet to come. It is undiscovered, and it's going to be done by the educators and the staff of this district because we're going to spend a lot of time for free trying to figure out how to serve our students with less. Fewer people, fewer resources, fewer support for our students, and... without one cent of that, hopefully more than 4% cost of living adjustment in salary. Shame on you for considering giving more than most CSEA members earn in a year to one individual. Shame on you for suggesting that you
112should give more than a beginning teacher makes after four years of working in our district to one individual. Shame on you for demanding furlough days from our administrators who are also working overtime and doing more with less, cutting their take-home pay while expecting the same amount of work from them. Our students deserve better. Our educators deserve better. Our staff and our administrators deserve better. Thank you. Thank you very much for your report. I'll now move to item E4, the superintendent report. Thank you, President Kasten. Sorry, my apologies for attending remotely, but thank you very much for the grace to do so as I'm sick and don't want to be sharing any of this with anyone else. I'm going to, it'll take me just a minute to share my screen. This evening I am going to
113present a bit of a pared down version of our annual report. I will attach my written report as well as the presentation. Excuse me. Forgive me as we go along here. It is part of the responsibility of the superintendent to provide a state of the district annual report. And so I will be sharing that update this evening. To the Board President Kasten, our trustees, staff, families, students, and community partners, it is my honor to present the annual State of the District Report highlighting the progress, challenges, and continued priorities of Santa Rosa City Schools during the 25-26 school year. This year has been one of rebuilding, stabilization, and forward momentum. Together, we have continued the important work of strengthening systems. Working, although not there, with restoring trust, improving student outcomes, and ensuring that our district is
114positioned for long-term success. While significant challenges remain, we have made measurable progress in aligning our work to the board's strategic priorities and creating a stronger foundation for the future of our schools and students. Sorry, thank you for letting me know. And on my end, it is visible. So let me... See if I put it in, if I share it not in slideshow, if that will work any better. That works. If you can zoom in on the slide part and reduce the screen. See if I can get it. It was acting up. I don't know what the issue has been lately. Sorry. See if I can get this to about as large as I can there. This is not wanting to give me the little error. Because of the time. There we go. Okay. Yeah, let
115me go ahead and just, I've uploaded my report, Strategic Priorities. I wanted to call out the work done over this past year with our governing board in laying out our strategic planning and organizational alignment. Just calling out some meaningful progress in strengthening planning and focused on alignment to goals, site initiatives, and resource allocation. There's been a lot of work around cross-functional collaboration between departments and an improvement and focused effort on making data-informed decisions. with our fiscal stability and responsible stewardship. This is, as shared, one of the areas where the most significant work and progress has occurred. And I agree, it is not something to be celebrated in the impacts to our staff and community, the difficulties in it. And also it is important and to be acknowledged that this does set us up for long-term
116stability and success. We are continuing to work on our enhanced stakeholder communication and transparent sharing of information. A couple of highlights that I really do want to call out around student safety, wellness, and school climate. Specifically, discipline as we are now at the tail end of the year for the entire year over year improvement across the board. And specifically, drug offenses have decreased by almost 40%. Fights maintained a decrease at 19%. And knives incidents on campus decreased by 20, over 23%. A lot of this does have to do with... improved structures and processes. Several things, the discipline matrix, I think, has been, when we look at that and the clear implementation of that and the change in roles in our SSAs have all been instrumental as well as our administrative staff. Obviously, we have continued
117goals there. Do you want to call out with teaching, learning and student support progress around secondary redesign progress on our special education local plan and expanded initiatives to increase access for student engagement? community engagement and partnerships. We have strengthened relationships with many of our partners. I'm sorry, I skipped appreciation and culture. And I have to say that appreciation is one of the key items that we really need to make sure that we are focusing on, which is recognizing the dedication of our employees. It would not be possible without the dedication and resilience of our team members at SRCS. And it is difficult knowing that not all will be returning next year for various reasons, including reductions in the work this year and the professionalism and service to students is greatly appreciated. We've improved and strengthened
118our relationships with partners and have worked to enhance our engagement efforts. And I just want to say, you know, express commitment and gratitude as we move forward. You know, in realizing our vision, we remain committed to building a district that is fiscally stable, academically strong, operationally effective, and centered on the needs of students. I will, sorry, those might skip slides. go ahead and defer any further information sharing. Please refer to my report. Sorry that that is the way that this is presented this evening. Thank you for your understanding and patience with my lack of a voice and in-person participation. Thank you very much for your report. When I move to the board president report, I'm going to try and keep my comments short tonight, but I do want to recognize this point in time of
119the year. First, we have a lot of transitions happening, and while they're not here, I want to specifically recognize student trustees Carrillo and Fitzsimmons. Both of them have added to our board significantly this year. Trustee Fitzsimmons joined. part of the way through replacing a member who had to depart and seeing both of them not just showing their leadership by coming to these meetings and speaking up and contributing but also at the superintendent student council and on campuses throughout the year i just want to recognize their contributions and wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors and i also want to thank all the staff who have provided an amazing experience for our students, including my own children at our schools this year. This has not been an easy year to work for the
120Santa Rosa City School District. And recognizing each and every one of you who showed up. and provided an experience that I have only heard positive stories from the students on our campuses as I've had the opportunity to visit and talk with students. And so just recognizing the dedication that was taken to do that, and especially recognizing those staff members who have been showing up now for weeks and months, knowing that they were no longer going to be with us at the end of the year, but still having that dedication to our students, still showing up. and providing them with the experience that they deserve on our campuses. So you all have my heartfelt gratitude and appreciation. As a part of that, I did have the opportunity to visit eight of our campuses in the last
121two weeks, recognizing and having the opportunity to recognize sometimes in person and sometimes through message our classified, certificated, and students of the year. Specifically, I visited Santa Rosa High School, Ridgeway, Monroe, Lehman, Proctor, CCLA, French American, and the Arts Charter. And I appreciate each and every one of the folks that I was able to meet with and recognize, and also those who were visited by other trustees as we all were able to spread out throughout the district. I also attended the school services CSBA SCO joint presentation on the May revise along with Trustee Kirby and was able to participate in the CSBA policy packet quarterly update that was presented along with Trustee Jenkins. And I'll let both of them provide additional detail on those meetings. With graduation next week, this is a time for us
122to celebrate all that our graduates have accomplished. And, you know, it's a time of departures and sadness and change and joy and hopes. And it's going to be a very emotional week, I think, for many of us. And I look forward to joining you out on those campuses. With that, I'll go to our board member reports. Trustee Jenkins, would you like to start? Sure. So a busy couple of weeks as usual. Let's see. I attended the second portion of the master's in governance course related to the budget and attended the CSBA policy packet review for May. Our next policy meeting will be focused on updating out of compliance policies that are mandated, and we'll try to get to the monthly updates for May as well. Administrative regulations also fall under policy. However, superintendent is responsible
123for updating and ensuring implementation following adoption of the related board policies. I attended some wonderful ABAPA performances these last two weeks. Thank you so much, Gail Bowers and Michelle Crosby, for the direct invites. At the Carrillo Choir Concert, I loved watching with the students and witnessing that strong, cohesive community do their thing in that beautiful performing arts center. Additionally, I attended the final ArtQuest Dance performance, as well as the Montgomery Choir Concert. Kudos to all of you. As a daughter of a musician, a previous choir participant, and a dancer, I cannot state enough the importance of the arts on students' self-worth, belonging, and expansion of their minds, both socially and academically. While I'm very vocal about the need for electives, not only the CTE strands, VAPA was what was left, and the impact of cuts
124to those sections will have a huge negative ripple effect for years to come. That being said, to our families who are impacted by said cuts, stay resourceful. If it's not offered in school, find it outside of school. If it's not financially in your reach, apply for scholarships, order if possible, ride the storm until we can get it back. There are programs throughout the community that can fill this need. I'm not sure if we are partnering with Move Over Mozart in elementary or not, and I know that there are many after-school programs that offer music in one way or another. The arts are an absolute lifeline for many. Not related directly to our district, however, I attended the Chief's Community Advisory Team through SRPD. which this month was focused on the budgetary restraints of the city.
125And as a county employee, we've been having meetings pretty regularly regarding fiscal diets there as well. I mention this as a stark reminder that our entire community is facing similar challenges with cuts, hiring freezes, and pinching pennies, or I guess nickels, wherever possible. And something that comes up in every circle is how no system can do this without collaboration across our community. I do want to give a huge shout out to the Montgomery baseball team who is playing for title this Saturday at 1 p.m. at Newman versus Sonoma Valley. Go out and support our kids. Go Vikes. And then lastly, as our next meeting will be after the school year is over, finish strong, everyone. Stay safe and congrats to the class of 2026. Trustee Kirby? I also attended the RBMS concert on 5-21. Just
126outstanding. I saw Trustee Delattore and DeFosse there. Just an outstanding performance. I really appreciated all the hard work that the students put in, as well as the music department at that school. As President Kasten alluded, I also attended the budget revised meeting at SCO on Tuesday. Again, my main comment would be, I guess, I implore you, the public, to ask your state elected officials to prioritize. changing the way education is funded here in California. I just, it defies logic to me that you start out at an 8% deficit every year, no matter what. We're funded enrollment, 92% attendance rate, so we're already starting off at a deficit every year. So something needs to change. That just can't work. I don't know any other business model that would. It would work that way. Let's see. Lastly,
127I plan to attend the graduation at Ridgeway High School this coming Friday. Or next Friday. Sorry. Next Friday. That's it. Thanks. Trustee De La Torre? Thank you, President Kasten. First and foremost, thank you to our staff. Thank you to our teachers. Thanks to our administrators. Classified, certificated, however you are identified, none of this happens without you. Thank you for a year dedicated above and beyond to our students, to our community, and providing outcomes that only you could provide professionally. To those that we are saying goodbye to. If it was your choice, congratulations. If it was a fiduciary, I apologize deeply because I truly do wish there were opportunities to keep all needed to keep these things running. I'm very fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit our elementaries on back to school night. It's
128a beautiful thing to see the progress of the students, to have an opportunity to see their work, hear their stories. talk about what the opportunities meant to them. And as President Kasten has said earlier, not heard one negative comment from our students from their experiences. And that is due to the community that surrounds them and brings forth for them. I also had an opportunity to bring the student employee of the year awards to LCL in high school, still in elementary. Rinko Valley Middle and Murray Creole High School. I truly do hope we do find an opportunity to have those recognitions again in this chamber at a board meeting. I know that was pretty special for those families and understand why we may not have been able to find time this year, but I'm looking forward
129to finding better opportunities next year to truly recognize those achievements. As Director Kirby stated, Thank you to the invitation from the invitation from Ms. Boulez at Rinkavalli Middle. I was there with Trustee DeFosse and Kirby, and we cannot say enough about the VAP opportunities that our community is able to receive and participate in. And it truly is a beautiful thing to listen to music from our young gifted musicians. Lastly. June 6th, the district does have an opportunity entering to the Sonoma County Pride Parade that will be here in Santa Rosa on June 6th at 11 a.m. here in downtown Santa Rosa. If you are not aware yet, please reach out to your club or advisor on the campuses. There will be a gathering for Center City School District students and families who are interested in
130marching in the parade at SoCo Coffee at 9 a.m. The gathering is at 10 to get lined up, and the parade starts at 11. And there will also be a booth with Center City School District after the parade for families to get information, be recognized, be part of the community, be seen, be loved, be heard. To our graduates, congratulations. This was not done by any small feat. Be proud of your accomplishments. Thank your families and community that supported you to get to this point. And we look forward to honoring you next Friday as we say goodbye to class of 2026 and get prepared for the following school year. Really look forward to the opportunities I have in front of me to share time and space with Ridgeway and Marine Corps High School next Friday. Thank
131you. Trustee Prack. If I turn it on, I attended the CSBA Masters in Governance workshop, which I think I was invited to the party, but I shouldn't have been there. There should have been like a governance for dummies. That would have been more appropriate for me. I also was able to attend Steel Lane's farewell party last week. It was such a beautiful community to attend. beautiful community to be a part of. And it was also bittersweet since it was their farewell. But I'm hopeful all those teachers that are being re, what's the word? Reassigned. Thank you. Reassigned. And the students that are going to be reassigned to new schools are welcomed with open arms and make new friends. And the teachers have great years next year. And lastly, I look forward to being at Ridgeway's
132graduation and Piners because my first baby graduates next week. I know. I hope he shows up. Trustee DeFasi? I hope he shows up too. I also was in the second session, the financial session for Masters in Governance. Good training for board members. I was privileged to go to the open house at Helen Lehman and Monroe Elementary there a week or so ago. The concert at Rink and Valley Middle School with Trustees Kirby and Della Torre. Excellent, excellent music. And some of you that can't play very well, I even appreciated it more. I've been on the board about 33 days now, I believe. And so I finally got to meet the rest. In the educational world, we call it a cabinet. In my former life, it's executive management team. So I met with the rest of
133them, and they all very nicely gave me nice thick binders of information that I... am slowly going through and reading every page and I will get through them all. So I appreciate that opportunity. I'll be at Piner next week with trustee Prack to celebrate the graduation there. And lastly, I don't know whether we really do this, but since I did spend 32 years with the County of Sonoma and retired from there, even though they did get my name wrong on my 30 year. anniversary with them, which I always chuckle about. I noticed we got a listing of personnel folks that are going to be retiring. And I just wanted to shout out to some of these folks, 25 years, Joy Schirmer, 37 years, Janice Roddick, Lisa DeCarbo, 29 years, nine months, Rosalinda Brady, 41 years.
134Mary Kane, 23 years. Michael Persinger, 20 years. Anthony Slayton, 27 years. Linda Costanas, 34, almost 35 years. And I'm sorry, me and names never got along. Faces I'm good with. Kieflam Atombez, 31 years, 8 months. Faisal Wold Lassi. I'm really sorry I killed your name. 29, almost 30 years. I just want to say thank you for sticking it out and doing that many years of service here. It takes a lot of dedication to put that many decades of work in. So it's a hard time, I think, to retire. see the difficulties the district is in. But please keep the faith. We're going to continue to work hard as we can up here to get this thing stabilized and get us back in the right direction and start bringing back some of these needed services for
135the students because that's why we exist, right? We're here to educate. And that's what we're going to do. So that's all. Thank you. Thank you very much for your report. Trustee De La Torre. Thank you, President Kasson. I apologize, but since this is our last board meeting before the end of school year, I really want to show respect and thank the Hillard-Comstock community and the Still Lane Elementary community whose campuses are closing next week. Thank you for all that you were. Thank you for all that you have been. And thank you for all the love that you will carry with you onto your campuses next year. Thank you for the experiences and the communities that were built. Also, thank you to all the students and athletes that were here this afternoon and evening with hopes
136of talks. And I just want to apologize that. These meetings go the way they go, and sometimes other things come up, and you can't hang out as long as you want to to speak. But thank you for showing up and attempting to say what you need to say for issues that are important to you related to the school district. Sorry, I forgot Rafael Santabria, 31 years. With that, we'll go ahead and close the reports. We'll move to Item F, public comment on non-agenda and consent items. Is there any public comment on non-agenda consent? Yes, President Kasten, we have two blue cards. I'm going to go ahead and call those names. If you make your way to the podium, we have one minute, correct, President Kasten? Correct. Okay. The first speaker is Patrick Atchison, and our
137next speaker is Alex Krohn. Patrick? Hi. Okay, go ahead. My name is Patrick, and I'm a SEP teacher at LCL in high school. SEP stands for Counseling and Rich Program, and as such, we are currently one of the programs significantly impacted by cuts. In SEP, we have a teacher, two aides, and a therapist to support up to 12 students. We currently have a wonderful therapist who wants to stay and has relationships with all of our students, but she was cut along with roughly 80% of other SBTs. The SEP therapists provide an anchor for our students and are integral to their success and mental health in this program. They are the core of it. The SEP program does not function without therapists in person who can support students and cultivate relationships with them. I ask them,
138what is the plan? What can we expect? And what do I tell my students? It's easier to make cuts when you don't work with students directly. Right now, we have seven days left of the school year, and I have no idea who my program manager is next year or who our therapists are. We have therapists who want to continue working within our program and have relationship with these students and their families. Please rehire our school-based therapists. Thank you. Our next speaker is Alex Krohn. Go on. Thank you. I plan to send my five-year-old daughter to Hidden Valley Elementary School. I was impressed by the campus at the open house. However, I was alarmed to see powerful Wi-Fi routers placed feet above the ceiling. As a parent, I believe we have a responsibility to protect children.
139Man-made pulsed RF radiation coming from those routers is neurotoxic, carcinogenic, immune-modulating. It causes behavioral learning, memory, and sleep problems, causes oxidative stress, impaired fertility, and DNA damage. I don't understand why five-year-olds need Wi-Fi in their classroom. If device needs to be connected, just extend the Ethernet cable that goes into the Wi-Fi router a few feet further directly into the device. It's a simple fix. There are also routers that only broadcast when in use. I urge the board to consider safer alternatives and take a more precautionary approach. I just want to feel safe sending my five-year-old to kindergarten, and I don't at this point. So thank you for your time and your consideration. Thank you. Thank you both for your comments. When I move to the consent calendar, I'm seeking a motion on items G2 through
1404 and G6 through 7. Move to accept. Second. Moved by Trustee Jenkins, seconded by Trustee Kirby. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee Medina. Aye. Trustee Prack. Yes. Trustee De Fossey. Aye. President Kasten. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Noting full board's presence, item G1 is not necessary for action. We'll move to item G5. Trustee DuFosse. Thank you, President Kasten. I just had a couple of questions on the contract. Contract one from business services for a consultant helping us to get funding reimbursements. And it's noted that they've helped us identify over 73 million. I'm just wondering, these don't have to be answered tonight, by the way, but I'm just wondering how much of that 73 million has been realized. We've identified how much have we actually gotten
141of that pot of money. That's contract one. Contract three, we're doing a mural at, I believe it's Hidden Valley. Hidden Valley, Love Murals. Just wondering. $50,000 on that. Why not use ArtQuest, perhaps? So just more pension dollars. And then lastly, contract for Westminster Woods. I see we're thrown in. I'm assuming that's to pay for students. I think the general question is, do we do that for all sixth grade classes or just this one in particular? I'm not opposed to it, by the way. I'm just wondering how we're funding it. So you said it was okay if you didn't get the answers tonight Does that mean that you're okay with getting information later and just sitting it now it is? Then why is there a motion on an mg5 trustee Jenkins? I trust you Jenkins Because
142it was pulled I do have a question. It's like actually not a question and it won't change anything But it's part of the discussion that Westminster would won West Minster woods one It's for this coming weekend. And so just in general, when we're doing contracts, it would be great if these came ahead of time because there's like, we can't say we can, but like it's, it wouldn't be appropriate for us to say, no, we're not going to pay for this. It's this weekend. So just feedback in general for contracts, please give us some time. I know we have folks up there noting the question. Do I have a motion? Motion to approve T5. Is there a second? Second. Moved by Trustee Kirby, seconded by Trustee Jenkins. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee Jenkins.
143Aye. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee Medina. Aye. Trustee Pratt. Aye. Trustee De Fossey. Aye. President Kasten. Aye. I'll now pass the gavel to Clerk Jenkins, who will handle item G8. If there's going to be discussion, Trustees Pack and I need to leave the room. Is there a discussion on G8? Looking for a motion. The G8 is the JC one. So I do have a question. So long, you two. Don't go far. It's out of your shot. Trustee De La Torre. So I saw some information that we're having some trouble meeting the numbers for these programs at a couple of our sites. And I believe I'm directing this towards... Interim Superintendent August Hume, but perhaps Dr. Kasher or somebody else may want to answer it. Are we deficient in all of the campuses that are
144attempting to have these MLU projects or I just need a better understanding of what went awry and what we can do to strengthen it or revitalize it because it's a really beautiful program and opportunity. Thank you for the question, Director De La Torre. I'm going to go ahead and answer that question, turn it over to Director Debbie Cardoza. Good evening. To answer your question, yes, we secured five CCAP grants to support the CCAP SRJC dual enrollment opportunities at all of our five comprehensive school sites. So, yes, the intention is to eventually have them existing at all of our campuses. So what is the enrollment capacity of that agreement? We have a certain percentage or number that we need to meet from each campus to be in compliance with those agreements. Great question. So in order
145to run an SRJCC CAP class, we need to have a minimum of 22 students enrolled in the course. And so we have that for three of our campuses, but there is one campus that we were unable to meet that minimum requirement. So we're actively working with that campus for future years to better publicize the course offerings and hopefully get the minimum enrollment requirement that's required by the Santa Rosa Junior College. It's not our requirement, that's the SRJC requirement. And then as far as the other campus, Piner High School, that's not represented in this contract, we found some additional information out from the Sonoma County Office of Education regarding instructional minutes. And so prior to this recent information being shared with us in April, we couldn't meet the instructional minute requirement that was required by the
146SRJC as well as ADA in order to offer a CCAP class. So we have found out new information, but of course, selections and all the work that was already done very thoughtfully by the school site was completed at that time. And so after having a discussion with the site principal, it was decided to pause on that for this year, but look at moving forward and offering a CCAP course there in the following year. So mainly questioning this is just a plea to our families and community to ensure that you and your students have more information on the abundant opportunities available on our campuses. If we are not meeting minimum requirements with the MOUs of our partners like San Francisco Junior College, then we can lose the opportunity to offer these wonderful opportunities. And 22 doesn't
147seem like a large number, but it is. A number that's really important and mandated by the JC for a reason so that they have applicable alignment. So it's really important that we appropriately publicize and recognize what these opportunities are so that we don't run into a situation where we may lose an opportunity as valuable as this. Yes, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that up. And since you brought it up, I also want to share that. the SRJCC CAP courses are free to our students and they're offered on the campus during the school day. And so it creates a greater access to our students to earn early college credit while they're in high school and they're connected to our career technical education programs. And so they're really a wonderful opportunity for our students to participate in.
148So I appreciate you asking your questions and also asking our community to ask their school counselors and their school sites about these opportunities because we look forward to offering them again in future years. Trustee Medina, looks like you have your hand up. Thank you. Yeah. Director Cardozo, just one quick question. With the courses that I know at LCL in the class of their semester, but JC or semester courses, and when they take a CCAP course at one of the other campuses, is it just for the semester, like a regular JC course, or is it year long? And if it's for a semester, do they get like a full year of like high school credit? I would like to invite my partner, Coordinator Raffo, to answer that question, who has also been deeply involved in that
149work. Director Medina, thank you so much for that question, because it's a great one. What we do is we offer two courses. So one happens in the fall, and one happens in the spring. So students, the expectation is that when they join in the fall, that they will actually be taking two SRJC classes. And I know that some of the ones that you guys are offering, I think the Counseling 53, another psychology one. But are we doing anything similar to the CCAP with Sonoma State and stuff? Or not yet? Great question. So we do have a very strong partnership with the Santa Rosa Junior College, but we also have a very strong partnership with Sonoma State University. Next school year, we are in the process of identifying a dual enrollment course that could actually be
150embedded into our education CTE pathway that is currently offered at L.C. Allen High School. What's unique about that partnership is that. The SRJC CCAP dual enrollment courses are required to be taught by an SRJC faculty member. However, with the SSU partnership, it can be our staff. That doesn't necessarily also have to be an SSU faculty member. So certainly with the SRJC CCAP courses, we can have our staff members apply to be adjunct faculty and get hired on by the SRJC through their processes. But through the SSU partnership, that is not a requirement. So we look forward to offering that next year. Thank you. Director Kirby? And just to clarify, since we're at the end of the school year, so we're talking about planning for 27-28 to hopefully get that onto the Piner and Santa Rosa
151campus, correct? Yes, that's correct. Santa Rosa and Piner High School. Just wanted to clarify. That's it. Thanks. Trustee DeFossey. Thank you. If we dip below 22 or anything, does it, we continue on? We just have to hit that threshold in the beginning somehow. Thank you. Any other questions or discussion? Looking for a motion. Moved by DeFossey. Second. Seconded by Kirby. Roll call, I think. Do we call them back up first? Okay. Trustee DeFossey. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee Medina. Aye. Passes. Passes. One, two, three, five. Oh, two abstaining. I'll go get them. Thank you, guys. I shall wait for the president. All right. Thank you for that, Clerk Jenkins. We'll now move to... H, discussion action items. We're going to start with H1, the business services calendar. H1A,
152public comment on the business service calendar. So we have public comment on items. H1B, approval of our 7-11 surplus property committee report. C, which is our deferred maintenance update. SRCS, facility use requests and policies under D. And E, for the nutrition services update. Let's go ahead and open public comment. Thank you, President Keston. I'm going to call three names. If you can make your way to the podium, you have one minute for public comment. Our first speaker is Luis Sanchez, followed by Oscar Dennis, followed by Toby Stafford. Go ahead, Luis. Thank you. My name is Luis Sanchez. I'm here to express our concerns with the high prices on field rentals, on public schools, and custodial services. I've been in this community for about 30 years, and I've been involved in youth sports for about the
153same time. And to know that these high prices are affecting us so much and affecting our programs, it's needed for us to... do something for us to seek your help and help us with these issues. And also with the possibility of no longer being able to continue renting public school fields starting next year after the turf fields are replaced. So we're basically looking for more affordable prices on school field rentals. custodial services and your help with continuous ability to rent these fields. Thank you very much for your comment. Thank you. Our next speaker is Oscar Dennis, followed by Toby Stafford, followed by Adolfo Mendoza. Hello, members. My name is Oscar Dennis. I'm one of the general managers for the Atletico San Rosa Soccer Club. I went with the club for about 20 years, and I'm
154very concerned about the fact that The price on rentals are going to increase. That's what I heard. And also the non-rental for nonprofits, it's very concerning. The fact that all these fields are built with taxpayer money and they're now not going to be available possibly in the future for our club. These type of decisions really affect about 600 people or 600 kids. They need those fields for be able to have some quality sports, different type of life, and help the youth. So that's my concern. I hope you guys reconsider or try to come up with some solutions for us. Thank you. Our next speaker is Toby Stafford, followed by Adolfo Mendoza, followed by Juan Gazar. Good evening, members of the board and community. My name is Toby Stafford. I'm here tonight speaking not only on
155behalf of the soccer club, but also for thousands of youth athletes, families, and community members who will be and have been directly impacted by the rising janitorial and rental fees. as well as potential decision to stop allowing community organizations to rent the Santa Rosa City Schools turf fields. Two of the organizations most affected are the Most Affordable Recreational Soccer League and the Most Affordable Competitive Soccer Club in Sonoma County. These programs serve working class families and communities that already struggle to access quality athletic fields and facilities. Pricing these organizations out or removing access entirely will hurt the very youth who need these opportunities the most. Santa Rosa already lacks the all-weather turf fields. Thank you very much for your comments. Next is Adolfo Mendoza, followed by Juan Guzar, followed by Casey Thornhill. Chair Custone and
156distinguished board. My name is Adolfo Mendoza. I'm the president of Atletico Santa Rosa. I've had the distinct honor of leading this club for the last 25 years. I want to thank all the kids that were here present, the parents that were not able to speak and be heard on the issue of facility use through the city of Santa Rosa school district. But being here in this area for so long, It really breaks my heart to know that the board would even consider closing facilities to the youth, the youth that we mentor, that we work with, that will end up in your classrooms to represent us when they go to college, when they go pro. And I think there's better ways for us to work together collaboratively. There's public. private partnerships that we can work. But
157what we're asking you to do is reconsider these fee hikes and keep the facilities open to all, not just the soccer, but all sports. Thank you. Our next speaker is Juan Guzar, followed by Casey Thornhill, followed by Rick Cantor. Good morning, everybody. My name is Juan Guizar. I'm a father of two girls that are part of our current youth sports programs here in the city of Santa Rosa. I just wanted to share my opinion as a member of the community that grew up locally, benefiting from our youth sports programs that allow the use of our school facilities. Local school facilities are incredibly important to keep open, available, and affordable for the youth in our community. They provide a safe, positive environment where kids can learn, play sports, build friendships, and stay active outside of school
158hours. Access to fuels. playgrounds and community space gives people an opportunity to grow physically, socially, and emotionally. Keeping these facilities open, affordable, and accessible also helps strengthen our community by giving families a place to gather and keeping youth involved in healthy activities. They're encouraged teamwork, discipline, and confidence. Investing in maintaining the local school facilities accessible. It's truly investment in our future and in our children's. Thank you very much for your comments. Thank you. Next, we have Casey Thornhill, followed by Rick Cantor, followed by Alan Green. Hi, my name is Casey Thornell, and I've proudly been a member of the Rebel Baseball League for over 10 years. My father also played in this league. So to this, the Rebel League represents family, community, mentorship, and tradition. First and foremost, I want to address and push back
159at recent public statements made by Mr. Gannon claiming the district never allowed portable toilets on campus. This is simply not true, and frankly, I'm insulted by these statements. I was the person responsible for field permits at LC Allen for over a decade. I can honestly state that district personnel were very well aware and permitted the use of porta potties on campus. Records at LC Allen would confirm this and it was stated on the permits. And to add, just a few years ago during the solar panel construction project at LC Allen, porta potties were placed on campus, which directly contradicts Mr. Gannon's claim. that they pose unacceptable health and safety concerns in common student areas. Coaches take care of these fields all year long, and so do the Rebels, and they're not paid for it. Thank
160you. Thank you very much for your comments. That's what we do. Next is Rick Contour, followed by Alan Green, followed by Sienna Menekani, I think. If this code of requirement is not rescinded or amended, SRCS and high school baseball programs will lose out on approximately $188,000 paid by the Redwood Empire Baseball League over the last 22 years, plus incur additional expenses replacing the volunteer work hours and personal expenses paid by REPL volunteers. This is both a lost revenue and increased cost issue for SRCS. It is correct. If the current SRCS policy is not rescinded or amended, the REBL will be forced to end their relationship with SRCS and local high school baseball programs, fields, and programs that we support. These fields are community assets paid for and maintained by taxpayer dollars, and they need to
161be available to the community at an affordable rate. SRCS are the stewards of these community assets, and they need to be better than enacting a policy that removes that availability to the community. Thank you. Next is Alan Green, followed by Sienna Menekani. Hi, I'm Alan Green, and I'm just going to mention two points because I know you all read the letter that I sent to each of you. Number one is the Redwood Empire Baseball League has been using Santa Rosa high school fields successfully for 35 years without any problems. And so I can't understand why it's an issue all of a sudden after 35 years. And the result of this would only be that Redwood Empire Baseball League, which is based in Santa Rosa, has to go to play on fields in other districts like
162Roanoke Park and Petaluma and Windsor and Healdsburg that don't have this kind of requirement. So I know I got a nice response from Trustee Medina, who said he was working on this issue, and I hope that he will continue to do that. Thank you. Our last speaker is Sienna Menekani. I was a player for Athletico Santa Rosa and now I'm a coach and the vice president of the club. Taking away public access to district fields causes a lack of safe playing spaces for low-income minority youth, which is what our club is comprised of. One soccer game at Elsie Island costs our club $500. That's $100 per hour for the rental and $150 per hour for custodian fees. Has anyone met a custodian who gets paid $150 an hour? No. Anyways, Athletico paid your district over
163$50,000 last year alone. That is enough to sponsor 50 kids a year at our club or four whole soccer teams. Not only is San Francisco City Schools robbing us with the fees, but now they want to strip us of our right to safe and proper training facilities for our struggling school district to continue to fail our city's youth, especially the minority youth. It cannot be ignored nor allowed. Do not take away the public's right to rent these fields. Do not deny nonprofits and local youth the opportunity to have a safe space to play. grow and learn and do not allow or continue to charge outrageous fees to community programs that should be partners with you instead of being pushed out. Thank you. Those are all the cards. Thank you very much for all of your
164comments. We'll now go to item B, approval of the 7-11 Surplus Property Committee Report. Director Oden, if you'd like to start us off. Thank you, President Kasten, Superintendent August, members of the board. I'd like to present the chair, Ms. Patty Sisco, and the vice chair, Mr. Hugh Futrell, to give their report from the 7-11 Committee. Great. Good evening President Kasten and board members. Again, I am Patty Sisco, chair of your 7-11 surplus committee, and this is Hugh Futrell, vice chair of the committee. I want to start by thanking our staff, Lisa August Hume, Eric Oden, Catherine Godfrey. And our consultants and facilitators, Jennifer Gibb, Felicia Silvera, Dominic Dutra, and Dan Morar, they were wonderful in answering every question that we had, getting us materials that we sought to make our better decisions, and facilitating each
165meeting. So I really appreciate their work. I also want to thank our committee members, Jenny Bruneman, Robert Chandler, Ryan Partica, Hugh Futrell, Jeffrey Tibbett, Efren Carrillo, and Jenny Close. The board put together a very experienced committee with a facilities professional, teacher, vice principal, city parks and recs director, former county supervisor, and former board members. There was in-depth knowledge. the workings of the district, budget decisions, and also housing needs and process for development in the city of Santa Rosa. Our committee met six times and began initially to review the data as directed by the education code. What we were told to do our task was looking at our duties, looking at facilities, needs and funding, enrollments, demographics, the legal processes involved to declare surplus property and current codes and agencies. We then went on to receive
166presentations by the consultants for each of the six properties before moving on to our method of consideration for each of the properties. And I believe in your report there are attachments as to what we were presented. I wanted to describe our method. We began by having each member describe generally their thoughts and opinions on each of the six properties, kind of looking for some measure of consensus or where there might be further discussion needed. Wanted to get every member the ability to have their say. Once each member had their say, we listed the properties and did straw votes as to sell, keep, lease on each of the properties. And that helped us determine where there was generally agreement and where there was further discussion needed. The discussions we had were thorough, respectful, and collaborative. to
167arrive at the recommendation to surplus all properties and to the report that we're offering to you tonight. The discussions also involve the best method of disposing of the properties, how to best and sustainably fund the general fund without negatively impacting the facility's needs, concerns regarding potential vandalism of vacant sites, the future educational needs and community needs of these sites. We also looked at phasing of the disposition of the sites so as not to flood the market and also decided that the ultimate desire was that the sites be used for housing ultimately. And then just a side note. For every meeting, there was an opportunity for the public to make public comment. And then we did have a public hearing on May 12th. And no members of the public appeared or made any comment during our
168process. Our recommendations for each of the six properties included that the property disposition should utilize, and this is long stuff, long-term leases of up to 99 years without an option to purchase for revenue production. The committee found that utilization of long-term leases without an option to purchase yielded the most revenue to the general fund. And I want to call to your attention, there is a legal footnote on page one of your report that explains that revenues received through a long-term lease of up to 99 years will allow unrestricted general fund purposes without obtaining state waivers or approval or limiting future access to state bond funds. or subject to any onerous arbitrary findings provided that the lease is not coupled with an option to purchase. So we saw that as a wonderful opportunity to sort of
169begin regular revenue sustainably to the general fund. as opposed to trying to use a different education code, the 17-642, which would have been, there would have been onerous consequences for trying to use that for one-time general funds. I'm going to summarize our findings and I'm organizing the sites a little bit differently from how the report does it just to be a bit more concise. In summary, the committee recommended that four properties be disposed of immediately through a phase one. after you do your process after we submitted the report. And these three, three of the properties, Brookhill Elementary, Steel Lane, and Santa Rosa French American were each indicated for immediate lease with the 99 years. And with each of these had an expanded recommendation that we are maximizing return to district to meet its most pressing
170educational needs. The fourth property listed for immediate surplusing was the Lewis Early Learning Academy. And that expanded recommendation recognized the significance of the historic structure and priority uses which benefit students like Head Start, Sonoma CAN, Vaya Esperanza, and California Children's Services. And so those four were set out for immediate. consideration for surplus. The other two, Herbert Slater and Hilliard Comstock, we wanted to time those differently to wait out three to five years, again, not to flood the market, but also to give the opportunity to pursue other possible uses, community uses of those properties within the city. And if that did not come to be, Within that period of time then they would be again offered up for the 99 year lease option Excuse me. Finally, to ensure that facilities needs were also met through these
171disposals, the committee recommended a pretty specific recommendation to the board that 80% of the revenues go for unrestricted general fund uses and 20% for reserve and deferred maintenance purposes. They recommended that for a period of five years or until a 10% board-designated reserve of operating expenses is achieved, the 20% allocation would be allocated to district general fund reserves, but thereafter the 20% would be allocated to replenish Fund 40 in order to support the ongoing preservation, repair, and modernization of district facilities and infrastructure. So that pretty much summarizes what our report recommendations were. These recommendations were unanimously approved by the committee members. So again, it was very collaborative and specific. And so in closing and before I ask Vice Chair Futrell if he has anything to add or correct. I want to say I know these
172are just really, really unfortunate circumstances that we find ourselves in in the school district and why we're here tonight. But I do want to say that the... committee members each feel very honored to have served in this way to provide this information and these recommendations to the board. So with that, I'll ask Vice Chair Futrell if he has anything to add. Thank you, Patty. Good evening, members of the board. I'll be brief. First, a personal note. As many of you know, apart from... some substantial public service over the years. My firm has been very active in construction and development in the community. At the very first meeting of the committee, I read a statement into the record that should the board ultimately decide to surplus and offer for sale any properties, my firm would not
173participate in any sales offers or anything else. I wanted to be clear that my participation was not economically self-interested. Secondly, I would emphasize a comment that Patty just made in terms of unanimity. Members of the committee brought to bear a variety of perspectives. There was emphasis on the need to produce general fund money somehow. Obviously, these are judgments you will ultimately be the decision makers about. There were other members who emphasized the importance of community use to the degree it was possible. And there were others that had a mixture of viewpoints. All those melted together in the course of extremely respectful and thorough work, including a great deal of very helpful technical assistance from your staff and consultant. And led by a very good and unusually experienced chair to my left here. Now just three
174technical points. Our recommendation was not to defer surplusing two of the sites. Our recommendation was to surplus all the sites. but to defer offering two of them until a later time for two reasons. One, the potential oversaturation of the market of dumping too much large property into the market at one time, particularly at a time where the most robust interest may be limited. Secondly, by holding back Hilliard Comstock and Herbert Slater, where the greatest number of potential community uses are, it gives the district an opportunity to pursue potential partnerships or deals with the city of Santa Rosa or others. We know the city has severe economic limitations as well, but that period of time will give you the opportunity to explore some of those alternatives. Related to that, though, I think the committee was very
175conscious that if you've got these school sites with limited security, limited control, limited oversight, the risk of serious vandalism and deterioration is severe, and we're confident that your staff and the board will deal with that. The other thing that I wanted to mention was just to clarify the nature of the 99-year lease, because a lot of time and trouble was devoted to this. You can, after surplusing the properties, simply put properties up for sale and simply sell them for cash. But if you do that... as a typical cash transaction, those dollars ordinarily are simply going to have to go back into your capital funds. They're not available to any unrestricted use at all. Now, you've looked at the report. You've seen the logic. I won't belabor that. There is a method of trying to sell
176the properties for cash and still get them into the general fund. It is extremely complex. quite dangerous and likely to result in depriving the district of access to state bond funds over the long term. So we didn't want to go that direction. But we did discover with the assistance of staff and with legal review, this notion of a 99-year lease. Now, as you may know, very, very long-term leases in real property. Not hugely common, but not uncommon at all in the commercial world. It is done, and frequently, often, with government entities. So in a 99-year lease, you can't couple it with an option to purchase because that eliminates the ability to get the money into the unrestricted journal fund. But over a century, the ed code will change. There'll be other opportunities to deal with
177the properties inevitably. So a lease approach on the properties... does have the ability to get those dollars into the unrestricted fund. I would just add then that the committee is fully conscious that you are the ultimate decision maker, and we're giving our best advice, and how you choose to deal with it in the end is up to you. But I know that all of us on the committee were very grateful. I know I was personally, for the opportunity to participate in the process. Well, thank you both very much. I want to personally thank you both for your time and willingness to take this on, as well as each of the committee members. I know that this was a... the right group of folks to bring together to tackle this challenge. And as I expected, the
178report included things that I didn't expect, which is, I think, one of the best signs of the success of a committee coming together and bringing forward different thoughts. First, I'm going to see if our staff has anything to add, and then I'll go to questions from the board. I see nothing to add from that. So I do want to start with the first question. Vice Chair Futrell, if you could just... comment on the ability to finance a project under a 99-year lease. I'm personally familiar with them and their use in other projects, but I think it would be helpful for everyone to understand the ability from someone who would be redeveloping or utilizing the land to be able to actually secure financing with a 99-year lease versus a sale. Sure. So what a developer, let's
179say, would do, entering into a lease in which all the costs of the property, property taxes and everything else, is paid by the lessee, not by the district. The developer would get a development loan and a permanent loan, and that loan would be secured not on the property. Property is free and clear, still owned by the district, not encumbered in any way, except by the lease. And the lease would be collateralized by the debt. If, for example, the debt was defaulted on, the developer went broke, the lender would either have to hand the keys, as it were, of the entire facility back to the district. or they would have to begin to pay all the obligations that the developer had. That is a standard low-risk scenario for districts that do these kinds of leases. And
180it's why they're often used. I would also add that typically these leases have inflator clauses in them. So they might be going up by 3%, 5%, or 6% per year. If, for example, $3 million of general fund revenue is ultimately realized. to the district or revenue, however you choose to use it, that will inflate over time and become ever larger sums. Thank you. And just to confirm, Director Oden, we say general fund revenue. That doesn't restrict us from using it for facilities. No, it does not. Trustee Jenkins? Thank you very much for the presentation. A couple things about the presentation. I really appreciate the attention to getting us to our 10% and then replenishing Fund 40. That's what we said. That just really stuck out to me. Another thing is... I just want to say
181out loud because we are going through so many transitions that it does not feel good, although I understand why we use this language, but the dispose of immediately, it hurts a little bit more when talking about, say, steel than it does others because they're still in it. So I just want to, like, as we're aware of our language, no, no knock on anything that was said just to be aware of it. With LELA in particular, so that I understand. So I understand that that is up for recommended for surplus immediately, but there's a little bit of a caveat with the LITLs, the LITL programs. Is that my understanding? There was an additional suggestion with that property in particular. I think we have leases there that exist currently with some, I think, federal Head Start and
182some other CCS partners that are there. So I can't quite speak to the exact contract for there. Did we get that? Are those staying? I thought everything was moving at the end of this year. Everything from Santa Rosa City Schools is moving, yes. Okay, that was the piece because I was confused on how we would be able to continue using the building for students since we can't use the building for students because of his age, but the portables. Scratch that. Then my question is regarding the, and you covered this, I just needed to clarify it, with the three to five with the two middles with Slater and Comstock. So to be clear, the recommendation is to surplus, but with. the idea of the partnership. So my thinking behind this is that like, I personally think
183that we should be able to reuse those once we have an idea of how we want to reuse those with an idea of leasing. Is that something that we can change in the future? So for instance, if we had like an alternative ed site that we magically were able to pulled together, as we've talked about for a long time, one of those facilities may be an ideal location. If we're going into a surplus situation and trying to partner with people to lease out the property, would we be able to get it back? I apologize. I had to answer something, but this was regarding to the leases at Lela? No. No, sorry. Shucks. The middle school properties, if we lease them out, can we get them back if we find a good use for them and
184we can all of a sudden afford it? Yeah, I think if you're looking to lease the city as a public partnership for a short period of time, yes, it's still owned by the district. I can also weigh in because that, if I may, because that question was raised, can you in effect de-surplus if you haven't disposed of the property? The answer is yes. Okay. Thank you very much. And Mr. Futrell, I very much appreciate the statement at the beginning of kind of where you stand and the perhaps conflict going forward. I just really appreciate that as far as human integrity, wonderfulness. We're going to go to Trustee Kirby, then Dufasi. I also want to add my thanks to the committee for all their hard work. Very detailed report. I really appreciate it. My first home
185I ever bought was actually a 99-year lease from... Queen Kamehameha or something like that out in Hawaii. I had no idea what it meant. I was like, this seems so weird, buying a house on a 99-year lease. So I am somewhat familiar with the process. My question was, I just wanted clarification, I guess. The option of just plain selling the property. We want to get rid of it, just sell it completely. If we do that, then those funds are only available to use towards facilities and maintenance facilities, correct? No, it can't be used for anything. Kind of restricted almost. Correct. I mean, you can apply for a waiver, but it's going to be incredibly difficult to get that, yes. Right. If we didn't apply for a waiver and just sold it, then we could only
186use it for maintenance facilities. We'd go to Fund 40, yes. Okay. That was the main question. Just to do fasting and then dilatory. Thank you. And then Medina. And I don't know if it's really a question that you all can answer, but a couple of things. If we were to hold on to the two middle school sites as recommended, do we even have to designate them as surplus today? I thought I'd read something. If you're not using it, there's something that triggers that. But now I'm not sure if I imagined that or I read too much. So that was part of it. And then another question I had as I was reading through, I mean, we keep talking and I like the 99 year lease idea or a lease idea. But part on page three
187under item four description of the legal process. About the fourth line down, it says a district can offer it to other public agencies for use, open space, recreation, park use, development of low, modern income housing, or for other uses. So that sounds permissive. But then in the next sentence, it says these officers are a prerequisite to making the property available for sale, lease, or lease with option of purchase. So I guess I'm a little confused. One sounds permissive, the other does not. So do we have to offer it to another public agency before we can move to lease it? I guess that's the first question. I can answer. The answer to that is yes. You have to offer it, but you don't have to do a deal. You do have to offer it to give
188them the opportunity to try to work a deal with you. Gotcha. So if the city of Santa Rosa shows up and says, hey, the state is... Filling us on our Mandation for low-income housing we're gonna take your site and flip it for our use for our state obligation for our housing element Can they do that? They can't make you do anything, but you do have the obligation under the statute to Offer it to them for the potential of discussion and a potential offer from them Okay, and then you call that correct is description. Yes, I agree with that. Yeah But you have to do it in good faith, obviously. You can't just say, oh, we're going to do it because we know we're not going to do it, but we're going to offer it to
189you. Wink, wink. Correct. Yeah, okay. So it has to be a good faith obligation. And then just to answer your first question, if you don't surplus it, there's a yearly penalty, I believe, you need to pay to the state for having the vacant properties and not using them for educational purposes. Isn't that nice of the state? They're so lovely. Thank you. And then, Mr. Fitzgerald, you probably know this better than anybody. You developed Harmony Elementary, didn't you, school? Is that your property? That isn't you? Oh, okay. That's right. Can we make as part of those deals, if we do it, to maybe some interest in doing like workforce housing for Santa Rosa City School employees, that we can require that as an element of a lease? Do it with somebody that's saying, hey, we want
190a certain percentage for Santa Rosa City School employees for workforce housing. You can negotiate any lease terms you choose, including those. I'm going to go to Trustee De La Torre, Medina, and Pratt. And I actually also want to make sure I call attention to the physical letters that were received in public comment as well. Trustee De La Torre. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for the work that was put into this. Have we as a district exhausted all ideas and wonderings of use of those properties? Middle school athletics, partnerships with a lot of the athletic groups that were here today seeking to continue to use space. If we surplus these properties and they got turned into housing. It's a whole lot of field space that was lost to youth athletics and the community that
191were utilizing them. ISP, other programs that we have as a district, have we explored all options on any of these spaces being viable and usable by us as a district prior to surplusing? I'm not aware of anything that the cabinet has already been discussed with, but we have been, I think the cabinet has been discussing like as if some of the properties are closed, like our charter schools now and some other are storage at the moment. But yeah, we don't have any other uses that have been identified more than storage for the moment. Superintendent August Hume, can you comment on that, please? Yes, sir. It doesn't preclude us from pursuing joint use agreements and things that's actually been part of the discussion around, as the committee had shared, looking at the city at Reckley. There
192are things that we can look at with that as part of the recommendation. And I want to express great appreciation to the... hopefulness expressed in the work by our committee in making these recommendations. So we can still explore other options. Thank you. Clarification of President Kessin. When we're approving the committee report this evening, if we choose to approve that. Are we also approving the recommendations or are we just approving the report? We're approving the report and receiving it. Each item will be brought back and considered again. I am going to probably at the end of this suggest some of it actually goes through the finance committee for additional review by the board before coming back with a recommendation. And then there'll be the timeline components. However, we should use this opportunity to express our general.
193current feelings on the report in general so that staff has clear understanding and direction. But each of these items will have multiple times to talk about it because we'll have to surplus it. We'll have to actually go through those processes with the properties. Thank you for the clarification because I'm... I appreciate the report. I appreciate all the time and effort that went into it. I appreciate the expertise that each member was able to bring to this table for the discussion and for communicating it so concisely for us tonight and for the community here. What I'm not ready to do is make a decision on what those recommendations are. So I just wanted clarification on what we're doing tonight on ideas. If I'm offering my personal perspective so far is. That's a lot of property that
194we currently own. It's a lot of community that has been staked for decades, centuries of educational space. And I just can't see surplusing those all out for low-income housing to who wins the lease. That's not how I envision it. The space is used for so much more than the classrooms that we're able to use it for. The community has spoken to that tonight. We've received plenty of letters and words of what to do with this space, how valuable it is to the community as a whole asset. With that being said, since there is a penalty for not using it, are we incurring a penalty for Brookhill or are we using Brookhill for something educationally? including the fact that right now we are storing instructional materials there that is considered, storage is considered a use for
195the district. Thank you. I just want a little clarification because I'm glad that you said that and that was more food for thought for us to think about because it's important information to have on these decision processes because time is of the essence. These decisions have to be made timely and responsibly. But for me, I just I want a little more homework done on if there's anything we can do as a district before we were to let those properties go. Even if it is joint use, like Superintendent had mentioned. That's a great idea, but I'd like to learn a little bit more about that. And just an understanding that it's a negotiation process with leases. Things have to be offered. We're not going into anything concrete. The 99-year is a long term. Just clarification that
196within that 99 years, there could be short leases as well. We go into agreement with somebody for three years, five years, two years, opposed to signing an agreement with one agency for 99 years. Correct? Yeah, as long as it's not longer than 99 years, you can do it as you choose. Of course, the longer it is... the more value in the lease, obviously. May I just mention, you mentioned low income. For affordable housing, sure, there is a requirement to have an opportunity for a discussion. But I think I can say that the committee did not contemplate that all those properties would just become low income necessarily. Affordable housing is part of it. It would be open to the market in whatever direction you chose to take it. And that's just one need of the community
197is why it was mentioned. My main point of view is I would not like to see all eight of those properties, schools removed, and housing of any site taken over. Those are large chunks of land. We are in this situation due to families leaving California and not filling the homes that we already have. So we sell the land and build more homes. Kids aren't going to feel just kind of doesn't seem like the right prophecy we're going for. But it's great that all the work you put into to make it clear what options are available so that we can have those robust conversations and trying to find the right plan to move forward and how to fiscally be responsible for those properties. And if there are opportunities for there to be revenue to be spent
198appropriately or saved appropriately as a district should be doing. Trustee Medina. Thank you. First off, gratitude to the committee for all your hard work. Truly appreciate it. I have a few questions. I think on the 80-20 split, there's the component of like five years or until we reach the 10% reserve. Is it like whichever comes first? Is that how it's planned? That's my first question. Chair Siska? The way it's written, it says... for a period of five years or until a 10% board designated reserve of operating expenses is achieved. the 20% allocation would be allocated to district general fund reserves. But then thereafter, 20% would be allocated to replenish fund 40 in order to support ongoing preservation, repair, modernization, and district facilities and infrastructure. But again, this is a recommendation. You would be deciding whether
199you want to do it that way or not do it. We were looking at making sure that As we were promoting revenue for the general fund, we weren't leaving out facilities funds. So that was the purpose of that language. But again, it's going to be up to you as the board to decide what you want to do with that or not. Okay. And so it sounds like the 10% could be reached earlier if that were the case, and then it would stop at that point going into the reserve. So if we did like a 70-30 to that point, that could work to potentially reach the 10% earlier. I think the other question that I have is in terms of... The information that was presented, like, that it made more sense to do, like, a 99-year
200lease because it helps bring in more revenue to the district. Are there any projections as to what figures of revenue could potentially be brought in? My opinion was that it could lead, initially, if all six were ultimately disposed of, and I know that would be... Maybe not what you would choose to do. You might end up with net revenues of $3 million a year initially, plus an inflator factor. Okay. Thank you. And I think the other question that I had, did the committee, and maybe this is something that comes later, I consistently brought up what happens with our... Or the money from that fur-rich property, can that be tied to some sort of agreement as it relates to housing? Of course, working with our labor partners, but that wasn't discussed at all in this committee,
201was it? Correct. That was not germane to the committee's work, but Director Oden, do you want to give a brief response? Yeah, I was just going to say, I'm sorry. I think that property's already been disposed of, so it wasn't part of this committee's review. But we wouldn't be restricted on using the funds from that in combination with something related to one. Correct. Yeah. And in terms of the three to five and phase two portion of the schools, I guess one of the questions that I'm wondering is, aside from potential, you know, fees from the state for not surplusing property, what is the cost to us at this moment of having these properties? What do we anticipate the cost being? And if we don't have that information, can that maybe be brought back as we
202look into making decisions? Yeah, I don't have anything in front of me. They do cost us money every day, as I said, empty and vandalism and such. So, yeah, doing something with them would be good. In terms of money going into the general fund, if the board wanted to, you know, looking at what a lot of the public comment is on in terms of like the use of fields and maintaining those fields, would the Fund 40 account for that? Or if we wanted to, let's say, do something where we, you know, hire increased custodial staff that maybe also works on the weekend and stuff as part of that, maybe 80%, could we have a portion of that be restricted for those? facility type uses? I mean, I'm not a, I don't know if that can
203be, I would say it should be, but I don't know if Superintendent August wants to talk about that. I don't see any reason why it couldn't be because if the funds are through a lease option, they can go into the general fund. It could be used for any of those purposes. Okay. But I guess I'm just wondering, like, the Fund 40 wouldn't count for that, but the other general fund could, but we could restrict, instead of it just going straight up to the general fund, restrict it for that purpose, the revenue from the lease? We could, okay. Yeah, there's opportunities for things to be locally restricted, you know, based on direction. Any, I guess, a question to the folks on the committee, are there any adverse effects or risks for leasing versus selling that we
204should know of as a board? Any downside, I guess? The downside is a default in the course of construction in which the lender walks away from the deal. and the way that is normally handled through a bond in favor of the district to protect against that risk, that is basically the list. That is the risk, but it is managed in the way that I described. And my final question is, in terms of managing these leases, would we have to create a new position at the district? I mean, I don't know how complicated it would be. Is this very specialized that handles doing this? I know our staff are already stretched in. What costs might be associated with that that are either accounted for or not? Should I respond to this? Oops. Go ahead, Lisa. From
205our perspective, it would be something that we would need to evaluate what the workload would be expected. So it's something we would need to look at with the existing staff and what expertise or guidance would be needed, whether it's something that could fit within existing positions or if we need to look at that. But it could be self-funded. Yes. Thank you. I'm going to go to Trustee Pratt and then myself. Now trustee dilatory answered my questions or asked my questions, so I don't have anything right so Chair Cisco could you speak a little bit more to the historic nature of Lewis and their committee recommendation on that? Yeah in in the report I think they They gave some information that we acquired from Denise Hill from the Historic Preservation Board. Let me just find what
206it is. We were recognizing its significance, but some of the important aspects were that... The Lewis School has served the Santa Rosa community since at least 1860 and has continuously evolved to meet the educational and social needs of generations of residents. Current building, constructed in 1922, represents an important historical resource reflecting the character and development of public education. There is also, if anyone is interested, you can look at the historic... Board's newsletter that they put out. That's what I got from Denise Hill to kind of get the history here. But, you know, it's an important historic resource and appreciated the committee's recommendation to recognize that and to look at in terms of surplusing it, that historic, that it should be preserved and meet requirements of the historic rehabilitation tax credits. Thank you, and I appreciate
207that. My understanding of the recommendation as well, it's a Phase 1 property. The surplus could be to lease. the surplus lease option with its current tenants. And that's why we see this. So it wouldn't necessarily be a surplus to housing. It would be a surplus to a community-based education benefit. Correct. That would be the first start. And that's the expanded recommendation. So to try to make that clear. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Well, so again, I want to express my gratitude. Thanks to the committee. I personally see the phase one properties as important to move on as quickly as possible, recognizing that this is still not a short process, that once we surplus them, we need to understand market interest, we need to actually discuss what these things mean, and that we'll have many decision
208points along the way. For Brookhill and for Doyle, I think the nature of those properties with their... seismic considerations. I wouldn't see no reason that we would not move immediately on the committee's recommendations. And then for Lewis and for Steele, you know, recognizing their proximity and value. I see additional housing as being really important to be able to keep families and attract families into the area. And, you know, so the prospect of being able to have housing. that does meet the needs of those with children, has a win-win benefit. With that, though, we obviously have a significant amount of work to do on the Phase 1, looking into the details of the lease and lease revenue, which is incredibly creative, and I appreciate the committee's focus on that. And with the Phase 2 properties... Starting
209immediately to pursue discussions with the city I know the city has a complete lack of indoor recreational facilities on the east side and the importance of the Slater campus could be a really unique opportunity to meet the needs of our youth after hours and on the weekends as well as others seeking into a recreational opportunities and obviously we have the joint land arrangement with comstock where I think they technically own the school and we own the recreational facilities currently. So I think beginning those conversations with the city sooner than later is going to be really important. And in the interest of that, when we approve this, I'd also like to ask the board to refer to the finance committee, the aspects of this report, looking at the potential split of lease revenue so that we
210would develop a policy and understanding of how those funds would be used. starting with the committee's recommendations as a place of work, but that we would be. Creating that understanding prior to actually on a separate track from the actual disposition of the properties So we had that captured in policy and it doesn't become something. It's an aspect of word of mouth so if we could also in accepting the report refer that aspect of it to the Finance Committee and Then ask staff to come back with the next steps and recommendations for pursuing the recommend either pursuing the recommendations or providing us with the opportunity to provide alternative direction. Trustee Jenkins? Related to what you just said as far as next steps and who's doing what, since there are six properties, I understand what you're saying.
211And it sounds like this is going to be more work for the board, too. So each one, so I'm clear, each one when we are leasing something out, We need to have a full conversation like this. Holy cow. We will need, so today we accept the committee's reports and provide the general direction to go to the next steps. Before they list it, they're going to come back to us with more information. And then we'll have a discussion. Sarah Jenkins. And then, but that is also a part of why there are parts of the committee report that I think we can handle on a policy level as far as use of funds, consideration of lease policies around facilities. And if we get those in place earlier, it will make each property discussion smoother going forward. Is
212it going to be the work of this specific? Oh gosh, I forgot group committee committee today represents the end of their work and it now transitions to staff and the board. So then are, is there going to be a new committee who's going to, that's just going to be us. Thank you guys so much for all you've done. Truly. All right. Is there a motion? Motion to approve. Motion to approve with the referrals and things I mentioned. Yes, because we're not voting. Correct. Yeah, correct. But the referrals of the Finance Committee and the process I laid out. Yes. All right. I have a motion from Trustee Pratt. I'll second. Seconded by Trustee DeFasi. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Pratt. Aye. Trustee DeFasi. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee De La Torre. So just for
213clarification, the motion, or the motion including direction. for the Finance Committee to work on policy. That also will need to be voted on in the future. Anything the Finance Committee does has to come back to the board as a recommendation. Aye. Trustee Medina? Aye. President Kasten? Aye. That motion passes unanimously. And with thanks, your committee work is over. So thank you. Thank you. With that, we're going to move to item C, which is the deferred maintenance update. And Director Oden, I think you're up here with us for a while. Good evening. Back again. It's like I never left. Thank you, President Kasten, members of the board, Superintendent August. I want to introduce Alex Escobar. He's our assistant manager of maintenance, operations, and transportation. He's a fantastic asset that... I get lucky enough to work with
214every day. And so I have him up here to meet you as well as help, not knowing what questions might come up at the end of this. So here you can see the current portfolio of what we have. We still have 27 total sites. We have not yet, you know, even though they're closed, they're still, we have to maintain them. So I showed some square footage changes, but the average age, the number of acres, total buildings, those are all still similar, as well as our staff is still listed there. I want you to work now. There it goes. Deferred maintenance. That refers to the practice of us postponing standard maintenance that we can't either oftentimes don't have budget for in that aspect. So that ends up leading to a backlog of needed repairs. What does
215deferred, why does it matter? Well, we have higher repair costs, safety hazards, compliance issues, as well as decreased performance, as well as compounding costs year after year. We can't afford to do something. Here are some examples of some wonderful things we have, we've been working on. Here are some examples of deferred maintenance. They include just a whole menagerie of things here from ADA compliance things to safety improvements to campus signage. Our average lifespans that we pay attention to across different things that are across our district, including carpet and roof, but even buildings. At the end of the day, the buildings do need to be updated. Infrastructure needs to have a lifespan. Our primary focus of monies for the maintenance program has been talked about by Luz as well as others as our 3% routine restricted
216maintenance, which is our main funding source that also pays all salaries and benefits for everybody in the maintenance and operations department. And whatever's left over is used to repair. And it's usually never enough. We have other funds that are available, or I should say are available if there's some funding available. Bond funds are, of course, a major thing going right now. Every bond project I do, I tie infrastructure pieces to everyone. You've seen it as we've discussed. When you say that seems kind of high, and I say, well, I'm also tackling. you know, X, Y, and Z with this. Fund 14 is really no longer a fund, but it technically is available. Fund 35 is those reimbursement we get from the state that we're trying with King Consulting to get. We've received some millions and
217we're on track to receive some more millions, I think 10 more million this fall. And then Fund 40, unfortunately, is no longer really available for use at this moment, but we hope in the future it will be. Here's basically a maintenance work request flow chart, which is how things kind of become either done or is it possibly something that has to go on the deferred list or become a possible bond project, hopefully to tackle it. Safety issues are tackled immediately. Alex and his team grab those right away and try to tackle those issues immediately. Some of the other stuff, the nice to haves, or hopefully we can get to, we might have to push a little bit and hopefully we can tackle those at a future date. We have a big deferred maintenance program that
218lists kind of our every sites. It comes bared out of our fit reports we do every year, but Alex and his team go through buildings every summer, go room by room and go through things. So we try to keep a list updated on where we are in lifespan, as well as immediate needs. This represents obviously our partnership with bond as they're both under my purview. So we end up, you know, making up what we don't have in routine restricted maintenance with bond repairs as part of our projects. And here are some of those, right? These are some pictures of things we've done. Roofs are a huge, a huge help for deferred maintenance. That is a massive help. HVAC and roofs are our number one complaint and our number one problem. So most of them are
219being completed. A few are still slated to come up. They'll see how in the summer, thankfully, and more to come. So I appreciate you listening. Take questions. Trustee De La Torre. Thank you so much, Eric. I got a question about the flowchart because unfortunately looking at the flowchart pretty much says everything gets backlogged and we can't do it. How are we dealing with things that are a safety issue and we don't have the resources to address? I apologize. I haven't looked at this flowchart. We've had it for... So if I'm looking at it, is it a safety issue? Yes. Yes. Schedule work? Yes. Enough resources? No. Add to backlog. Yeah, if there's enough resources, yes. And safety issues are dealt with. Yes. It's connected. I think there's an extra line in there. So I'm reading
220this because I understand I've been dealing with this. As a facility advocate for this district for 30 years, we just don't have enough resources. And the deferred maintenance is what gets us in the trouble of it is no longer maintainable. Now we need to rebuild it. And your departments are doing the best you can. I understand that. It's just what can we do to advocate for more? What can we do to help with the limited resources that are unavailable? Because this is such an important issue of things that we are investing into and then not being able to maintain and protect. Can I interject really quick? Just to add, I just want to ask, could you define what enough resources means in this flowchart? strictly dollars and possible personnel, right? Maybe the personnel to accomplish
221said task. You know, our guys are fantastic and they stretch themselves to do things they might not fully be a 100% on, but they figure things out. So, but a lot of it is around funding. So to Director De La Torre's question. Yeah, to answer your question, I appreciate that. Yes. Even though we helped lead the 7-Eleven committee, it was their committee. I don't fully agree with their recommendations. I, of course, love Fund 40 to be funded. That is where we will get a lot of our resources to fix problems. So I would advocate differently a little bit in taking some of those funds and getting them back into Fund 40. And when it comes to deferred maintenance, can you just answer out to the community on why it's stuff that our staff need to
222focus on and not something necessarily that we can have volunteers do on our active sites? Well, we have a union labor agreements, right? And so my staff is all CSCA members and they're required to do the work. We appreciate volunteers, of course, as we're, Alex can maybe speak to the sheer amount of work orders we get every day and the amount of work that they tackle. But sometimes they just can't catch everything like weeds and maybe some touch up painting and things like that. They're a little smaller. So having some volunteers at schools help out. is great but it does have to be cleared not only by myself but by the CSEA president that basically agreeing that you know they're willing for somebody else besides the CSEA member to perform work they should be doing.
223As I refer to the like school beautification days and other opportunities that might be available for those volunteers to assemble we used to have a Hands across the county day or volunteers would pick a site and show up and then do that type of landscaping or maintenance or upkeep type work. Yes, it does. It does. CSEA has been very gracious and they understand kind of where the district is and they approve most, as you may have been a party to a lot of them, those requests. All right. Trustee Kirby and then Medina. Can you just clarify on the deferred maintenance log when something does get logged, if funds do become available and say, hey, look, we've got money to fix up some rooms at a school, how do you prioritize it, I guess? Yeah, there's
224a lot. So it is hard to pick just like where the top is. But basically every year, Alex and I will meet and go through the list and kind of prioritize color code, you know, kind of these sections of what, if we have funding, we should be looking to tackle. Now, as things come up throughout the years, things might jump into that top of that. But for the most part, we stay active on it, you know, throughout the year, trying to keep it up to date. If funds become available. We start with the highest need thing we feel is first, and that just goes by the years of us being out there looking at what's happening, speaking with employees, staff, teachers, administrators on what their concerns are. And the estimates on that log, I'll just
225say that. For example, I saw like a single classroom refurbishment was $500,000 for a single classroom. And I was like, I feel like I need to get into that business. That should be the building. I mean, is that normal? It seems really high to refurbish a classroom. Correct, it is. Yes, you might have been looking at the building of classrooms, not just a classroom. Okay. I don't know exactly what you're looking at. I just happened to look at Creos campus. I looked down and it's classrooms and they were like L1, M2, M3. But to your point, maybe it was a complete building. It might have been. Yeah, I'd have to go back and look at it. But yes. That would make more sense. Yes. Okay, thanks. Trustee Medina. Thank you. Just in terms of deferred
226maintenance projects, I saw one of the pictures you had, it looked like some paving. If, let's say that a school... got like some company that was willing to do like all the paving, like provide all the labor free, but the district had to provide like the material. Is that something that could like expedite it? Like if school sites did things like that, like the parents were able to organize things like that? Possibly there are some procurement roles we're required to do as a state agency. And there are liability issues with having contractors and people do certain things that the district has to clear. So it could be, but there are some hurdles. Okay. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you very much for the discussion and report. And Alex, thank you for being here. Greatly
227appreciate all of your work and efforts throughout the school. With that, we're going to go ahead and move to item D, the San Francisco City Schools Facility Use Requests and Policies. I assume I'm starting with Director Oden. Director Oden, if you could introduce our speakers today. I can. I have here Ms. Jessica Santana Peralta, our district accountant, as well as Ms. Andrea Correa, our lovely principal of Piner High School. The reason that this item was brought, I believe, as it asked by the cabinet or the board, but I brought these two because even though the term facilities has the word facility in it, it's not in my department. This is not my purview. It is between accounting. and a school site so for questions and different things that come about i wanted to make sure
228that we had the people who actually make the approvals here to talk so i'll turn it over the board for any questions and how we can help uh let me go ahead and start with superintendent august if you'd like to introduce the item Yes, thank you. Sorry, this is what's going on. Less of a voice. Excuse me. So yes, facilities use is a collaboration between The sites do determine the priority use of their facilities. They are required to be used for school purposes first. We do have the Civic Center Use Act, which there are some links there to the... The updates that were approved last year, just as a reminder, there were a number of years, I think it was more than a decade, that went without any changes or revisions, updates to the facility
229use costs. And there were comparisons and studies done last spring when the new fee schedule was brought forward. There are a couple of items that I want to just historically address in there, which are related to the need for custodial support on campus, which is why facilities are involved as well when we're looking at access and cleaning and the usage and our ability to support that. So that is why we do have our combination of team here, and there is a difference when we are looking at something from a joint use perspective versus a traditional facility use application. And there are differences within the Civic Center Act and our policy related to organizations that directly support our youth, non-profits, and for-profit organizations. So there are different classifications in there, and I'm going to hand it
230over. to our team to provide additional clarification on any of those. I will Add one more item, which is that we did change our online platform this last year. And I know that that is one area that has been difficult for both staff as well as users. And so I'll let Jessica speak to that a little bit about what we're looking to potentially adjust instead as an option to make that a little bit. easier from both sides as far as use. I'll hand it over to the team to provide. Before you hand it over to the team, I also just want to note that this item includes consideration of amplified noise, specifically a piner via a request for an agenda item from the public. And so we have the noise restrictions from the city, and
231that is available and germane to this discussion as well in order to fulfill that request. With that, Ms. Volcrea. What would you like for me to speak to? Well, let me capture the scope of it. Things cost a lot more than they did a year ago because of the actions we took as a board for the fees. And we've heard, I think, from a lot of organizations, especially around field usage. So that would be item one to address. I would say as a site representative, there are varying degrees of relationships that we have with outside organizations that utilize our fields. And so as a site administrator who has been approving facility use requests for... 15 years. There are people we want to work with, right? There's people who come in and they help provide beautification
232of an area. They support our school with donations. They fundraise with us. They're excellent partners. They're good friends. They clean up after themselves. They do all kinds of things to work with us. And those relationships are much easier to navigate than or groups that want to come in and just utilize our fields for whatever reason that they may have, right? They may need it for one time or it's something that they do outside of the realm of youth sports. There's all kinds of different groups that utilize our space and it's not just our fields. They use our NPRs, they use our PAC, they use all kinds of things. And so... In most cases, we are very open to working with groups. And then after we've worked with them, we kind of reflect on what that
233experience was like. And so every group is different and each site is different. And so what might be really great at Santa Rosa High may not work very well at Piner High School. And so we really just try and work with groups that do things with the youth. people that are affiliated with our site specifically. Maybe they have students or children or families that have come through Piner. We're more inclined to work with people like that because they're more invested in our community based off our experience working with them. So that's kind of how we approach it with groups. There are times when we say no because we have our own activities that are going on. So everything is really fun and offensive. Like, do we have Piner activities that are going on? And if
234so, the answer is always going to be no, right? Piner athletics, Piner activities, Piner whatever comes first. And then if the space is available, we look at who the group is and whether or not we want to continue working with them based off a variety of experiences we may have had with that group. As well, I think that a lot of times we will waive the fee for the group to come on and use our facility, but we will charge custodial because it's not just about opening doors and opening bathrooms. There are a million things that could happen when a group is on your site, right? So you could have a ton of people on your site and you want to waive that fee, but it's on a Sunday afternoon. I'm certainly not going to
235come and open a door on a Sunday afternoon or then come back and close the door on a Sunday afternoon and then be responsible for cleanup of any spilled. I mean, if it's in the gym and they spill a ton of stuff. we have to mop that floor immediately or it's going to ruin the gym floor. So you have to have a custodial representative on site to make sure that things are clean. What if someone gets hurt? What if we have to call the fire department? What if somebody has to come out? There's a ton of things that can happen at a site and we would be liable as a school site. And so we have to make sure that we're covering our own selves as well as our site, as well as our facilities,
236because we know, and this is no criticism, if something breaks, it's not getting fixed tomorrow, right? We're going to have to put a work order in for that. It's going to be a big deal. And I'm almost 99.9% positive that whatever group was using the facility is not going to pay to fix it. So we have to be really careful about who we partner with. And a lot of that is just based off of experience and what that experience has been. Lucy Jenkins. So personally, I was very confused as to why, one, we were getting a million emails about this, mostly baseball, some soccer. But the part that's confusing to me is that this policy went into place last year. And so I'm confused on how we are where we are right now, because if
237people are just now getting upset about, I suppose it's baseball season. Right. But with that, the other piece, so I understand that people are upset. The timing of it didn't make sense until I said it out loud into a microphone that's recorded. And so there's that piece, the port-a-potty piece. And then when this came out. Port-a-potty piece, you guys know what I'm talking about? I do. And when this came out, it was new. It was a new, like, hey, we have to start charging. We need to make money. And we haven't been doing this for a long time. Oh, you're saying no. No. We do not make money. Yeah. We're covering costs. Covering costs. Yes. We're not benefiting from this. We're covering costs. Excuse me. But we had not been doing that effectively prior. Okay.
238And there was talk. When it first passed, there was talk about like scouts using the classrooms and it being kind of cost prohibitive for them to continue doing that. So then we were directed to direct back to the site admin to see about waiving for that situation. It wasn't your campus. So I guess, how do we make these things so that they... Everybody, it's workable and that it's consistent across the board because I hear that like working with certain organizations is better than others. Well, yeah. It totally makes sense. And from a Montgomery parent perspective, like my daughter volunteers at Montgomery for Special Olympics most weekends, most. of most of the year. And it is insane how many people are on campus on the weekends. Like it's absolutely insane. I was like, how do we
239have more people on the weekends than we do during the weekdays? I guess I'm just talking a lot, but. If I may, I'd like to, so I think it's a combination of a lot of different factors, all kind of coming to a head right now. So I'm just going to speak for Piner High School and I can't speak for other high schools. In regards to baseball. For about 14 years, we had a wonderful coach named Nick Green. And he was wonderful, fabulous, good friend of my family's. He was actually one of my students at Piner High School 100 years ago. And as a part of his facilitation of coaching baseball, he had an agreement with Rebel that because he played on their sports teams, we waive their fee and he would act as that agent
240for Pioneer High School. He would open the gates. He would dump the trash. He would clean up after them. He would be there to open the restrooms if they were needed. And so we didn't have to charge for that custodian because of the fact that Nick was there. Nick is no longer a baseball coach. We have a new baseball coach and no criticism to him. His life is a little bit different and he's not able to do all of those things. And so again, we do not have someone who can open the gates, open the bathroom, mow the field, chalk the field, do all the things that need to happen in an event on a Sunday for five or six different baseball games. And so we have to have a custodian there to make sure
241that all that's facilitated. And custodians cost money. Right now, go back 10 years when our budgets were a little bit more robust than they are now. Fees were not as high as they were now. A school site could take on the cost of a custodian on a Sunday much more easier than they can today. We just don't have the funds to cover overtime costs for custodial fees on a Sunday. That if you were to do 10 days of that. You're talking about thousands of dollars that would come right off the top of our general budgets for high schools that have to cover toilet paper and paper towels and everything else. And so we have to be much more strategic about how we spend our resources. And so we have to be aware of the cost
242of those things. And so that's just an example of what's happened at Piner that has changed the way that we can continue that relationship. It's not that we want to do that. It's just that that's the situation we're in now. I want to go to Superdent in August because I think she wants to add to that answer. Yes. The other piece that, you know, over time, you know, to build on what Principal Correa was talking about is over time, there were these side agreements which also don't actually capture the things that we are supposed to be. considering in this according to the Civic Center Use Act, which is essentially the things that cause that deferred maintenance that we were talking about. earlier, and the share of capital costs. But also, we have an obligation to
243our CSEA employees, our custodians, that was mentioned earlier, that they have those rights, the right to come and do that work. We can't just arbitrarily have somebody else come in and do that for them through an agreement with the with an outside organization without working for a union for that. Thank you. And thank you, Principal Corey, for explaining. That is helpful. I will just say additionally that with the use on the campuses, the high use on the campuses, that I absolutely think that some of the... Some of the funds that are gathered from the use fees do go back to the site. Just a little bit. I mean, just think about the parking spots. My thing was like the senior parking spots, they get destroyed on the weekends because it does impact those sites quite
244a bit. We can go Trustee Medina, then Dayla Torrey, then myself. Thank you. First off, real quick, on the, you know, We brought up like if something happens, something gets damaged. I think the current system asks for organizations to have insurance, right? They have to present insurance, right? What does that cover? Yes, so we do ask that the insurance have a $2 million coverage for general aggregate and a $1 million for each occurrence. So we would probably have to go through their insurance. They are required to have that on file for them to submit a permit. So that needs to be there and active before they can even submit a permit. And I think the current custodial rate is $150 when? This is when there isn't actual school stuff going on normally, right? Outside of
245normal custodian hours. Is that when it's 150? Yes. So that would be weekends or holidays if the event were to be approved on a holiday that's on a case-by-case basis. So now what about like a student organization, like a campus club that's doing something on a Saturday? Now, if they are hosting something that's, I don't know, four hours, they're expected to pay $600 for custodial? No, they'd be charged just a regular custodial fee, but that's a different, it's based on the rate. So there's three different groups. So non-profit, school organizations, and then for-profit. But the rate says regardless on the weekends, it's $150. Is there a different rate? That is because we are required to charge what our cost is because the cost of that custodian has to be paid from somewhere. And so that's...
246Our actual cost when you're looking at overtime and all of the driven costs and the callback charges. Back to the question. Yes, they should be charged for that, even though we know that that doesn't feel good and doesn't feel right. So that could be something that a site could cover or there could be something along those lines. They usually do. Yeah, so that would be an expense. How does the site cover it? That would be out of their site funds? Yeah, from their general funds, as Ms. Correa mentioned before. So a student organization would have to ask the administration to cover it if they wanted to do a weekend? Yeah, the administrator would have to approve the facility use permit, so that would be something that would be taken into account when they're approving that.
247And with this new system, what's it called? Incident IQ? Yeah, Events IQ is the portion of Incident IQ that deals with facility use requests. So I've heard concerns about it. Does it let people know when something's approved? Does it provide some automatic feedback, like confirmation that your request has been submitted? Yeah, this was brought forward last year, and this is the first year that we've implemented it. It has had a lot of work put into it on the back end by our IT department. They've been wonderful. It has. Had its snags both internally and externally with our groups. We are looking, we have been trying to work with them to kind of facilitate it more. And we're currently looking at an RFP process of gathering to see if there's a better facility use request program.
248platform to use but we really need it to meet all our needs as a large district right now especially with invoicing there could be over 200 events just in one month and we only have one person working accounts receivable to invoice so that is something we're looking at to improve as we have had taken into account not just the community's feedback but our administrators at the site and our internal employees who handle most of that on there and we're aware of the complications? So I believe I've seen incidences where let's say there's one organization having an event, I don't know, on the football field, another one in the gym. And then that then triggers both organizations having to bring in a custodian. So each paying $150. Like in a situation like that, wouldn't one custodian
249be enough? If it's on the same day, possibly? Same day, same site, same time. It depends on the size of the event, right? I mean, if there's 10 kids on a football field and 20 kids at a gym, then one's enough. But if you got, you know, 500 kids on the football field and 150 in the gym, that's too much for one person. So it's up to the site to figure that out. That's why they approve and they are the ones who assign the custodial staff. And then I'm wondering if, well, obviously we've heard a lot of concerns, right? What would be the process if as part of like the solution? I mean, to me, there's a simple solution that could maybe address this is if we change maybe like some of our evening custodial
250staff to work, you know, Saturdays and Sundays and not every evening because there'd always be staff. Is that something that's been looked at, thought of, or what is the process? Obviously, we'd have to negotiate something like that. Well, it would mean taking them away from an open school site where kids are and that's their primary job just to focus on a facility use permit, which. Seems to go unless, you know, we don't have enough staff or something like that. It also has to be negotiated because any change of hours, we're tied to the contract. So we've had obviously people reaching out about this and they said, well, they can, you know, because so they can come in 10 minutes, open the gate and come in 10 minutes at the end of the day and open
251the gate. Unfortunately, our contract doesn't say I'm paying him for 10 minutes. If they come in, we're paying them for at least two hours. And if they're coming in twice, we're paying them for four. And if your event is four hours, we're still paying four hours, even if we're not charging you for four hours. And you talked about that situation where, you know, before like volunteers would do some of that work. But then we're talking also about the union. That gets approved. The rights to that work. Is it something that maybe we could work towards? maybe reaching some sort of agreement where if there's a cost-free version, a volunteer version, that that takes priority if it's a cost to either a student group or some campus organization? That might be a security risk. If we
252had somebody from outside having that volunteer, they'd need access to keys, access to codes, access to supplies. That's why when they sign up for a permit to submit a fee, they do. Are they're aware of regulations and one of them is that a site representative is going to be present to make sure that the rules are followed and to make sure that everything runs smoothly. That's actually part of our AR around this. Superintendent August, I think you also wanted to add to that answer. Yeah, I just want to take a step back to the question about additional staff. And that's something that You know, we would need to be looking at projecting what additional staff would be needed because, as Director Oden shared, we don't have the current staff available to shift from school size.
253You've heard of the shortage that we have there. We would need to look at, in order to project that staffing, we would need to know the number of agreements and the use throughout the year and have that set up up front, you know, in order to look at negotiating that with our joint use agreements and then working with our bargaining, our labor partners. on any changes in working conditions. So those are all things that would need to happen in the background that we've started some messaging around what would that, you know, just internally exploring some options around that as we look at potential for joint use or other long-term agreements that are more than just individual events. I think for now, I'll just end my comments by basically saying that I'm really... concerned about the,
254I think this is unintended consequences. I think when this was brought to us, it seemed like it was just an update in the fees, but it was actually a very significant change. And I think there's been some unintended consequences that are really impacting our community. My concern is around opportunities for youth, especially. You know, like it was mentioned before, I feel like our schools, our fields, these are taxpayer funded. You know, our taxpayers help fund these bonds that help us. create these fields. And I think that especially when youth are being a part of it, like, you know, the different sports, these opportunities, we can't afford to lose them because that's something that's important to just help keep them out of trouble. And oftentimes, you know, there's good relationships with our own sports teams. And
255if they're on our fields, using our fields, I think that also exposes them to our schools and then helps to to further recruit students to our schools. So I really hope that we could do something to find some sort of solution with a lot of these community organizations that have been adversely impacted and potentially might have to cease operations as they exist because it's incredibly unaffordable for them to continue in the way that we've established these rules. I mean, Trustee De La Torre, then myself, then DuFasi, then Kirby. First and foremost, this isn't directed at anyone, but just to be clear, I asked that we bring this to the board and discuss this a year ago when we first brought this up. And this is our first opportunity to talk about the new fee schedule.
256I have been a youth athletics coach and volunteer coach in this community for 30 years. I've been president of Sandersville Lacrosse Club, a board member of Rink Valley Youth Soccer, a coach with Santa Rosa Girls Softball, Rink Valley Little League. Empire Soccer Club. These are organizations, we simply do not have enough athletic facilities in the city of Santa Rosa for our youth to practice and train and use athletics as an extracurricular and life-saving opportunity. So I understand the voices and concerns of the community that if we make it cost prohibitive, those organizations go away, those opportunities go away. including Rebel Baseball that has used these fields for 35 years. That is significant. To understand the significance of partnerships and guests that we have found ways to accommodate for over 30 years, and now our new
257fee schedule makes it cost prohibitive. Yes, we don't have the funding. We don't have the custodians. But there needs to be an opportunity to have discussions. or memorandum of understandings with groups that we do want to work with and groups that we do want to provide opportunity and space for these trainings and these games and these facilities. I just, it really hurts to think of alienating these organizations for costs. If we charge what we need to charge to cover our costs, that gets... relate to their registration costs where families can't afford to sign up and play? Yeah, I would say that in the past, I think the district covered these costs, right? So that's where the costs were there. The other thing I might add to that is a lot of this is just around
258field sports. I think that a lot of our youth rent gyms and they already all have these costs, right? So when you talk about... You're talking about certain sports, not all youth sports. More than half of the youth sports pay these fees because they're opening a gym. They're in our buildings. This is around porta potties on school sites to which the principals are asking not to have on their sites. But they're asking now. They didn't ask for the last 30 years. They've been asking. They've been there. So to read in a paper that we've never allowed porta potties is untrue. And I didn't appreciate that. Like I've been. One of the board members has ordered porter potties and signed the agreement that we'll have them cleaned. They're placed or removed. So I understand we changed
259the policy last year. We're trying to get things up to speed and up to par. But to hear the outpouring of our athletic communities that can no longer use our facilities because of these restrictions, there's got to be a common ground we can find where we're still taking care of our campuses and we're utilizing the help and support of the community. It's just asking to use these spaces. So if I just may comment, Mr. De La Torre, if that's okay, I'm going to try and say this so that people don't get upset. not everybody takes care of porta-potties the way that you probably took care of porta-potties. And so when I talked about the relationships we have with different groups, it really is the relationships we have with different groups. Not everybody does what everybody
260says they're going to do. And it is not my place as a school administrator to offend or question or argue. a group that uses our facilities, right? That would get me in trouble and that would not look good for the board or the district. And so we have to be very careful of how we navigate relationships as well. When it comes to youth athletics, I have three children and all three of them have played youth athletics all of their lives. I have paid thousands of dollars for them to participate in sports. So I understand that as a parent, there will be a fee. I also understand that for families that can't pay those fees, hopefully there are scholarship available so that their students can, so their kids can play. At all of our sites, youth
261sports that use our facilities Monday through Friday do not pay custodial fees because we already have custodians on site. It's Saturday and Sunday when schools are closed that we have to charge those fees. But rarely, and I'm not going to say 100% because I can't speak for any other school. I can only speak to Piner. We never charge youth sports fees to use our facilities. We only charge custodial fees on the weekends. And that's because we have to. But during the week, Monday through Friday, when we have custodial staff on site, we are not charging them those fees. And then we waive the facility fee. And are we able to still do that with the new policy? I don't know how other schools are. But we don't have a lot of youth sports at Piner
262right now. We only have the adult baseball league. And in that case, we are not charging them facility fees. We're only charging them for a custodian. out of the respect of the relationship we have had with them. And we know that those fees have increased, like all fees. And if I may even play devil's advocate a little bit more. We are a non-public school, right? And we have an activities department, our ASB, and every year they put on prom. And every year we have to pay to use a facility in Santa Rosa to have our prom. Now, could my argument not be, well, why won't they waive our fee? We're a school. Why can't we use their facility? I just had to sign a $6,000 check to have prom at the backdrop. Why didn't they
263waive my fee? Same argument. Things cost money. We have to keep our facilities nice. We have to keep our schools nice. We can't let anybody come in and use anything. And so there has to be some type of qualification of what we're going to charge. Right? And I know it's unfortunate. And I know that fees have gone up. And I feel very bad about that. But the reason why they're using schools and not city fields is because city fields are way more expensive. And there's not enough city fields. I agree. That's why they're not using it. I agree. So, you know, especially if there's a sprinkle, if there's a rain, city fields are closed throughout, you know, seven months out of the year because of rain. So what I'm asking is... We look into MOUs
264with groups that we do want to work with or groups that we have had good relationships with. And if they're not cleaning them after themselves and they're not taking it, then they broke the MOU and they don't continue their use. All I'm asking is that we have conversations with these groups that have had use of our facilities because the reality is, like Director Jenkins mentioned, it's packed on the weekends. A lot of those groups using those facilities on the weekends are not permitted, did not ask for permission. They showed up to use the facility because we don't have the staff to tell people, no, don't use the facility. So people are parking in the neighborhood and walking in the facility and using our campuses with or without our permission because we don't have the staff
265to say no. These are the groups that are asking for permission. And if we can find a way to work with them to allow that, that would be fantastic. an opportunity I would like to explore. I'm not, and I'm just asking that we have conversations with these groups and see if there's something possible so that we are covered. So that custodians do do what they need to do within their union regulations and that we are secure and safe campus because ultimately these are groups that are asking us to use our facilities to be community members and stewards of those facilities while they're in use. And if we don't work with them and have good work relationship with them on our sites, then we run the risk of somebody else coming in and using those sites
266without our permission. And we have no MOU to pull. We have no somebody, hopefully somebody in the neighborhood called the police because now they're trespassing. And that was dealt with for people that were uninvited guests. We're going to go to Superintendent August, then to myself, then to Trustee DeFasi, Trustee Kirby, and then back to Trustee Medina. Thank you. Yes, we do have MOUs that we can explore. I will share we have not had the staff to be able to follow up on those until very recently. We finally are fully staffed to be able to address the requests that have been coming in for those memorandums. I also want to bring up just for a notation that we have tens of thousands of dollars in outstanding fees that have not been paid from organizations utilizing our
267field. So again, it comes down to staffing being able to address all of the issues of this, not just the custodial side, but the support side. So we are working on that. And those with outstanding We'll be receiving follow-up, additional follow-up, but it's not always a matter of just because somebody has insurance that we're going to receive payment. We don't always even receive payment for the facilities themselves. These are all processes that we are working on, but we are exploring the agreements as well. If I can also add, and it's not... Again, this is not revenue for the district. This is just covering our costs. And as our superintendent Lisa August said, we are owed monies. Like this year alone, we've invoiced over $111,000 and outstanding, there's still $110,000. from owed monies just from facility
268use requests. And additionally, we have another $22,000 that haven't been paid in past years from people who have requested to use our facilities and now either aren't an organization anymore. There's no way for us to collect that money. And that's not just, again, it's not revenue, it's covering our costs, but that's already money that the district has spent that we're not able to recuperate. And so we are, Accounts Receivable Tech works diligently every month to send invoices out, send out reminders. But again, we can have over 200 events in one month that she has to make sure that gets invoice properly notified, sent, mailed, follow up on emails. It's definitely a lot for one person and it's not money that we've gotten, we've received yet. For that specific problem, are we not able to ask
269for payment up front or payment of time of application? Is that just a harder process? So currently, the way it's done specifically, the process is they submit a permit. The facility fee for that, the gym or the field is set there. But as it stands currently, for any custodian fee, it's not added up front because we're not sure if they're going to need one or two custodians right away. That's not set there with our current platform. So it has to be added after. So to go in and add additional, so send out that invoice, expect payment up front. If they're already kind of pushing back on getting invoice afterwards, after they've had their event, not a lot of them are going to be happy with us. asking for money up front and i understand that
270and i apologize to our staff but if i'm in a sports league for the city of santa rosa i have to send a check-in with my team or i don't play so i mean we we might need to re-look at that as well especially with such an exorbitant amount outstanding i mean that's embarrassing not to us but to our guests our guests yeah that that's that's a re that's one of the reasons that we are looking at a different platform that will enable us to not have to manage as much of that process. So I'm going to move to my comments, then we'll move to Trustee DeFossey, Kirby, and then back to Medina. So I actually appreciate bringing up the city of Santa Rosa's fees. You don't get to over $1,000 in fees until you're
271like 1,000 people. The field rentals, and I'm specifically focused on the fields because if you are opening our facilities, beating our facilities, the potential damage and things like that is a kind of separate conversation. And I think there's also a separate conversation around turf versus non-turf as we're categorizing these. This comes specific to non-turf, non-indoor field usage. The city of Santa Rosa's fee schedule makes a lot of sense. It is, first off, if you're a youth league, you have a $10 per player fee per the season and then a $20 per an hour field rental on top of that. And when I'm thinking about the comments I'm hearing from our soccer leagues, especially where they have three-hour... practices four or five days a week plus games on Sundays, that seems like a rational way to
272engage them in use on our fields. And with all due respect to the presentation, we may be doing special favors for folks during the week, but we charge $75 an hour for janitorial during the week. If we're following the policy that was approved a year ago and is written right now. So if we're not charging that $75 fee during the week, then we're not following the policy and we're selectively choosing where we're doing it and not doing it. And that's almost more of a concern to me because. We've used significant amount of taxpayer bond funds. We're about to use a significant amount more for some of these fees. And so I'm almost more concerned around the arbitrary nature where we don't have use agreements, but we're giving special considerations to some folks and others instead
273of having one more rational fee package that would actually enable the use of our fields. If we could come in alignment. with the city's fee schedule i think that would actually make a lot of sense especially as we're walking down this road and potentially talking about ways to collaborate with them on other campuses we have a lot of the recreational facilities in the community and i think the current implementation of this fee schedule is going to result in more people using our fields without getting permits and without paying anything. And I think that'll actually lead to worse behavior that could lead to more garbage, more damage, and less accountability because we also don't have the staff to go around and kick people off of our fields after hours. It's better for us to have reasonable
274fees, have them permitted and regulated, and actually know who is there so when there's a problem, we can address it with them. directly. And I question our efficacy in the use of the funds. I get a thousand person event or 500 person event needing potentially multiple folks. A lot of the things that I'm hearing about are, you know, 11, 12 youth players and a couple of coaches for a practice, or maybe 40 or 50 folks that show up for a game. And that's most of what the emails were that I've got, whether it was, I mean, throughout all of the fields and the different sports. So I think we're... significantly eroding the trust with the community which will damage any future potential for us to go out for bond funds I think that we're either
275eliminating the ability for sites to have discretion or or having the discretion be used in a way that's not contemplated in the policy currently because I'm hearing both that we have to do the $150 On the weekends, but that we're making exceptions on a $75 during the week and both those lines have the exact same language in our policy so either we're giving sites the discretion to work with groups and waive the janitorial fees and make it rational or we're not and I'm hearing that answer is different, but the policy is not providing that discretion so I I think that there needs to be a way to connect this. And if we're having one. custodians show up in order to open fields, is there a way where we can have two or three staff that
276are covering multiple locations? Because yes, the 10 minutes to unlock the fields and the 10 minutes to lock them, we have to make sure that we give them the hours that they need, but it doesn't mean that we can't task with other things such as staggering across different fields what our opening times are. You know, can we open one site? in one hour have the custodian go to the other site, open that site, and find a more efficient way for us to expend the funds to support all these different leagues. Fundamentally, I think if we keep this policy, our fields are going to get used as much, if not more. We're going to reward the bad actors that haven't been getting permits, and we're going to result in a place where the good actors are
277forced to use our fields without permitting. Fencing helps, right? That does help. They're open now, so fencing will help. But I will say this, the city of Santa Rosa parks are just out there parks. We have schools, right? So the city. only charges maybe a low fee because they do put porta-potties out there and they don't have custodians that have to clean those or such, so they can handle that. The school site has to be ready for the children that come that Monday. And a lot of those fees aren't just the custodian opening and closing. That is important to open and close our facility, but there's garbage, there's restrooms to clean, there's stuff that goes on throughout the day. What if the toilet gets clogged? What if they run out of soap paper? Who knows
278what happens? But if they're not there, they can't address that. But our current fee schedule applies the same $150 for 12 kids and the coach showing up to practice on a soccer field. Correct. That applies to 1,000 people showing up for a tournament. Yeah, but they might only be there for two hours, whereas the 1,000 might be there for 10, right? So there's a cost difference there. But if their use is for three or four hours, they'd be paying for the three to four hours. even though that custodian could go and do other things. I think what I'm trying to argue is there should be a way to schedule and time this where one staff could support multiple activities unless it has the high attendance ratios. Momentarily, President Cassin, I'd like to make a motion
279we extend the meeting to 1130, please. Is there a second? I'll amend to 11. We got way too much on this, and it's our last meeting of the school year. All right. It's been moved in a second to 1130. Is there any opposition? All right. All right. We'll go ahead and do a roll call because I have someone online, so I have to do a roll call anyway. Sorry. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee De Fossey. Aye. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee Medina. I, but I just want to let everybody know that I have to get out of here at 1015 because I've been told the facility is going to lock down. So I, for Trustee Medina. Okay. Trustee Prach. No. President Kasten. Aye. That motion passes 5-2. All right, we are in
280a discussion item. We'll get to a place where we have to do some level of direction on this. Trustee DuFasi, I'm going to go to your comments. Thank you, President Kasten. A couple of things. Because I read the Civil Act law piece, too, and this isn't necessary for you, but can we deny use for a group? And what and how what do we use to justify other than somebody that's abused a thing? But let's say we don't know this group. And I'll get a real extreme example. In the early 70s, the KKK came and held a rally at one of our parks and they got a permit because they have freedom of speech. So could a group like that or a religious group show up and. Use our facility. So there is a section for
281religious groups incorporated in the education code for facility use Currently the only thing on there stated for the code is if they have destruction of property that we can then deny them and then our current Board policy and admin regulation don't stipulate reasons for denial currently So if the Proud Boys showed up and say we want to use Pioneer's football field, they can do that? It would depend. No, they cannot. I agree with you. Because I would have to approve that. The approval of the NFL. Okay. And we don't need to get into a long discussion about it. I just want to make sure that we're on solid ground. Because I agree with you. I don't want any of those people around. But, you know, I want to make sure that we're not going to
282get into any legal problems, especially in this day and age with stuff that's going on. So there's that. The other thing, and Professor Cray, and I think you got it, was that email that I got about complaining about noise from Piner. I assume it was on the weekend. He wasn't very specific. Well, no, that email was in regards to a senior sunset activity for our senior class on Friday at 6.30 p.m. Yeah, well, okay, because he didn't specify at least the one I read. So I'm like, oh, I don't know what he's even talking about personally. Sound levels. Who regulates that? So the Santa Rosa Police Department. So he calls the police. The police are the ones who enforce that, not us. Yeah, so we don't have anything to do with that. So it all
283is to the city. So if it is, the cops show up. If they think it's too loud, they come over and say, hey, knock it off. And I would like to point out that I have worked at Piner High School for 27 years, 10 of which I was an activities director. I've been a coach. I've been an administrator. I've been a teacher. I've done everything on that football field. We have never gotten complaints about the sound of our activities, and nothing has changed. The only reason why I ever heard anything is because when you put the lights in, and I got a rivety all up in a kerfuffle for a while. That was a while ago. We haven't really had any issue. This is all brand new. It's very interesting. But thank you for that.
284Now I'll know how to respond back to him. That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. So we don't have any skin in that game. That is to the city, and that's where it goes. Perfect. All right. Some clarification on some of the things on the fee schedule. So first, are summer days considered non-regular days? No. Monday through Friday, our staff's there except a holiday. Even summertime? Even the summer, they're there in the summer, yeah. Our custodial staff is 12-month employees. All year round, okay. Yeah, I guess it wasn't clear about that on our fee schedule, like what days. It didn't really define what days are non-regular days versus regular work week days. I mean, yeah, I didn't write this one, but I think Jessica, who's our district accountant now, probably would have great say
285in kind of maybe revising this to help reflect some of those things. Just it might be more transparent to someone trying to rent the thing. The custodial fees. So the one that we approved back on 6-25 last year, it said per our form that the increase was, we increased it by 188% on regular days and 233% on non-regular days. Is that correct? Those were the numbers on the presentation last year. That is correct. They had not been addressed in many, many years. So we were actually, we were subsidizing the costs. All right. And so I know in order to comply with the Civic Center Act and that code 38134. It says that these amounts that we charge must not exceed direct costs. So when we're charging $600 for four hours. that $600 is then going
286to that custodian that showed up for that day. It's not just for the employees. I believe I included a little verbiage in there. Direct cost is not just salary for employees, but it's supplies. It's the use of the wear and tear, maintenance, trash, utilities like water, gas, electricity. All that would be included in the price. And the admin fee is also, but this new platform, we're supposed to reduce that workload, correct? But it's actually increased it? It has not functioned as we had hoped. It was, it has definitely, like it was approved last year and like with this fee schedule, it was approved so that it'd be applied consistently across the board. Unfortunately, the staff that Push this forward is no longer here and wasn't there to really cement the implementation to keep it to
287make sure that everything was implemented across the board. And we had that vacancy for about three months. So that kind of, as you might guess, is probably the reason why it's still not implemented accordingly across the board. But that was the thinking or the process behind updating the fees is not just. catching up to all the costs that we have put in subsidizing the cost, but that we apply it across the board on all our sites so that we're all on the same page. Okay. Do we have, and then maybe this is for Superintendent August also, do we have any kind of AR or policy in place prohibiting porta potties on our campuses? I actually do not know the answer to that one offhand. I will defer to Director Oden if he knows. Sorry, Jessica,
288if you know. Sorry, it's not included in the current AR for facility use. In the fee schedule, it says it's just the administrator. Are the ones kind of approving or not approving the permits? All right. So, I mean, for these outside events, like I said, if it's a field out, baseball, soccer field, whatever, if someone was to bring in their porta potty, then we wouldn't need someone to come and open the restrooms, right, for the food. I think that there have been other issues specific to the porta potties that Director Oden can probably speak to. Yes. Just not getting pumped once a week? Well, they pump them during the school day, right? So that's fun for the kids. Or maybe they don't. They get tipped over by kids who's there to clean that up during
289the week. It's school staff. It's not this weekend team, right? It happens. It falls on school staff, a lot of this. And it's just a place that the principals have argued they don't want kids around. So is it? against board policy, maybe not, but the principals are the ones who get to say we want or we don't want this on our campus. And if they don't want it, they get that choice to say no. And I also wanted to remark about, Mr. Kirby, your comment about administrative fees. I just want to be very clear. Sites do not get any funding off of the fees that the district brings in, nor does site administration. And I know that's not what you meant, but I just want to be clear for anyone who might be listening. The
290administration... We're not getting any of those funds in our general fund, and our sites aren't getting any of those funds. All funds that are brought in go to the district office if they're brought in, which goes into their general fund. So I just want to be clear about that. Because I know a lot of people think, well, you're getting this money. And I'm like, whoa. We're not getting that money. I appreciate that. But per your comment earlier, these groups that we're renting the fields to, they are donating to your sports programs over the years. They're helping take care of the fields. Our custodians or maintenance people are not. typically taking care of the baseball fields. The coaches, the groups like this are the ones mowing them. They're grooming the fields. Not the outfield. So our
291maintenance and our grounds does a wonderful job of doing upkeep on our larger stuff, like the tree line and the fields and the outfield and the tall grass. The infield, baseball coaches are very persnickety about their infield. Oh, yeah. And they get a little frustrated if people come in and mow it, not to their degree of satisfaction. Sure. And so, you know, compromises, okay, if the grounds takes care of the outfield, I'll take care of the infield. And I think it's more just because of their desire to have a really nice infield. And our kids want to have a really nice infield too. One thing I wanted to add is with the middle school coming to Piner next year, we anticipate we're not going to have a lot of outside organizations using any of our
292facilities. Number one, we're getting new field stadium. And so we're going to probably be very picky about who uses that new turf field. And then second, we're going to have 400 more kids using our fields every day. We're not going to have time to let outside organizations use our fields. And so I am, you know, put that out. It might even get, people might be able to be more frustrated because we're not going to have the availability that we even have now. Sure. Superintendent August, the MOUs that were brought up about. that we may need to form instead of these rental applications, those need to be brought before the board, right? And uploaded on by the board. And it's going to take some time to get that done. Probably not before this summer, I would
293imagine, right? I'm hopeful that we can, we have some template language that, you know, I mean, this isn't starting from scratch. We do have positions filled now that have people that can get brought up to speed on drafting some things, but I have to have the time to look at how we negotiate that moving forward. And we need our other staff to be able to, depending on what those look like, we need to have time to have discussions with our labor partners who would be impacted by it as well. So possible by the end of June. I can't say that it's going to be ready next week. All right. My last question was, someone brought up the insurance. I think, Jessica, you talked about groups having to have their own insurance. Has anyone ever filed
294a claim against the district for any injuries or anything with one of these events, to your knowledge? We have had people submit claim forms for injuries or accidents that happen during weekend activities. We have how many? In the last week, I've had two that people have reached out about. And usually they'll submit the claim form and it goes through our insurance. The district doesn't approve or deny any of the claims. Everything is done by the insurance. And that's just, you know, me in my new position currently. I would have to look back and see if any claims are submitted before. Okay. I was just curious. All right. Yeah, I hope we can do something to refine these fees. So Steve Medina, and then I'm going to see if I can give us a path forward
295here. Thank you. Just real quick, alternatives to incident IQ are being looked at. Do we have a timeline when that might be coming back? Can you restate that? Alternatives to incident IQ are being looked at. Do we know when we might see something back related to that? We're hoping to have something before the end of June. The RFP process takes a couple of weeks and then selecting the best candidate to move forward. But I'm hoping to get something in place before the last board meeting of the school year because that's something we need to move forward for next school year if we're going to change. I think as things are determined, I think what Trustee La Torre was talking about, you know, fees being paid up front as much as possible. I know sometimes they
296change based on the number of hours a custodian puts in and stuff. But as long as there's language that helps communicate that to people would be good. Again, I think our schools should be... community schools of sorts. And I think I like the idea that site admin are able to be a part of developing that relationship with organizations that are part of. So I think as we develop MOUs, I think building that community with site admin, I think is going to be important as long as we're prioritizing our schools, our use first, which is a no brainer. But I think I've also heard complaints that not just outside organizations Sometimes our coaches and our staff are also part of like that custodial staff complaint that the stuff isn't clean or locked up appropriately after use.
297So I don't know if that's part of some of these agreements, but I think we need to have some sort of, I want to call it maybe like progressive discipline of organizations that use fields and maybe they're not doing what they need to do. um some clear outline process that determines when they will no longer be able to use it you know if it's abused right so i think if something comes back to us that's something that i would like to see that way it's clear and communicated effectively to everybody and everyone understands that's all All right. What I'd like to do is get a sense of the board's straw vote, if you will, as to whether or not there is a desire to have changes to this policy come back as written, which I'd
298like to recognize doesn't actually recognize the site-based exceptions that we've been talking about today. And then if there is that interest, my recommendation is going to be that the board give me the ability to appoint an ad hoc committee in order to actually work more diligently with staff on this so that when it comes back we have more actionable proposals. So first, just real simple, if I don't have four folks that want to change the policy, we're not going to do that. So if I can get a simple raise of hands if there is interest in pursuing some of these additional ideas that have come up around changing the policy or if we're good with it as is. Two, three, four. Okay, that gives me four folks. And then I'm going to lay out the
299term here. It would be an ad hoc committee basically not to exceed past September in order, and ideally quicker than that, in order to work with staff specific to the content of this agenda item. Is there any objection from the board on that? Okay, then I'll make those appointments by June 10th, and let's go ahead and move this item, move to the next agenda item. Thank you all very much. Thank you, guys. I'd love to be a part of that ad hoc. Yeah, I'm going to make sure I have everyone express their interest so I can bring those back on the 10th. Thank you. Thank you all very much. All right, we're going to move to our update on Child Nutritional Services, CNS, and Superintendent. Superintendent August, if you'd like to introduce Ed. Yes. Thank
300you very much to Director Ed Burke for coming. And Ian, when he's actually, this is his time off. He's pursuing some higher education on a brief leave. So we appreciate him taking the opportunity to come back and share our required annual update for CNS. Appreciate it as always. I also just want to start with our sincere apologies for how many times we rescheduled you and you have our undivided attention. I love it. Thank you so much. So I'm so excited to be here and share all the great work we have done and a deep appreciation for our staff. I want to start off with a deep appreciation for our friend Rosalba Estrada de Martinez, who has been identified as the Classified School Employee of the Year at Sonoma County Office of Ed. Shout out to
301our friend Rosalba. So on the pictures, you can see on the left, our friend Rosalba is in costume, waving people down, telling them about free meals during the COVID school closures. Rosalba was a member of one of three people who served about 40% of all the meals that we served. Oh, am I? Pardon me. I was so excited to get started. There we go. Thanks so much. Alrighty, so on the left, you can see our friend Rosalba is flagging people down so that we can hand out bundles during COVID. Rosalba has also done a really tremendous job of connecting with students and getting them really excited about the salad bar at Steel Lane Elementary. And we are so excited for Rosalba to be in consideration for the statewide prize. So we're really pulling for Rosalba.
302Rosalba is a fantastic example of al puro sentado, means to rise to the occasion, do your best, and overcome all the challenges that you have. And Rosalba has been there every step of the way in my tenure to help us do better and serve more students. So we're so deeply appreciative of Rosalba and the principles of al puro sentado. So just kind of a brief overview. Our goals, as always, are staffing, scratch cooking, infrastructure, nutrition education, local procurement, and sustainability, and reducing the amount of plastics in schools. This is a through line in all the decisions that we make. We determine how does this relate to our goals. So, but first the numbers. We had a similar gross revenue year over year compared to last year. So what we have seen is the year over
303year growth that we had enjoyed since we returned from COVID has really slowed. And so that's going to be an area of focus for us is enhancing our revenue. Another neat consideration is that we have maintained similar revenue, despite any kind of declining enrollment or other considerations in our community. A big part of that has been the implementation of plastic-free elementary school lunch at two of our sites, which has increased our gross revenue by $319,000. This is really exciting because it means that we are serving more students on a consistent basis. And if you have not had the pleasure, plastic-free elementary lunch is phenomenal. It's just the best part of my day. It's not plastic. It's so much better. It's really great stuff. We have also managed by reducing some ongoing costs associated with hiring
304staff, namely the professional services, and by implementing scratch cooking. We have reduced our ongoing expenses by 1.19% year over year. And that's really just getting started with scratch cooking, and we anticipate greater savings next year, which is going to be amazing. We have also invested $360,000 in capital equipment, and we'll discuss that in a little bit, but about 69% of that is going to school site meal service. We also want to share a deep appreciation for our staff at Montgomery and Santa Rosa High for operating 712. We provided more staff, we provided more equipment, but our staff really came through, optimized their entire day, organized, and really came through in a really tremendous way, but have also demonstrated and developed some really phenomenal best practices for how do we serve two separate meal services each
305day for each meal service. So a deep appreciation for our friends over in 712. With our staffing, we are so grateful. We have 17 people who have obtained their manager level food safety certifications. This represents about 29% of staff that are required to have this certification. We have hired a lot of staff. We have now certified a lot of staff. This is phenomenal progress. The certification process is a lot. It is a very intensive. very difficult exam. And so we're so grateful for our staff for believing in themselves and engaging this process with us. The first time in particular can be overwhelming. It is a lot of information. It is a lot of stress. And so getting through that process has been a focus for our team and supporting our staff members. We also have
306done some really phenomenal work with scratch cooking in our central kitchen. Scratch cooking requires more hands. It requires more time. But it also means that we can make our own food exactly the way that we want it. The birria, apologies for the brag, but the birria that we make is the best birria I've ever had. The consomme is absolutely perfect, and it is exactly the way that we want it when we want it. And our food cost is going to offset those increases in labor, which is an ongoing best practice. Likewise, we had a partnership with our friend at Sonoma Family Meal to provide food service training for our Cook Chill team. A lot of our staff are new to the large kitchen operations. And it was a really tremendous opportunity for us to build
307our confidence, build a community with our friends at other schools, and also steal some of their best ideas. Because in all things, we're all here for the same reasons, but we also want to compete. So as we mentioned earlier, we have $360,000 in capital equipment that we have invested or encumbered in the current school year. And we have a breakdown here. So you'll see that we have added a dishwashing machine at Santa Rosa High. One of the things that we are very keen about is adding dishwashing machines at our busier high schools because washing dishes by hands is a lot of effort and it really just drags. So having a dishwashing machine is going to be a tremendous benefit to our staff at school sites. We have to work with our friends at Sonoma County
308Office of Health to ensure that our plans meet our current expectations for food code. But they have been really phenomenal partners, and so we're really grateful for that. Likewise, you'll see that we have spent about 69% of our funding on site meal service equipment, that's serving lines, that's storage, that's new ovens or new equipment to replace aging equipment. So again, a lot of emphasis was put at our high schools, particularly 7-12, and adding more serving lines where that was available in terms of the infrastructure available to us. But also in cold storage, because we have so many more meals to serve, we need so much more storage. A deep appreciation for our friend, Erica Lopanovich, seen in there in the middle. We have been going out to kindergarten classes to extol the virtues of kale
309chips. It starts off with, ew, what is that? And ends with, I can't wait to have more. We talk about the values of eating the rainbow. We have this really great sing-along featuring ASL that students will then kind of flash at me in the cafeterias periodically. They're like, this is bones. And it's like, yeah, that's bones. So we have, it's the best, just the best. So we have made a commitment to visit all the elementary schools next year and providing ongoing support. So in all of our goals, really they are in service of nutrition education. We want students to eat. We want students to eat well. One of the considerations is what is this? How do I eat it? What do I do if I don't like it? And so these nutrition education sessions that
310we do with our friend Erica really address those three issues in introducing new foods. We have heard anecdotal evidence from our friends in kindergarten that following these sessions, kids are really excited to try new foods. They chat about it. They discuss what they're going to do if they don't like it. It's absolutely phenomenal. And it really gets to the opportunities that we have here in school to increase amount of fruits and vegetables being consumed. I'm going to touch on that a little bit later with sustainability and waste prevention as well. But when we offer more fruits and vegetables, when students are taking more fruits and vegetables, they're going to have a lifetime of healthy habits that is going to tremendously impact their lives in a positive way. Arguably, every goal that we have presented so
311far is in service and impacts our nutrition education services that we provide. Also, a deep appreciation for our partners. We have the best, the best Asian pears from our friends at Earthseed Farms. We've had some really delicious apples. If you have the opportunity, visit Feed Sonoma. They have a strawberry parfait apple that is absolutely perfect, and it is delicious and locally grown here in Sonoma County. As you are well aware, we did have some funding setbacks. We no longer have grant funding for local foods. We have maintained and committed the same amount of funding that we did the last year. As prices go up, so too does there pressure on our local growers. And so it's important to us that we maintain our obligations to our community. We want to spend Santa Rosa dollars as
312close to Santa Rosa as possible. And I have to say, Santa Rosa, excuse me, Sonoma County tastes absolutely amazing. Deeply appreciative for our partners, particularly for the ins and outs of local procurement. So deep appreciation. So sustainability, I have so much for this. So plastic-free elementary meals are going to be expanded in the coming school year. We intend to serve it at all of our elementaries. That's going to be dependent on hiring. So there are a few sites that we're going to have to get to after we have hired on staff. But we have seen that there is a dramatic reduction in plastic at our plastic-free elementary schools. We also implemented a really cool bulk cereal model where instead of plastic, I'm just imagining for a moment, a plastic container of cereal that sits on
313a shelf for a while, we now have bulk cereal like you would see at a hotel or a conference that's organic, it's low sugar. It also, part of their net revenue goes towards supporting Monarch butterfly sanctuaries, which is so cool. And we have found that that also reduces the amount of plastic that we are serving our breakfast as well, which is super cool. So we are in the process of buying more of these cereal dispensers so we can make them available at more school sites and have that much less plastic. Another consideration that we are just constantly thinking about and tying it back into nutrition education is fruit and vegetables. So for context, a little bit of a deep dive. We have to have a fruit or a vegetable on every single tray as a
314student leaves our cashier. That is to say, we have to have that to get a reimbursable meal. If a student passes without a fruit or a vegetable, we don't get paid for it. And that's kind of awful. So we do have juices available at our high schools. That's really a compromise. Not a fan of juice. I don't think it's enough fiber. I think we could do better. So our efforts with platelets with. Our efforts with nutrition education is also having conversations with high school students about fruits and vegetables. What kind of fruits and vegetables would you like? How would you like to have them? Really wonderful conversations centered in fiber and immediate benefits that you're going to get from having fiber. Not to get gross, but it was really a wonderful, fun conversation. We've also
315had some really great chats, and I'm so appreciative. I did forget to mention this earlier, but I'm so appreciative of our friends at Piner High School, particularly the students there. who have been emailing on a regular basis. We like this, we don't like this. That emails also enable us to have some ongoing conversations. How are you feeling about the salad bar? What if we did something like a salsa bar? How if we did put in some tajin packets, would that increase your fruit and vegetable consumption? Likewise, we're having some wonderful conversations about surveys, feedback loops. Right now, it's a pretty informal process and we want to put some more formal written agreements in place. Is there a Google form where you can drop in ideas for what you'd like to have for lunch? But I
316really want to emphasize that the most impactful thing that we can get is an ongoing conversation. I had a wonderful conversation with a student about their religious needs during a specific time of year related to fasting. I was like, please, educate me. Tell me specifically what your needs are so that we can be there to support you. So those ongoing conversations are highly impactful and deeply appreciative. Likewise, we had a wonderful conversation about surveys. Should we put emotic, emotic, emotes, excuse me. Emojis, thank you. Like faces, or should we use numbers? And it was a really wonderful conversation because once again, I've got it completely wrong. I'm on the wrong side of 30. I thought emotive faces would be inappropriate, but no, that was the preferred choice. Like, let's go. So that'll be really great
317for our survey design. All of which really comes back to is our goal is to have students eating more fruits and vegetables every single day. I'm also deeply appreciative of the efforts of our staff to serve meals as quickly as possible so that we have more time to eat more fruits and vegetables. And I am all set. So any questions, concerns, or comments? Trustee Jenkins, then Kirby, and then De La Torre. Thank you for your presentation. I always look forward to when you are speaking. You are just a wonderful presenter. A couple things. Huge kudos. I mean, how far we've come in student nutrition is wild. My kids are 17 now, so they're headed into their senior year. And just from kindergarten to senior year. has been extreme. So great job to you and your
318team. I did want to plug us up here at this, whatever we call this thing, because just like any meeting, if you bring them food, they will come. So just. We are here from 4 to 11, 1130 on two Wednesdays a month. Feel free to bring us food. Because, mostly because if it's good enough for our students, it's absolutely good enough for the adults. And there has been such extreme changes in nutrition in the schools. And I want to sing those praises because they... It goes far then. I feel like we're likely a leader in the school system of what we're doing with nutrition. And I think it needs to be talked about more so that it has that trickle-down effect to surrounding districts and throughout the state. So thank you. Thank you. All right.
319We're going to go Trustee Kirby, De La Torre, Pratt, DuFosse, and then myself. Also, thanks for the great presentation. A couple of quick questions. You mentioned that the gross revenue increased, I think it was $319,000 by going plastic free. How did you do that? How did it increase? That's a great question. So for context, the school food program, think of it as like a nonprofit restaurant. We serve more meals, we get more revenue. So what we found was by offering plastic free, and please, you know, I will say the quiet part out loud, the stuff that's wrapped in plastic is not great. It tastes terrible. It's not how it's supposed to be. No one wants wet pizza. No, thank you. So now we have food as we intended to be served. We have a birria
320burrito that has the crisp outside, the soft inside. We have the chana masala that's not... sweating in a plastic container. It is, it smells better, it feels better, tastes better. Everything about it is consistently better. And so what happens is we then find that students are like, wow, that smells great. I want that. And so sorry, mom and dad, but they're coming to eat with us and not what we packed from home. So we are serving more meals at those sites, which is phenomenal. What we anticipate is. greater growth relative to where we are now. So for example, at Hidden Valley, there was lower participation when we started. So the growth was a little more dramatic, whereas Monroe was a smaller amount of growth, but students are showing up every single day. And so we're
321finding that there is an opportunity for us to really enhance our gross revenue by serving more meals. And that is, again, very hand in glove with our intentions because we want to serve students really great food. I appreciate the fact that you guys are spreading this slow growth to our elementary schools. Are you hopefully able to one day expand this to our high schools? I know it's a big ask and it's a bigger scale, but is that the hope? I love that question. So at our secondaries, we have a central thesis, and we're continuously looking at this again, because what was true a year ago may not be true a year from now. So our central thesis at high schools is we have to serve these meals as quickly as possible so students can go
322and do really anything else that they want to do in their time. In retrospect, 30 minutes is not really 30 minutes. It's the time it takes to get across campus, time to go to the bathroom, time to chat with your friends. So there is a tremendous amount of competition for students' time, and we want to give them as many opportunities as possible to do something other than waiting in line. So there are opportunities for us to put things on students' trays. There is a trade-off. It does take more time. So I did, I'd have to look at my notes for the specifics, but at my previous district, it was a norm to put things on students' trays. It did take longer to serve the same amount of students. And so that is going to be
323a consideration in terms of our prioritization. If we said, hey, can you give me five more minutes to serve meals, I can put things on your trays, that might put students in a really precarious position because as it stands, we really only have the one space to serve those meals. So it is a rocket launch, and it's something that really has a tremendous impact if we're not successful, where we could very likely cause more problems than we're attending. So it is something that we are evaluating. I'm having conversations with other school districts. I'm going to be having some calls with our friends in food service design and just say like, hey, maybe my math is not what I think it is. Walk me through these steps. How does this district do it? How did they
324do it? And given that space is at a premium at our secondaries, we understand that there may not be a second serving line available and we want to be cognizant of that as well. But I am right there with you. I think that even a compostable clamshell really doesn't give you the same experience as walking and having someone put the food on a tray for you. That's just categorically better. But it is a compromise so that we can serve those meals faster. And if opportunities arise, and that is something we are consistently looking at, we'd be happy to jump on them. Last question. So I saw on your equipment purchase, I know in the facilities master plan, we talked about allocating for a kettle update. Is there an update on where that replacement is? Timeline?
325Absolutely. So we are working with our friends at Van Pelt. We have contacted a food service designer. We are making arrangements to bring on an architect. So in terms of the scope of work, think of it this way. When you're renovating your facilities, there is going to be a review of everything. So for example, we want to replace our two... Back to kettles. For context, no one uses steam anymore. It's just incredibly inefficient and difficult. They are original to the building, so they're approaching 30 years. Likewise, our boiler is kind of touch and go. It does turn off in the middle of service. We're getting through it. But we are bringing on staff so that we can revise the entirety of every system that it touches. So it is the piping, it is the plumbing,
326it is dropping concrete, it's putting in new hoods. It's an expansive project. And because of the scope of the work, we have to bring on a more complete team, whereas replacing an oven would be much simpler and easier to do. And thusly, the moves that we can make, we make them now, utilizing our kitchen infrastructure and training grant money or utilizing our reserves. So the kettle project is underway in terms of planning. I am... very, very eager to move forward with the planning steps so that we have a more complete outline of what work is needed, what timelines are going to be there, and so on. So, yeah, absolutely. Great. Thank you. We'll see De La Torre, Prack, and then Dufasi. Ed, I just want to keep it as quick as possible and respect your
327time. Thank you for every presentation you bring to us. I always feel... much more informed when you're done explaining what you're doing and how you're doing and so proud of you and your staff for doing it so well. One thing did pop up, the loss of the grant. Are there opportunities on the horizon? Are you keeping your eyes open for other opportunities to replace? Absolutely. As grant opportunities present themselves, we will make plans and execute for them. One of the considerations is going to be what does the state's funding look like? So for context, the state has been extraordinarily generous with our food programs, really making up for a deficit in the past 20 years or so. So the past like five, five, 10 years since we got back from COVID has really just been
328a phenomenal time in school food. The worry is that that may not continue or there will be other priorities that take place. And so that is a consideration that we have in mind. But yeah, absolutely. Because we want to take outside funding wherever we can to alleviate the pressures on our funding here. Thank you so much, Ed. And please keep us informed on what this board can do to continue to support you and your team and the amazing job that you're doing for our students. Thanks so much. Trustee Prack and then Dufasi. Hi. We haven't officially met. But after hearing your presentation, it's like, oh, I think you're a very smart businessman. You know, your demographics. So my question is, I know that the French school years ago had, I don't know if it was
329a grant or however they worked it into their charter that they were able to have French food, French cuisine with a French chef. Is that through the CNS program? And I know that when they were here last, they were talking about, or Evelyn was talking about getting that back into their school, into their cafeteria. Yeah, so historically, and please bear in mind that this was before my tenure. So what I do understand is what was explained to me when I started. My understanding is the French program had a separate food program that was housed within CNS. So CNS staff, CNS budget. The key distinction was that as an elementary school, they had a supervisor that was a chef. So for context, the same position, same salary that supervised all of our secondary schools was preparing
330meals for the French American Charter School, along with two full-time food worker two positions, where typically an elementary school has one part-time or one full-time staff member that spends their time in Central Kitchen and their school. So there was a lot more staffing available to that program. My understanding was it ended shortly before I started. We did evaluate it from the context of budgeting and equity. My understanding is that there was an agreement that if there was a deficit in the program, that the parent group would pay for that deficit. Again, that created an equity issue for us. Is this something we could do at all of our elementary schools? Really, no. Is this something that we want to do at all of our elementary schools? Sort of. So what we want to do is
331have an amazing food program that's accessible to all students. We want to have great food, period. When we have as an opportunity at the French American Charter, because they're at a former secondary school, they have a complete kitchen. So we are going to be doing plastic-free elementary schools from the get-go with an amazing and talented staff members that are going to be supporting them. Keep in mind, this is the same menu, same services that we're providing to all of our elementary schools, because again, we're keeping in mind from a budgeting and equity focus. So that is something that has been requested. We have declined historically. And I think that unless there is a situational change with regards to equity or budgeting, I don't know that that's something that's really feasible for us to do. May
332I add to that? Well, and I know that their lunch program or their like $5 for a lunch versus the $2.50 that other elementary sites charge. Right. That is correct. So with universal free meals, we no longer charge for meals. So there wouldn't really be an opportunity to have, and pardon my language, but the premium choice or the upsells of choice. Another consideration, and this is not specific to any one school or any one district, but with school food programs there at the time, this was before COVID, before free meals. And also to anyone who is listening, we are going to continue with free meals forever. It is Ed Code. It is the law. It will not change. But back in the day, we would have to go and get debt collection from families, which
333is the worst part of my day. And so I'm so grateful for universal free meals because periodically there would be a gap in understanding. I thought I applied. I didn't realize I was being charged. How am I going to make this $50 to you? And there is some limitations on what we do. Like there are rules in place. We will never shame a child. And we did not shame children at that time. Where's your lunch money? The worst thing you could say to someone in the serving line. So there were opportunities where we did have to take on bad debt and let it go. And that did come as a deficit to our program. For context, before COVID, we were running a deficit of several hundred thousand dollars. That deficit comes from general fund. So
334the food program was competing for dollars with general fund, which supports a lot of really phenomenal programming. And again, from the lens of equity and budgeting, that's something we want to be cognizant of as we move forward. And one more question, Omar. So is that why we fill out at the beginning of the school year, the free and reduced lunch form, even though I know I don't qualify for that? Absolutely. So we are so grateful to our friends at Information and Evaluation, our friend Dr. Bardelli, because that is the school funding form. So while everyone eats for free, we still have to fill out those forms so that the school can get. greater degree of financial support. And so we are so tremendously grateful and proud of the historically high responses that we've seen as
335we have transitioned through universal free meals. It's been absolutely phenomenal and we're just so grateful. And how do, what's the percentage of people turning, submitting those forms? I would have to look. I know that we had a contest to see who would get to 90% first. I have to say I'm out of the game, so to speak. So since we went to universal free meals, I am no longer personally involved with the collection and processing, but I am the absolute biggest fan of the team that's doing that work. That's also a part of the information we requested during the study session because it's our duplicated process. I'm going to go to Trustee DeFossey and then to Trustee Medina. Good evening. Thank you for your presentation. Nice to meet you. And you just got me fired
336up for school food. So right on. I'm totally knowing it's better than the 32 years of jail food that I ate. So thank you. Keep it up. And what we can do to help you, please let us know. Absolutely. Thank you. Trustee Medina. Thank you. I wanted in part to respond to Trustee Pratt's question around the French American school. Obviously when they had their meal program, there was a big uproar, but I think my understanding, it's meant to be part of the curriculum. It's part of that French educational curriculum that they're supposed to have. And so that's, I think, the missing context. I'm sorry I missed a lot of your presentation. I did have a couple questions around Is there some sort of requirement when students go on field trips that they have to take
337a lunch from us? Because I've seen that kind of implemented that they're forced to take a lunch and they can't leave it behind. That is a fantastic question. So I'm not familiar with the practice of forcing students to take a lunch. I would, if you don't mind, I'd love to follow up and have conversations with folks that are impacted so that I can understand what these pressures are, what our goals are. Not knowing any specifics, I would be very keen to find out, is this well-intentioned? Like, hey, you don't have a lunch, here's a lunch. Or is there something we need to address? But that's an interesting question. I'd love to dig into it. And I know you've been doing a lot of cool stuff with foods. I think I've seen a lot more at
338the elementary level. I see a lot of complaints and stuff from secondary students. I'm wondering, what are the input methods that you have? Is it just, well, let's touch on the input methods by site, if possible. Absolutely. So we are having ongoing conversations with people at Piner High School. So for example, one of the teachers there connected their students to us. So we're having dozens of emails where we're having ongoing conversations about improvement, things we'd like to do differently. We're having conversations about survey design and inputs so that we can have like a Google form. We can have folks email me. I do highly recommend an email because we can have ongoing conversations and clarifying. So for example, I had a wonderful email from a student that said, I want more variety. I was like,
339cool, what are we looking for? What specifically is it that we want? And we can evaluate those things together. So there are some opportunities there, but I agree. I think when we're discussing almost 14,000 people with 14,000 opinions, we need to have some scaffolding in place that we can more directly communicate and hear feedback. back and also make people feel heard and seen and appreciated. And I know in the past, I don't know if you did today, you mentioned the lunch pizza parties and stuff. And I reached out to you about students meeting at lunch for clubs and not having time to go grab a lunch and then also meet. Has there been any additional work at looking at potential solutions to make sure students are able to get food if they're part of clubs
340during lunch? That is a fantastic question. So one of the challenges that we have is that we have a fixed amount of resources, time and space and staff. So one of the questions that we had was, so we're doing pizza parties at elementary classrooms, which is awesome. Those are just kind of periodic. So we also decline those requests periodically. If everyone wants to do on the same day, sorry, I can only do so many. So in the context of high schools. The concern is that we would be taking time away from the serving lines, where for context at Pioneer, we're doing almost 600 students in eight minutes. The loss of one staff member would add several minutes, that's that serving time and add in. And again, the central thesis is to go as quickly as
341possible. The concern that we have is that we are, the concern is that we're going to be preparing food specifically for a smaller group. We're going to have to deliver that meal. Are we going to be disrupting classes to go in before school starts, that we have staff available during service? How often are we going to be doing it? How often would this be happening at schools? So the technical term that I'm looking for is a Pareto optimization of how we're allocating our resources to solve this problem. What I would aspire to do, and this is within the context of... facility master planning and infrastructure would be to have more places to serve meals or perhaps a faster serving line. Because again, like if I can serve students faster or get more students through the
342line in the same amount of time, which is faster, apologies, then we can probably resolve that issue as well because clubs are absolutely an important part of campus. And then so too is hanging out with your friends and doing other things. And so I'm looking for a solution that we can meet the needs of a larger group of students with optimizing resource allocations. Thank you. All right. Director Burke, thank you so much for your presentation today. Appreciate your flexibility. And if you can express on behalf of the board our strong appreciation to your team, we really appreciate everything you do each day. So thank you very much. Thanks so much. All righty, we're now going to move to the human resources calendar, item two. We're going to start with public comment on the human resources
343calendar. Just to give a sense for the board on how I anticipate this calendar to go, items A through E can move on one motion unless anyone, after we receive public comment, seeks to pull one for individual consideration. F. G and H, each are going to be required to be addressed independently. So with that, we'll go ahead and open up the public comment. Thank you, President Kasten. We have two blue cards. I'm going to call your names. There'll be one minute if you want to make your way to the podium. First is Dale Batt, followed by Catherine Howell. I'm reading the justification for paying loose an extra 75,000. This is a quote from the agenda tonight. The level of work required of this position exceeded the anticipated need, partially due to several vacancies within the
344fiscal department. If that is the logic behind this justification, teachers, classifieds, staff in general should be paid more using that exact same logic. We are doing more while having less help around us, colleagues being cut left and right. We have overcrowded classrooms and are expected to eliminate learning gaps and bring... below grade level students up to grade level, as well as increased state testing scores. Additional work is forced upon us with counselors being eliminated and SDC classes gone and co-teaching erased. RTI is being pushed as another measure for teachers to learn and use in overcrowded classrooms. Over 30 students in a classroom is not normal. It's become normal, and that's a very sad reality. The contract says 165 students is max caseload for teachers, and that's 33 per class. That cap should not be that
345high. It should be lower. $75,000 pays for help. Please use it to help our schools. Thank you. Our next speaker is Catherine Howell. I just want to say very quickly, thank you for... Thank you in advance for approving the MOUs, site-based MOUs, especially bell schedules reflect the needs of an individual site and the students and the cooperation between the teachers and the administration at that site. So we appreciate you saying, approving our MOUs. Thank you. There are no other cards. All right. Thank you very much. I'll turn this to the board for items B through E. Does any board member wish to receive the presentation on any of those items? Second. All right. Move by. Hold on. If anyone wants to have the presentation, then we'll have it. It's the MOUs. All right. So I'm
346looking for a motion on B, C, and E. All right. Moved by Trustee DeFosse. Seconded by Trustee Medina. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Dufasi. Trustee Medina. Aye. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee Prack. President Kasten. Aye. That motion passes. Items B, C, and E are approved unanimously. With that, we'll move to Human Resource Calendar Item D, approval of San Rosa Teacher Association MOU impacts and effects of school consolidation and closure transition. Dr. Vicki Zans presenting. I'm really tempted to say good night, but good evening. Okay, so... Thank you for approving the other ones. I'm here to present the, what am I approving? The impacts and effects MOU. Dr. Zantz? Yes. If it's okay with the, like, depending on how other people feel, I don't feel like I need a
347presentation. I just had some questions. Sure. Maybe they're just me thinking out loud as per usual. However, there were some things that stood out to me in this that I was just kind of, it goes along with something that I had said earlier regarding things coming in to vote for when they've already passed or when they're coming up. So for instance, there are a lot of things that are like no later than May 22nd. And it is past that. And so I'm curious, like, how, if you can enlighten me, how that happens, why that happens, things of that sort. So the how and why that happens is just the timing of when we have board meetings versus when the MOU is negotiated and then ratified by the bargaining unit. And so sometimes it may be
348that we were, we had bargained it and it was going for ratification at, let's see, when was the last board meeting? Somebody give me a date. The 13th? Yes, the 13th. So on the 13th. or 14th, it may have gone to SRTA for ratification on the 13th, but they have a certain number of days that they take to ratify it. So it's right when we had the last board meeting, but because this board meeting is not until the 27th, it comes after the dates that you're suggesting. Thank you. I guess it just kind of follows in line with concerns that come up as a trustee in general like we as a trustee i have to like vote on everything right and i understand that especially with mous they are you know obviously we vote on
349it but it is you know if people are in agreement great i love that um It's just with everything, I feel like we can tighten things better so that it is timely. So I appreciate the explanation. That was my only concern about that one is that was bolded in a variety of places. And so I wanted to make sure that I mentioned it. Trustee Dufasi? No, and I appreciate Trustee Jenkins' point. I agree. wholeheartedly. But my anticipation or my expectation is with anything that is going to be substantive, we're going to get it prior to an implementation date, not, and I totally agree with. what Trustee Cenk had said here. But these two items, it's like moving boxes and packing tape. I think ideally, yeah, we want it on the front side. But I certainly
350think my expectation is if there's any substantive issue, that we certainly are going to have to get it on the front end. Because if we vote no, how do we unwind that clock, right? So thank you. Any other discussion or motion? Move to approve. Second. Moved by Trustee Jenkins, seconded by Trustee Medina. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee Medina. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee Prack. Aye. Trustee De Fossey. President Kasten. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. Thank you, Dr. Zantz. We're now going to move to item F, action item on approval of amendment of the Interim Associate Superintendent Chief Business Official Employment Contract, Superintendent August Perdon. Thank you, President Kasten. I would like to start by addressing a couple of the concerns that were brought up. I did attach
351a... more thorough explanation of the rationale. And I do understand concern when there's a perception of administration being paid additional over and above. I think that is very different than this particular situation. All of the rest of the administration, we are full-time. Just as if we have classified or certificated staff who are asked to work an additional assignment, additional days, additional hours, they are compensated appropriately. And according to that time, that is essentially the situation in this case. If you recall, just to share the information as a reminder. This position is normally a 1.0 FTE. We brought Luz Cazares in as an expert to assist in the difficult work that we had. At the time that she was contracted, we had a full staff. We had... Shortly into her tenure, we had vacancies that lasted
352for a substantial period of time, which did require additional work. Further you know, depth of scope, breadth of what was being addressed. And it has resulted in substantial, substantially more work load, the number of days, the number of hours, all of that. I do also want to clarify that $76,000 is not salary to Ms. Cazares. That is the total net cost, the total cost. of the increase, including the statutory benefits that are required to be paid on classified salaries, which is close to 40%. And I also wanted to... that it is still a net savings, not only from the 1.0 normally paid or initially budgeted in the position, but additionally, there was a savings because of vacancies that lasted for a period, a long period of time, several for multiple months. Well, all of them
353for at least a minimum of two months up to three months. total savings of $105,000 from those vacancies. So the net savings of providing this increase is still close to $30,000 in difference. Had we had myself in the CBO position, I would have required or I would have recommended and would have needed the assistance of bringing in an outside consultant, specifically Luce with her expertise to guide the work had I been in that position this year. We had an opportunity that most districts do not have, which was to bring her on as our expert. And I highly recommend the increase for the time spent and the work. provided, completed, is approved as appropriate. I also do need to share that because this, the title of the position contains superintendent, I do need to do an
354oral reading of the specific the substantive change or compensation. So the annual salary at 75% would be $171,982.50 for a 75% position. And the... Total workdays of 168.75 and vacation accrual accordingly at 16.5. And vacation is not paid out on just an accrual basis. It is paid out when employment is terminated as required for any classified position. Discussion and questions from the board? Trustee Medina? Thank you. Superintendent August, a quick question. I think, had we looked at potentially seeing if there was any help from SCO to pay for this? Yes, I did make that request of Superintendent Carter, or Dr. Carter. One of the big items is ensuring that our transition to full-time CBO next year is smooth, that we do have our systems in place, making sure that we don't go back on our
355processes, procedures, continuing the work with the FHRA. All of those items, SCO is particularly interested in ensuring that we are successful in that. And I have not received an answer back from Dr. Carter, but she is taking it to her team for consideration for assistance with that. And when we adopted the budget for this year, we had originally adopted a budget of 1.0 FTE for CBO? Yes, at the time of budget adoption, it was considered a 1.0. So this isn't going beyond what we budgeted? Correct, and there is a cost savings from the entire... the shortfall in staffing in fiscal services. Before I comment, I'll let others ask questions first. Any other discussion or questions? Trustee Kirby? Since we're still waiting for a response from SCO, if we approve this, does that negate the potential?
356money back or would they still consider it? No, they're considering the request because of the additional support provided that truly also helps their role in ensuring the transition work coming ahead. Okay, thanks. Trustee Jenkins? So this is more of a comment, just so that the rest of the board kind of knows where I'm at. So I personally am leaning towards no. Retroactive pay to cover unapproved expansions of duties sets a dangerous precedent in a year where we barely stayed solvent and keep telling teachers there's no money for extra hours. Approving $76,000 in the last meeting of the year sends the wrong message about our priorities. Trustee Medina. Thank you. In terms of comments, I think I just want to say that I've seen Luz put in the work, extensive work, late night work, being extremely
357accessible to us. So I don't doubt that she's gone above and beyond in doing this work. don't want to have to spend extra $76,000. But I think it's the right thing to do. And I'll add that I feel that aside from her actually doing the work, it's been very eye-opening for ourselves, for the district. And I think there's been a lot of, I want to say, learning and education from her expertise. I feel... that probably even staff have learned a lot from us having her here. So I definitely think it's merited and it's, to me, in terms of employee, I feel it's the right thing to do. It's the wrong thing to do in the sense of where we're at with. Everything else, right? The imagery, how it looks. I think from a fiscal perspective
358where we're at in terms of the savings and where we budgeted, it's aligned. So I'm leaning towards supporting it, even though it'll be unpopular. Further discussion? Is there a motion? I'll move to approve the request. Second. I have a motion by Trustee Medina, seconded by Trustee Kirby. Roll call vote, please. Trustee Medina. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee Jenkins. No. Trustee De La Torre. No. Trustee Prack. I go to the next trustee. Trustee De Fossey. President Kasten. Aye. Trustee Prack. Abstain. Okay, that motion passes with four ayes. two nos and one abstention. Trustee Jenkins and De La Torre being the nos and Trustee Pratt being the abstention. Thank you. We'll now move to item G, which is the public hearing regarding the Teamsters Local 665 Sunshine Proposal for Contract Openers with San Jose City Schools District
359for 2627. This is a public hearing. Are there any cards for the public hearing? President Keston, there are no cards. Are there any members of the public present for the public hearing? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and close the public hearing. We'll move to item H, Teamsters Local 665 Sunshine Proposals for Contract Openers with the District. Dr. Vicki Zans presenting. Thank you. On May 14th, 2026, Santa Rosa City Schools received the Sunshine opening for Teamsters. And the whole contract is open, but they are interested in discussing wages, benefits, and working conditions. What the board is being asked to do tonight is to accept the Teamsters local. and we will come back at a later date with our sunshine. Any questions for Dr. Zanes? Is there a motion? Motion to approve. Moved by Trustee De La
360Torre, seconded by Trustee De Fossey. Roll call vote, please. Trustee De La Torre. Aye. Trustee De Fossey. Trustee Jenkins. Aye. Trustee Kirby. Aye. Trustee Medina. Aye. Trustee Prack. Aye. President Kasten. Aye. That motion passes unanimously. We'll now move to item H3, which is the superintendent calendar. We're going to go ahead and open for public comment on the superintendent calendar. There are no public comment cards. Seeing no public comment, we'll move to item B, which is approval of the San Francisco City Schools 26-27 board meeting calendar. Everyone's had a chance to review this. I'm going to give some short comments and hand it over to Superintendent August. I do want to point out that there's a significant change in how the meeting schedule is formatted for our consideration. One, we are looking 18 months out. So
361I recognize that the next approval of this will be in 12 months. But by having a rolling 18 month calendar, it gives us a planning window where that. that six months on the end is understood with the dates and some of the intentions for things that will be recurring. So we expanded to an 18-month calendar, recognizing that there's another approval that will happen. So if anything does change for those last six months, we can address it. In addition to meetings, this also, and I want to recognize Melanie Martin specifically for this, this component we have two instead of one special recognition meetings. The last version you saw at the previous meeting had one end of year recognition for all of the certificated classifying students of the year. This actually does two similar to our resolutions,
362but gives the flexibility for that meeting to be more of a ceremonial meeting where we would not necessarily need to have other business or even a slave in this chamber. We could have the meeting called to order, have all of us be present, but actually get to spend more time with the awardees and those folks being recognized. So those are two components that I want to make sure everyone notices as they're looking at it. Then the other component is codifying the concept of studying session meetings and the different types that we've started to kind of use. in the last year. So we have the full day study sessions that we started this last year codified in here of the all day strategic planning. meeting in the fall where we focus more on the policy and
363programmatic side and in the all-day budget one in the spring leading into the process that we've experienced in these last couple of months and then we also codified the concepts of the study sessions where we start at five versus six o'clock in order to be able to provide more time similar to the public safety study session and the one that we had earlier today. Obviously time management is gonna need to be important for those. And then this also lays out the topics for the strategic and the study sessions in order to be able to see where that's at. I do wanna make sure that Superintendent August can speak to the governance calendar, but if there's any questions on this one, why don't we start there, Trustee Medina? Yeah, I mean, I'm against going to 18
364months. I'm only 4'12". I'm okay with, I think traditionally having that middle Wednesday be set for a study session makes sense. I'm against putting the topics on it way ahead of time. so much could happen, so much could change. So, you know, I think that could be decided as it goes. The semester recognitions, I'm opposed to that. I want us to go back to just two schools or whatever per meeting. I think it's... better, more efficient, and it allows for more time to just focus on a couple kids. I think, you know, one of the concerns has been like the toxicity of our meetings. As long as we keep doing it like in the beginning, I think they don't necessarily have to be exposed to that. So, yeah, so there's a lot that I don't
365like about what's being presented. Other discussion? Trustee Pratt? I mean, it's my first calendar, so it's... It's going to be a learning experience for me if this is what I like or what I don't like. I don't want kids to be here when there's a lot of tension and animosity and hostility on hot topic days. I don't want them to have to feel that tension or that uncomfortableness. Because when there's a packed house, I get real more anxious and it stresses me out being here. And I can only imagine how a child would feel. So I would rather have one day where we can celebrate everybody and make it more of celebration. And the other rationale for the proposal of the recognition awards is time management for these meetings. Even with the changes that we
366have made, we are still consistently going past 10 o'clock at night and being able to. take on important business at more rational hours where our brains are working versus consistently having that business come up after 8 o'clock. That was another part of the consideration. Trustee De La Torre? I agree with Trustee Medina. I did not feel we should be planning 18 months out. We should be planning 12 months at a time. It would be an added strain on our staff to have a separate meeting for recognitions. The point of being in this chamber and being in front of this board was so valued and meant so much to the families to have that opportunity. And we did it for three years while I was in this seat under some extremely tense, hot issues. And the
367room was respectful in the beginning of those meetings. and the celebratory for those students and staff that were getting those recognitions. So I also feel we need to go back to doing that. It meant so much to the families and the students and the staff to be recognized in that way, opposed to putting extra strain on staff that we have stripped down and limited to have two more meetings a year. Simply for recognitions. And with those, there's more information I would need to know before approving that. Is that two extra meetings in this chamber? Is that recognition meetings at one of our sites that would be a different environment? Is it indoor? Is it outdoor? I would need to know more information before I'd be ready to approve. that type of forward thinking, because I
368know an experience of how much it meant to families and staff to be in this room in a regular meeting with everything else going on to be recognized. And unfortunately, like you said, we attempted to do it as time management, and we still don't get through our meetings or get everything on the agenda done. So unfortunately, that did not prove effective. Steve Jenkins. Regarding the recognition, I really like it being a separate meeting, like it's set up in here. I also really like the 18-month rolling idea. A couple of possible tweaks in November and December. Our first meeting is on November 11th, which is a holiday. Just want to make sure that everyone's aware of that. That's Veterans Day. That's Veterans Day. Catch there, Trustee Jenkins. I got you guys. And then the second one
369is December 18th. That's a special meeting organization of the board. I thought that had to be before. Yeah, when we're electing people, I think it has to be before. We got kind of docked on that when we came in. It's after. Okay, fine. However, that day is also a non-school day and it's the last day before break, which I mean, it's the Friday. It's literally the Friday of break. Just kidding. Yeah, no, yeah, I'm right. It's the Friday of break. Handy dandy paper calendars, everyone. Don't do that to me. That's when I'll go Christmas shopping. So I just want to point those two dates out. They may be a conflict that we may need to look at. But I like the 18 month. The study sessions thrown in there, I have mixed feelings about. I
370like the planning idea behind it. And I really like the... at least for this next year, to have the recognition, and then we can get ourselves back into when things are a little bit more solid, we're past some of these huge crisis hiccups, and then we can get the recognitions back into a regular meeting. And I think we can notate that the topics for the study sessions are intended. Some of the intent around these is around specific times where data and information is going to be available. And by stating it up front, it gives time for staff to know that we're going to be working towards those. So especially like the safety session, several of these provide intentional timing associated with when we get data for those presentations back. And also let staff know. well
371in advance when we're going to be tackling certain topics but i think we could very much add an asterisk on here that says that you know topics are subject to change uh to trustee medina's point uh trustee kirby yeah um my comment is Obviously, this is a plan. I mean, we're always going to have to tweak it, change it. Something's going to happen. We're going to need to deal with something along the way. This is just a plan. I personally really appreciate a long range plan. I've got so many things going on that I need to plan ahead to reserve days ahead of time and know what's going on. So I also I do like the. Recognition days. I also liked beginning the meeting with a nice celebration, but I'm with you. These meetings just
372go so long. I'd rather just dedicate a time to do it all at once. To me, it just seems to be a better idea. I don't know. That's my thoughts. Appreciate that, Trustee Kirby. Trustee Medina? Yeah, so I think, again, I've never seen this issue be so controversial, but it's a calendar. We approve dates, second, fourth, Wednesday generally, middle Wednesday. As a board, we're supposed to reserve it for study session. I think we, I don't like, again, the idea of the issues being solidified. I think as we transition from one individual to another individual's president, it's the president and superintendent that are supposed to be setting the agenda. So I think we're getting ahead of that. Second, with the awards thing. Are we going to continue to not have the school updates where the schools
373do their presentation and the parent organizations come and present and give us an update? Because those things have always been tied together. the site staff make a presentation, parent staff present, and because we're all here together for that campus, then we recognize those site staff and students. They're generally tied together. So this idea is have an awards thing and those presentations, because I think it makes sense to just keep it together. And I wouldn't say to leave it on this calendar. I say that could be agendized later on. And for the awards thing, if you're going to... Talk about moving to a quarterly or semesterly thing, whatever. Have you gotten site input for that as an idea? What would they prefer? Isn't the celebration for the school update too, like with the kids? together? So
374the concept here is that we'd actually have in-person activities. Unlike this year where we ended up distributing the certificates and the sites did their own thing. And part of what happened there was that the sites did their own thing before we started trying to actually organize one of these. And so this would make it very clear as to when we're having the two events for the recognitions. This doesn't prohibit us from reincorporating site updates and also revisiting the content of the site updates perhaps to include more policy and updates on what's happening on the campuses which kind of got lost in the last few years was moved to I think a video style thing back beforehand all those things can still come can still be incorporated into meetings as we're planning